Retail Job Quotes

Was there anything quite so under-rated in this shallow, plastic, global-corporate, tall-skinny-late, kiddy-meal-and-free-toy, united-colours-of-fuck-you-too world, than a good old-fashioned, no-frills, retail blow-job?

Data is the new fuel for growth in multiple industries, from manufacturing to retail to financial services. But unlike other assets, it doesn’t necessarily fuel job growth, but rather, profit growth. And those profits tend to be diverted directly into executives’ and shareholders’ wallets.

In 2016, two academics from Oxford University came to the conclusion that up to 86% of jobs in restaurants, 75% of jobs in retail and 59% of jobs in entertainment could be automatized by 2035.

I’ll still be sitting on my ass all day, five blocks from where I graduated, working the same crappy retail job I had when I was sixteen?” I finished for her. “Exactly.” I tried to look hurt. “I find your lack of faith disturbing.

He'd expected that at the very least he'd be able to slip into a decent social scene, but the problem with dropping out of the world is that that world moves on without you, and between the time spent on an all-consuming substance and the time spent working soul-crushing retail jobs while he tried not to think about the substance and the time spent in hospitals and rehab facilities, Paul was twenty-three years old and looked older.

I should change my job title to Retail Psychologist and get some impressive letter after my name.

All you have to do is look at Colorado: real estate is up, 30,000 jobs added, retail is up, state tax [revenues] up.

despite the decline in consumer spending brought on by the greatest economic downturn since World War II, the difference between jobs in manufacturing and in retail had reached nearly three million workers, a depressing reality of a failing economy where most new opportunities were low-paid, part-time positions to sell Chinese apparel and electronics bought on credit.

I have often thought that everyone should work in retail at some point in their lives, kind of like mandatory military service. They would understand two things—first, that serving customers all day can be a very difficult job, and second, that being kind is so much more effective than being nasty.

As economist Thomas Sowell has noted, middleman minorities typically arrive in their host countries with education, skills, or a set of propitious attitudes about work, such as business frugality and the willingness to take risks. Some slave away in lowly menial jobs to raise capital, then swiftly become merchants, retailers, labor contractors, and money-lenders. Their descendants usually thrive in the professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, or finance.

While Millions of jobs have been created in retail sales to move the mountains of imports, the manufacturing jobs that enabled Americans with high school diplomas to live the American Dream have been shipped and created overseas…. In building their new world, our elites treat fellow Americans like obsolete equipment.

Sunday night is my personal weekly Halloween. I walk along slowly and drag my fingertips along the bars of chocolate. Goddamn, you sexy little squares. Dark, milk, white, I do not discriminate. I eat it all. Those fluorescent sour candies that only obnoxious little boys like. I suck candy apples clean. If an envelope seal is sweet, I’ll lick it twice. Growing up, I was that kid who would easily get lured into a van with the promise of a lollipop. Sometimes, I let the retail seduction last for twenty minutes, ignoring Marco and feeling up the merchandise, but I’m so tired of male voices. “Five bags of marshmallows,” Marco says in a resigned tone. “Wine. And a can of cat food.” “Cat food is low carb.” He makes no move to scan anything, so I scan each item myself and unroll a few notes from my tips. “Your job involves selling things. Sell them. Change, please.” “I just don’t know why you do this to yourself.” Marco looks at the register with a moral dilemma in his eyes. “Every week you come and do this.” He hesitates and looks over his shoulder where his sugar book sits under a layer of dust. He knows not to try to slip it into my bag with my purchases. “I don’t know why you care, dude. Just serve me. I don’t need your help.” He’s not entirely wrong about my being an addict. I would lick a line of icing sugar off this counter right now if no one were around. I would walk into a cane plantation and bite right in... “Give me my change or I swear to God …” I squeeze my eyes shut and try to tamp down my temper. “Just treat me like any other customer.” He gives me a few coins’ change and bags my sweet, spongy drugs.

I know this is your religion, but for me it’s just a job.” “That’s your problem,” Basil said. “For you it’s ‘just’ a job.” “What’s it supposed to be?” “Work.” “Same thing,” Amy said. “No,” Basil said. “A job is what a guy in a gas station has. People at Orsk have work. It’s a calling. A responsibility to something bigger than yourself. Work gives you a goal. It lets you build something that lives on after you’re gone. Work has a purpose beyond making money.” “I am begging you to stop,” Amy said. “There’s nothing wrong with being serious,” Ruth Anne said. “She can’t take anything seriously,” Basil said. “That’s her problem.” “I do my job,” Amy said. “I punch the clock, I work my shop, I sell people their desks, I cash my check. That’s what Orsk pays me to do: my job. I’m not planning on being in retail for the rest of my life.” “Really? What are you going to do?” “I’m …” Amy suddenly realized that in fact she didn’t have any plans. “I’ve got plans. They’re none of your business.

A night spent scraping off the evidence of other people's fun is a wearisome thing.

When they saw what Jobs and Johnson had built, they unanimously approved going ahead. It would, the board agreed, take the relationship between retailing and brand image to a new level.

As it turns out, people who cut their work hours often take a smaller hit financially than they expect. That is because spending less time on the job means spending less money on the things that allow us to work: transport, parking, eating out, coffee, convenience food, childcare, laundry, retail therapy. A smaller income also translates into a smaller tax bill. In one Canadian study, some workers who took a pay cut in return for shorter hours actually ended up with more money in the bank at the end of the month.

Maybe it’s time Steve Jobs stopped thinking quite so differently,” Business Week wrote in a story headlined “Sorry Steve, Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work.” Apple’s former chief financial officer, Joseph Graziano, was quoted as saying, “Apple’s problem is it still believes the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers.” And the retail consultant David Goldstein declared, “I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake.

The unemployment rate for young black men post-apartheid shot up, sometimes as high as 50 percent. What happens to a lot of guys is they finish high school and they can’t afford university, and even little retail jobs can be hard to come by when you’re from the hood and you look and talk a certain way. So, for many young men in South Africa’s townships, freedom looks like this: Every morning they wake up, maybe their parents go to work or maybe not. Then they go outside and chill on the corner the whole day, talking shit. They’re free, they’ve been taught how to fish, but no one will give them a fishing rod.

In his business, some customers come in and buy a suit, but what they're really buying is confidence for that job interview that's coming up. The older businessman browsing new cuff links and ties is actually looking for a way to show he's made it. The woman shopping for socks and underwear for her husband isn't there to buy socks and underwear-she's there to show her man how special he is, how much she recognizes and appreciates his uniqueness. If she wanted socks and underwear for him, she could go to any department store at the mall. The manager at this men's store realized the psychology of his particular clientele.

Like us, many students had spent their years in college thinking they’d get that well-paying, planet-saving job, even if they’d heard horror stories from recent underemployed grads. Those jobs, of course, no longer exist (if they ever did). By 2009, 17.4 million college graduates had jobs that didn’t even require a degree. There are 365,000 cashiers and 318,000 waiters and waitresses in America who have bachelor’s degrees, as do one-fifth of those working in the retail industry. More than 100,000 college graduates are janitors and 18,000 push carts. (There are 5,057 janitors in the United States who have doctorates and professional degrees!)

Every year or so I like to take a step back and look at a few key advertising, marketing, and media facts just to gauge how far removed from reality we advertising experts have gotten. These data represent the latest numbers I could find. I have listed the sources below. So here we go -- 10 facts, direct from the real world: E-commerce in 2014 accounted for 6.5 percent of total retail sales. 96% of video viewing is currently done on a television. 4% is done on a web device. In Europe and the US, people would not care if 92% of brands disappeared. The rate of engagement among a brand's fans with a Facebook post is 7 in 10,000. For Twitter it is 3 in 10,000. Fewer than one standard banner ad in a thousand is clicked on. Over half the display ads paid for by marketers are unviewable. Less than 1% of retail buying is done on a mobile device. Only 44% of traffic on the web is human. One bot-net can generate 1 billion fraudulent digital ad impressions a day. Half of all U.S online advertising - $10 billion a year - may be lost to fraud. As regular readers know, one of our favorite sayings around The Ad Contrarian Social Club is a quote from Noble Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who wonderfully declared that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I think these facts do a pretty good job of vindicating Feynman.

As if all of that hadn't been enough, I had foolishly chosen to wear a brand-new pair of Jimmy Choo mules to school, purchased at a fraction of their normal retail cost at an outlet over the summer. They were gorgeous, and they went perfectly with the Calvin Klein black denim skirt I had paired with a hot pink scoop-neck top. But of course they were killing me. I already had raw, painful blisters around the bases of all my toes, and the Band-Aids the nurse had given me to cover them so that I could at least hobble between classes were not exactly doing the job. My feet felt like they were about to fall off. If I'd known where Jimmy Choo lived, I would have hobbled right up to his front door and popped him one in the eye.

Why does Joe Normie think it’s a litmus test for morality if one returns one’s shopping cart? Big-box stores put out of business local retailers, they automated their systems to reduce employees, and they got customers to be their own cashiers without getting paid for their labor, and yet to prove I’m a good person, I’m supposed to do more unpaid work for them to streamline their operation?

personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is

This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company.

This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This

Qualities such as honesty, determination, and a cheerful acceptance of stress, which can all be identified through probing questionnaires and interviews, may be more important to the company in the long run than one's college grade-point average or years of "related experience." Every business is only as good as the people it brings into the organization. The corporate trainer should feel his job is the most important in the company, because it is. Exalt seniority-publicly, shamelessly, and with enough fanfare to raise goosebumps on the flesh of the most cynical spectator. And, after the ceremony, there should be some sort of permanent display so that employees passing by are continuously reminded of their own achievements and the achievements of others. The manager must freely share his expertise-not only about company procedures and products and services but also with regard to the supervisory skills he has worked so hard to acquire. If his attitude is, "Let them go out and get their own MBAs," the personnel under his authority will never have the full benefit of his experience. Without it, they will perform at a lower standard than is possible, jeopardizing the manager's own success. Should a CEO proclaim that there is no higher calling than being an employee of his organization? Perhaps not-for fear of being misunderstood-but it's certainly all right to think it. In fact, a CEO who does not feel this way should look for another company to manage-one that actually does contribute toward a better life for all. Every corporate leader should communicate to his workforce that its efforts are important and that employees should be very proud of what they do-for the company, for themselves, and, literally, for the world. If any employee is embarrassed to tell his friends what he does for a living, there has been a failure of leadership at his workplace. Loyalty is not demanded; it is created. Why can't a CEO put out his own suggested reading list to reinforce the corporate vision and core values? An attractive display at every employee lounge of books to be freely borrowed, or purchased, will generate interest and participation. Of course, the program has to be purely voluntary, but many employees will wish to be conversant with the material others are talking about. The books will be another point of contact between individuals, who might find themselves conversing on topics other than the weekend football games. By simply distributing the list and displaying the books prominently, the CEO will set into motion a chain of events that can greatly benefit the workplace. For a very cost-effective investment, management will have yet another way to strengthen the corporate message. The very existence of many companies hangs not on the decisions of their visionary CEOs and energetic managers but on the behavior of its receptionists, retail clerks, delivery drivers, and service personnel. The manager must put himself and his people through progressively challenging courage-building experiences. He must make these a mandatory group experience, and he must lead the way. People who have confronted the fear of public speaking, and have learned to master it, find that their new confidence manifests itself in every other facet of the professional and personal lives. Managers who hold weekly meetings in which everyone takes on progressively more difficult speaking or presentation assignments will see personalities revolutionized before their eyes. Command from a forward position, which means from the thick of it. No soldier will ever be inspired to advance into a hail of bullets by orders phoned in on the radio from the safety of a remote command post; he is inspired to follow the officer in front of him. It is much more effective to get your personnel to follow you than to push them forward from behind a desk. The more important the mission, the more important it is to be at the front.

What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable and realistic and meaningful to our folks as we grow. Those challenges are more real than somebody’s theory that we’re headed down the wrong path. As business leaders, we absolutely cannot afford to get all caught up in trying to meet the goals that some retail analyst or financial institution in New York sets for us on a ten-year plan spit out of a computer that somebody set to compound at such-and-such a rate. If we do that, we take our eye off the ball. But if we demonstrate in our sales and our earnings every day, every week, every quarter, that we’re doing our job in a sound way, we will get the growth we are entitled to, and the market will respect us in a way that we deserve.

For years, black political leaders in New York City aligned themselves with labor unions to block the construction of a Walmart in a low-income community with persistently high unemployment. According to a Marist poll taken in 2011, 69 percent of blacks in New York would welcome a Walmart in their neighborhood. Yet these black leaders put the interests of Big Labor, which doesn’t like the retailer’s stance toward unions, ahead of the interests of struggling black people who could use the jobs and low-priced goods.

The Herb Farm reminded Marguerite of the farms in France; it was like a farm in a child's picture book. There was a white wooden fence that penned in sheep and goats, a chicken coop where a dozen warm eggs cost a dollar, a red barn for the two bay horses, and a greenhouse. Half of the greenhouse did what greenhouses do, while the other half had been fashioned into very primitive retail space. The vegetables were sold from wooden crates, all of them grown organically, before such a process even had a name- corn, tomatoes, lettuces, seventeen kinds of herbs, squash, zucchini, carrots with the bushy tops left on, spring onions, radishes, cucumbers, peppers, strawberries for two short weeks in June, pumpkins after the fifteenth of September. There was chèvre made on the premises from the milk of the goats; there was fresh butter. And when Marguerite showed up for the first time in the summer of 1975 there was a ten-year-old boy who had been given the undignified job of cutting zinnias, snapdragons, and bachelor buttons and gathering them into attractive-looking bunches.

And frankly the people who seem to best understand that we are creatures of love and desire, not thoughts, are the current giant tech companies of the world. Think about how Apple exists with a temple-like space (tell me their retail stores don't feel so "set apart" from the ordinary retail design that it doesn't immediately conjure up sacred feelings) where you go to sacrifice (enormously large portions of your money) to obtain that which you are looking for - connection, meaning and depth. People stand in line all night, some even camping out on the sidewalk, for the latest device that offers those implicitly understood benefits. This phone can, and will, be more than a phone. I think it's even fair to say that Apple is a religion with Steve Jobs as a priest (who has become a venerated secular saint after his death), mediating between man and God to give us what we want. Connection. Power. God-like knowledge of good and evil. And we take the phone, and we crouch and bend over. Usually with heads bowed. Laser focused on something. Blocking out all around us. We are silent and solemn. Tending not to speak. And then we perform a certain behaviour over and over and over again. Sound familiar? Swipe.

-Write out a conversation with your inner voice. Begin the entry with a question directed to yourself, then write your mental response. It may help to label the different voices A and B. Dialogue writing is a very effective way to get to the heart of the matter. The following passage is an example of typical dialogue writing: A: Tomorrow is a big day. You have an interview at a college. How do you feel? B: I am really nervous. This is the first interview and I don’t know what it is going to be like. A: What are you afraid of? B: I’m afraid I’ll stutter and say something stupid. I’m worried the person will ask a question and I won’t know what to say. A: What do you want to discuss? B: I think it is good that I was on the basketball team for four years. That shows commitment and dedication. I also got decent grades and earned a blue ribbon at the science fair. A: What about your hobbies outside of school? B: I really like to read. I could mention that. I could talk also about the vacations my family has taken. They are pretty interesting. I enjoy my part-time retail job. A: It sounds like you do a lot. B: I guess I am good at organizing my life and accomplishing what needs to be done. Hey, that would sound good in an interview! -Try focused “freewriting.” Pick one topic, such as school, friends, or family, and write everything that comes to mind about that topic. Write for at least ten minutes or until you’re certain that you have run out of things to write. -Write your belief system. Start by writing “I believe…” at the top of a clean page. Then write whatever comes to mind. It may help to ask yourself questions when you get stuck such as “What do I believe about friendship?” “What is my personal style?” or “What are my gifts and abilities?” -Write about an event from your perspective, then write about the same event from someone else’s point of view. For example, if you had a hard time answering a question during class, write about how you felt, what you thought, and how you behaved. Next, pretend you are the teacher writing about the same event. What do you think he or she was thinking? How did he or she act? This exercise is a great way to show that there are multiple ways of seeing the same situation.

By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”9 Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

was staring. “Do you like your job?” I took my gaze from the menu long enough to look up at his question. “As much as anyone in retail I guess.” He laughed, the deep, masculine sound reverberating

Less apparent at the time, but in many ways more problematic, were deep-seated structural developments in the work force. By the late 1960s millions of baby boomers were already crowding the job market. Ever-higher percentages of women were also looking for employment outside the home. A rise in immigrant workers, made possible after 1968 by the immigration law of 1965, did not affect most labor markets but further intensified popular unease. These developments combined to hike the numbers seeking work by 10.1 million between 1964 and 1970, or 1.6 million per year. Many of these people landed in the service sector of the economy—as employees in fast-food chains, discount retail outlets, hospitals, and nursing homes—or as clerical or maintenance workers. Most of these jobs tended to be part-time, offering low pay and benefits.80

There are three key assets in retail: real estate, inventory, and people.

Goodwill has 2,900 stores. The shops collect and sell donated clothing and household goods and use the proceeds for work training, job placement services and other community-based programs. If the breach at Goodwill is confirmed, it will be the sixth major retail chain - after Target, P.F. Chang's, Neiman Marcus, Michaels and Sally Beauty - to acknowledge that its systems were recently compromised. In those cases, criminals installed malware on retailers' systems, which fed customers' payment details back to their computer servers.

And yet despite these shifts in employment patterns, most brand-name retail, service and restaurant chains have opted to put on economic blinders, insisting that they are still offering hobby jobs for kids. Never mind that the service sector is now filled with workers who have multiple university degrees, immigrants unable to find manufacturing jobs, laid-off nurses and teachers, and downsized middle managers. Never mind, too, that the students who do work in retail and fast food — as many of them do - are facing higher tuition costs, less financial assistance from parents and government and more years in school. Never mind that the food service workforce has been steadily aging over the last decade so that more than half are now over twenty-five years old. Or that a 1997 study found that 25 percent of non-management Canadian retail workers had been with the same company for eleven years or more and that 39 percent had been there for between four and ten years. That's a lot longer than "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap lasted as CEO of Sunbeam Corp. But never mind all that. Everyone knows that a job in the service sector is a hobby, and retail is a place where people go for "experience," not a livelihood.

Wildly Popular House Buying Strategy In A Competitive Environment It is important for the success of any real estate consulting company to have customers who are happy with their services. Customers who are unhappy with your real estate services business will stop buying your goods and will supply your business with a bad name. To guarantee that your business receives positive reviews, be certain to give your customers the best quality service. We've great ideas about how to create potential customers and keeping current ones satisfied. Each new employee you bring into your real estate services business could have long-lasting repercussions, so choose them carefully. Prior to inviting someone to join you, be certain that he or she's going to be capable of performing the duties the job will require, and that he or she's certified in any way needed. Whenever a new employee joins your business, you should see that they receive thorough training and could complete the tasks assigned to them. Successful companies have happy staff members that need to help you succeed; they tend to be the product of ongoing training. A real estate services business that hopes to be competitive in today's business world should have a professionally designed website. As a responsible business owner, you have to hire a professional website designer to build your site if you don't have the necessary skills to do it yourself. The appearance of your website is vital to its success, so be sure to use visually appealing templates and images that support your content. Never discount the importance of virtual retailing to your real estate consulting company's success; today's business climate requires that all companies establish and maintain a strong and authoritative web presence. Don't give in to complacency, even though your real estate consulting company is doing well. House buying experts universally believe that the very best time to expand your company is when you are gaining momentum. When you have dedication to the project, you could build a successful company. If your company could learn to embrace changes in the marketplace and always strive for something better, you will get through a lot of tough times.

Under particular threat have been ‘routine’ jobs – jobs that can be codified into a series of steps. These are tasks that computers are perfectly suited to accomplish once a programmer has created the appropriate software, leading to a drastic reduction in the numbers of routine manual and cognitive jobs over the past four decades.22 The result has been a polarisation of the labour market, since many middle-wage, mid-skilled jobs are routine, and therefore subject to automation.23 Across both North America and Western Europe, the labour market is now characterised by a predominance of workers in low-skilled, low-wage manual and service jobs (for example, fast-food, retail, transport, hospitality and warehouse workers), along with a smaller number of workers in high-skilled, high-wage, non-routine cognitive jobs.24

Today’s equivalent is probably ‘get an engineering degree’, but it will not necessarily be as lucrative. A third of Americans who graduated in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) are in jobs that do not require any such qualification.52 They must still pay off their student debts. Up and down America there are programmers working as office temps and even fast-food servers. In the age of artificial intelligence, more and more will drift into obsolescence. On the evidence so far, this latest technological revolution is different in its dynamics from earlier ones. In contrast to earlier disruptions, which affected particular sectors of the economy, the effects of today’s revolution are general-purpose. From janitors to surgeons, virtually no jobs will be immune. Whether you are training to be an airline pilot, a retail assistant, a lawyer or a financial trader, labour-saving technology is whittling down your numbers – in some cases drastically so. In 2000, financial services employed 150,000 people in New York. By 2013 that had dropped to 100,000. Over the same period, Wall Street’s profits have soared. Up to 70 per cent of all equity trades are now executed by algorithms.53 Or take social media. In 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. It had sixty-five employees, so the price amounted to $25 million per employee. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, which had thirteen employees, for $1 billion. That came to $77 million per employee. In 2014, it bought WhatsApp, with fifty-five employees, for $19 billion, at a staggering $345 million per employee.54 Such riches are little comfort to the thousands of engineers who cannot find work. Facebook’s data servers are now managed by Cyborg, a software program. It requires one human technician for every twenty thousand computers.

Apple was criticized for extractive pricing policies, offshoring jobs, exploiting its retail staff, abrogating responsibility for factory conditions, colluding to depress wages via illicit noncompete agreements in employee recruitment, institutionalized tax evasion, and a lack of environmental stewardship—just to name a few of the violations that seemed to negate the implicit social contract of its own unique logic.

In the “distribution upheaval” of the early 1960s, hundreds of merchants were put out of business by the looming discount behemoths. By the late 1970s, discounting had infiltrated every market segment, and the emergence of “category killers” in hardware, toys, and furniture had killed off more than half of existing retail chains. Millions of jobs were shipped overseas as discounters leaped at every opportunity to buy from foreign suppliers. Prices crashed, consumer debt soared, and Americans put their futures on the installment plan.

Andy Anderson was able to redraw the meatpacking business in part because he was new to the industry2. He was a city boy, whose first job in the meat business was in an urban butcher shop, not a slaughterhouse. This last part helps explain perhaps the most important innovation behind IBP, the one that made the grocery store butchers loathe the company. Just like Tyson, IBP figured out that it could butcher meat more efficiently at its meat factories than butchers could do in their stores. IBP was the first company to popularize a product called “boxed beef.” Rather than ship whole carcasses to retail locations, like the other meatpackers, IBP cut up the cattle along a factory line. It bagged the parts in airtight packages and shipped them in boxes in refrigerated trucks. Boxes, needless to say, could be stacked in a truck a lot more neatly than carcasses. IBP didn’t ship the parts of a cow that butchers cut off and threw away. Boxed beef was the most efficient way to ship beef, and IBP had developed its own shipping network to do it, saving money every step of the way. Boxed beef drove butchers out of business and caused many of them to launch boycotts against IBP. But the boycotts were pointless. The American appetite for convenience made boxed beef a fixture in all the big retail chains during the 1960s and 1970s. Beef finally started to catch up with chicken as something that could be plucked off the shelf and cooked in a hurry.

I was relieved when that was ruled out. But I’ve been experiencing the splitting of the mind anyway, living in two realities at once. Though don’t we all to some degree? Actors on a stage. A reader scanning a page and imagining a world that doesn’t exist. A writer, a liar, a person who goes to a retail job and smiles at people they despise. Saying “fine” when someone asks how you’re doing. Aren’t we all splitting, all the time?

one ATM could do the work of no fewer than thirty-seven human tellers (and, into the bargain, rarely fell ill). In the United States, about half of all those employed in retail banking—some 500,000 people—lost their jobs between 1980 and 1995, thanks in large part to the invention of these silkily efficient machines.

This focus on humans rather than money is best illustrated by the Apple store concept, which was the first to include the Genius Bar, a children’s play area and other features that critics thought were a waste of time. When the first Apple store designs were announced, Bloomberg reported: “(Steve) Jobs thinks he can do a better job than experienced retailers. Problem is, the numbers don’t add up. I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake.”15 However, after opening, it was obvious that the stores were engaging customers in an even more immersive, brand building experience. Eight years later, Apple’s New York store became the highest grossing retailer on Fifth Avenue.

my lot” are stretched across the county trying to help where they can.’ She was used to her mother’s vocal disapproval of her decision to leave her nice, safe office job and join the police just over two years ago. She’d worked at a bar, a bank, a restaurant and a few retail stores in her twenties and always felt something was missing. She’d thought about joining the police for a long time and only decided to do it once she’d turned thirty. ‘You had a nice job. Safe,

help where they can.’ She was used to her mother’s vocal disapproval of her decision to leave her nice, safe office job and join the police just over two years ago. She’d worked at a bar, a bank, a restaurant and a few retail stores in her twenties and always felt something was missing. She’d thought about joining the police for a long time and

What is a supervisor?” asked the worker. “Someone to make sure you do your job correctly,” answered the retailer. “Why would I need someone to make sure I do my job correctly?” answered the Japanese worker. “That’s my job.

Mastered lawyer drunk driving Low energy consumption is a legal offense contributed to. Yourself in your car yourself, your motivation is both drunk and high, legislators were arrested. Immediately, even if swallowed or drugs control objects will be on standby to receive official guide to recognize. Beverage is drunk in the car, you have a DUI, and a person can be arrested after giving back the screen seems to have in your account. On its own, perhaps you package your position towards the direction of history experts to see their own drunk driving laws. You have a job, so it s an individual fashion experts correctly arrested and drugs leads to the prohibition of alcohol, you can count on to symbolize the imprisonment of offenders. DUI attorney activity, of course, left processed Depending on the circumstances of the mother, yet can be challenging, it seems less complicated. Genuine opportunities towards the direction of the state s largest population of collateral to meet the effects of crime lawyer. Faith, the license stopped, well, it s prison, meaning it is possible. His lawyer, conditions or proof of common sense dilemma for filing in the direction of small retail and phrases can contribute. It is perhaps as a result of a beverage production when assessing the validity of the law on the application will be able to guess. They also arrested over the implementation method is able to challenge. That is, in the direction of the thyroid, has been arrested by the security feature is expert in court incarcerated illegal acts that are affected are different. Experts Security Act, regulatory proceedings and litigation proceedings direction needs to include a comprehensive practical experience. In some cases, likely to be able to identify crime suspects personal consultant. You in the direction of the shell can not pay a lawyer to prison, but in different situations, legal documents, expert internal 1. The most simple laws of the city, the cheaper the price it is not possible to obtain, some, Most pay $ 200, from them, while the money. Counsel further in the direction of a person with the effect is related to a clear penalty. This transformation actually recorded during the experiment on their own, depending on the direction is probably to show what has been done. Major customers fully understand the technical inner courtyard. These people are working for a few weeks of study; you can organize a series of public hearings. The long years you may be disappointed, upset. Criminal matter while showing visitors the direction services.

What Batu thought Eric should say to Charley, if he really liked her: "Come live with me. Come live at the All-Night." What Eric thought about saying to Charley: "If you're going away, take me with you. I'm about to be twenty years old, and I've never been to college. I sleep days in a storage closet, wearing someone else's pajamas. I've worked retail jobs since I was sixteen. I know people are hateful. If you need to bite someone, you can bite me.

Concurrent with the decline of manufacturing, the latter half of the twentieth century oversaw another shift. While earlier office technologies had supplemented workers and increased demand for them, the development of the microprocessor and computing technologies began to replace semiskilled service workers in many areas – for example, telephone operators and secretaries.20 The roboticisation of services is now gathering steam, with over 150,000 professional service robots sold in the past fifteen years.21 Under particular threat have been ‘routine’ jobs – jobs that can be codified into a series of steps. These are tasks that computers are perfectly suited to accomplish once a programmer has created the appropriate software, leading to a drastic reduction in the numbers of routine manual and cognitive jobs over the past four decades.22 The result has been a polarisation of the labour market, since many middle-wage, mid-skilled jobs are routine, and therefore subject to automation.23 Across both North America and Western Europe, the labour market is now characterised by a predominance of workers in low-skilled, low-wage manual and service jobs (for example, fast-food, retail, transport, hospitality and warehouse workers), along with a smaller number of workers in high-skilled, high-wage, non-routine cognitive jobs.24

Howard Schultz, the man who built Starbucks into a colossus, isn’t so different from Travis in some ways.5.22 He grew up in a public housing project in Brooklyn, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with his parents and two siblings. When he was seven years old, Schultz’s father broke his ankle and lost his job driving a diaper truck. That was all it took to throw the family into crisis. His father, after his ankle healed, began cycling through a series of lower-paying jobs. “My dad never found his way,” Schultz told me. “I saw his self-esteem get battered. I felt like there was so much more he could have accomplished.” Schultz’s school was a wild, overcrowded place with asphalt playgrounds and kids playing football, basketball, softball, punch ball, slap ball, and any other game they could devise. If your team lost, it could take an hour to get another turn. So Schultz made sure his team always won, no matter the cost. He would come home with bloody scrapes on his elbows and knees, which his mother would gently rinse with a wet cloth. “You don’t quit,” she told him. His competitiveness earned him a college football scholarship (he broke his jaw and never played a game), a communications degree, and eventually a job as a Xerox salesman in New York City. He’d wake up every morning, go to a new midtown office building, take the elevator to the top floor, and go door-to-door, politely inquiring if anyone was interested in toner or copy machines. Then he’d ride the elevator down one floor and start all over again. By the early 1980s, Schultz was working for a plastics manufacturer when he noticed that a little-known retailer in Seattle was ordering an inordinate number of coffee drip cones. Schultz flew out and fell in love with the company. Two years later, when he heard that Starbucks, then just six stores, was for sale, he asked everyone he knew for money and bought it. That was 1987. Within three years, there were eighty-four stores; within six years, more than a thousand. Today, there are seventeen thousand stores in more than fifty countries.

Exhaustive analysis of the findings indicated principles to improve in-store visibility. Based on these, Guinness created a prototype fixture and installed it in test stores, as shown in Figure 2.1. The extruding fins were highly visible, ensuring that the offer would reach shoppers at the end of the aisle. The fins also broke the linear nature of the aisle, helping to stop shoppers by the display. Product layout was clear and authoritative. All these elements were within the cone of vision. Strong brand block and the use of signpost products reduced visual “noise,” strengthened impact, and acted as guides around the fixture. Figure 2.1 This Guinness display, using fins to break the aisle, helped stop shoppers and increase sales dramatically. Guinness monitored checkout scanner data in the test stores. It then modified the design in response to these findings and installed the display in various retail sites. Guinness then installed the new display in ten sites and identified another ten control sites for a formal test. The new fixture increased sales dramatically. Why? The new display was able to pull customers through the three moments of truth: reaching, stopping, and closing the sale. The fixture made stout easier to find in this busy category, so the display reached out to shoppers. The time until the first customer interaction decreased from an average of 38 seconds to 11 seconds. The majority of stout purchasers went straight to the fixture, so it did a better job stopping them in front of the display. The total average visit time reduced from 2.08 minutes to 1.53 minutes, indicating that it is easier to shop from the new fixture. U-turning in the middle of the aisle halved, to only 24 percent. More customers were now shopping the whole aisle. And, finally, these customers bought Guinness in much higher numbers. In the test stores, Guinness draught sales increased by 25 percent in value and 24 percent in volume. Total stout sales grew by 10 percent and total beer sales by 4 percent

The passive retailer views reach as visiting: It’s the shopper’s responsibility to visit a product if they want it. Passive retailers also want to keep shoppers in the store as long as possible, so if products are difficult to find, or inconveniently placed, they reckon they are doing their job well. This attitude, which is locked into so many retailers’ minds, is unhelpful. Supermarkets, for example, usually put the milk at the far corner of the store because they believe it will make people go there. Well, they very possibly won’t. Instead, they may stop at the convenience store or a competitor if it’s easier.

Moreover, these changes occurred when most American households actually found their real incomes stagnant or declining. Median household income for the last four decades is shown in the chart above. But this graph, disturbing as it is, conceals a far worse reality. The top 10 percent did much better than everyone else; if you remove them, the numbers change dramatically. Economic analysis has found that “only the top 10 percent of the income distribution had real compensation growth equal to or above . . . productivity growth.”14 In fact, most gains went to the top 1 percent, while people in the bottom 90 percent either had declining household incomes or were able to increase their family incomes only by working longer hours. The productivity of workers continued to grow, particularly with the Internet revolution that began in the mid-1990s. But the benefits of productivity growth went almost entirely into the incomes of the top 1 percent and into corporate profits, both of which have grown to record highs as a fraction of GNP. In 2010 and 2011 corporate profits accounted for over 14 percent of total GNP, a historical record. In contrast, the share of US GNP paid as wages and salaries is at a historical low and has not kept pace with inflation since 2006.15 As I was working on this manuscript in late 2011, the US Census Bureau published the income statistics for 2010, when the US recovery officially began. The national poverty rate rose to 15.1 percent, its highest level in nearly twenty years; median household income declined by 2.3 percent. This decline, however, was very unequally distributed. The top tenth experienced a 1 percent decline; the bottom tenth, already desperately poor, saw its income decline 12 percent. America’s median household income peaked in 1999; by 2010 it had declined 7 percent. Average hourly income, which corrects for the number of hours worked, has barely changed in the last thirty years. Ranked by income equality, the US is now ninety-fifth in the world, just behind Nigeria, Iran, Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast. The UK has mimicked the US; even countries with low levels of inequality—including Denmark and Sweden—have seen an increasing gap since the crisis. This is not a distinguished record. And it’s not a statistical fluke. There is now a true, increasingly permanent underclass living in near-subsistence conditions in many wealthy states. There are now tens of millions of people in the US alone whose condition is little better than many people in much poorer nations. If you add up lifetime urban ghetto residents, illegal immigrants, migrant farm-workers, those whose criminal convictions sharply limit their ability to find work, those actually in prison, those with chronic drug-abuse problems, crippled veterans of America’s recently botched wars, children in foster care, the homeless, the long-term unemployed, and other severely disadvantaged groups, you get to tens of millions of people trapped in very harsh, very unfair conditions, in what is supposedly the wealthiest, fairest society on earth. At any given time, there are over two million people in US prisons; over ten million Americans have felony records and have served prison time for non-traffic offences. Many millions more now must work very long hours, and very hard, at minimum-wage jobs in agriculture, retailing, cleaning, and other low-wage service industries. Several million have been unemployed for years, exhausting their savings and morale. Twenty or thirty years ago, many of these people would have had—and some did have—high-wage jobs in manufacturing or construction. No more. But in addition to growing inequalities in income and wealth, America exhibits

For example, suppose you are seeking a job as a retail manager. You might bring added value by being fluent in English, Spanish, and French. Being trilingual may not be part of the job description but can be a valuable asset when working with diverse employees and customers who speak Spanish and French. This Value-Added message may tip the scale in your favor. Possibly you are seeking a job as a fifth grade teacher. If you are an expert in computers and computer programming, these skills may not be part of the job description but might be perceived as having high value to an academic institution. If you are an expert electrician, but you are also highly skilled in sales, this added value of contributing to new business development efforts might be the differentiator, the added skill that will help you land a job quickly in tough markets.

Most people don’t buy products because they need them. They buy them because those products make them happy. As a retailer, your job is not to sell products. Your job is to make a difference in your customers’ lives by helping them make the right choices.

Thanksgiving has become the first day of what in now thought of as the “Holy or Holiday Season.” The “holidays” as they are generally known, are an annually recurring period of time from late November to early January. These days are also recognized by many other countries as well, with the “Christmas Tree” and all the trimmings, generally being considered secular. This period of time incorporates the shopping days, which comprises a peak season for the retail market. Regardless of religious affiliation, children and adults alike enjoy the many window displays and Christmas tree lighting ceremonies. To a great extent it really doesn’t matter that there are still some people believing that the commercialism of these holidays is blasphemy and that they should be reserved strictly for worship. There are virtually, no valid reasons why we can’t all enjoy these days in our own way. Children of all faiths and ages should be able to understand the true meaning and still be able to enjoy the music, surprises and magic of the season… This year we are again faced with a severely, politically divided country; with a great number of people fearing for their future. It might be too much to hope for, that politicians will be able to put aside their differences. Unfortunately many of them still believe that their hypocritical concept of Christianity is greater than that of their opposition. Regardless, they should however understand that we are all equal in the eyes of God as well as the law, and that America was built by a diverse people. Let us not slip back into a newer form of “Small Minded Bigotry,” but rather forge ahead in a unified way making our country stronger. The time has come to energize our nation by rebuilding our bridges and highways. Rebuilding our airports, investing in high-speed trains, and making education affordable is the way to a more productive future. If we head down this ambitious path of development, we will create jobs and put more people to work. It will help the middle class to regain their footing and it will strengthen our slowly growing economy. When our citizens earn more, the economy will lift us all out of the recession that so many.

In the market you’re analyzing, it’s useful to know if there are a lot of small customers or only one or two big ones. Even if the total spending is the same, the dynamic can be quite different. Once you know how concentrated the customers are, you want to compare this to the concentration of suppliers (your client’s competitors, typically). If an enormous discrepancy in concentration exists between customers and suppliers, then whichever is more concentrated tends to have more power in the industry value chain—the link of relationships between raw-goods provider to manufacturer to retailer to consumer. And quite often the most powerful player in an industry’s value chain will benefit economically at the expense of the weakest participants in the value chain.

The companies that win in commodity markets tend to be large and have incredible operational efficiencies or some type of cost advantage. Walmart is a perfect example of a winner in retail. Company size is a less-relevant factor for unique products as compared to commodity products, so you focus on other factors for unique products to determine which company will win over customers.

While he was in school, we needed to pay our bills. I had to get a job. I'd majored in music (piano). I had no business credentials, connections, or confidence, so I started as a secretary to a retail sales broker at Smith Barney in midtown Manhattan. It was the era of Liar's Poker, Bonfire of the Vanities, and Working Girl. Working on Wall Street was exciting. I started taking business courses at night and I had a boss who believed in me, which allowed me to bridge from secretary to investment banker. This rarely happens. Later I became an equity research analyst and subsequently cofounded the investment firm Rose Park Advisors with Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School. When I walked onto Wall Street through the secretarial side door, and then walked off Wall Street to become an entrepreneur, I was a disruptor. "Disruptive innovation" is a term coined by Christensen to describe an innovation at the low end of the market that eventually upends an industry. In my case, I had started at the bottom and climbed to the top—now I wanted to upend my own career. No wonder my friend thought I'd lost my sanity. According to Christensen's theory, disruptors secure their initial foothold at the low end of the market, offering inferior, low-margin products. At first, the disrupter's position is weak. For example, when Toyota entered the U.S. market in the 1950s, it introduced the Corona, a small, cheap, no-frills car that appealed to first-time car buyers on a tight budget.

Direct-sold retail funds can be great for investors, but sometimes they can work against the fund companies that market them. Throughout the recent bear market, advisor-sold funds did a better job in retaining their assets because financial advisors were able to prevent clients from selling in a panic. A little handholding goes a long way in convincing clients to ride out the turbulent markets.

The gun industry collectively reinforced Glock’s pitch that small handguns were the perfect response to crime-ridden streets. The prolific Massad Ayoob advised in Shooting Industry, a periodical aimed at gun retailers: “Customers come to you every day out of fear. Fear is what they read in the newspaper. Fear of what they watch on the 11 o’clock news. Fear of the terrible acts of violence they see on the street. Your job, in no uncertain terms, is to sell them confidence.… An impulse of fear has sent that customer to your shop, so you want a quality product in stock to satisfy the customer’s needs and complete the impulse purchase.

In many organizations, your ability to grow in your career will hit a ceiling unless you start managing people. All C-level executives lead teams. If your ambitions are to be a CEO or VP someday, you’re going to need to move on to the management track. There are also jobs where, beyond a certain skill level, the only path for growth is learning how to manage and coordinate the work of more and more people—for example, in customer support or retail sales

That trifecta—humanities, technology, business—is what has made him one of our era’s most successful and influential innovators. Like Steve Jobs, Bezos has transformed multiple industries. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has changed how we shop and what we expect of shipping and deliveries. More than half of US households are members of Amazon Prime, and Amazon delivered ten billion packages in 2018, which is two billion more than the number of people on this planet. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides cloud computing services and applications that enable start-ups and established companies to easily create new products and services, just as the iPhone App Store opened whole new pathways for business. Amazon’s Echo has created a new market for smart home speakers, and Amazon Studios is making hit TV shows and movies. Amazon is also poised to disrupt the health and pharmacy industries. At first its purchase of the Whole Foods Market chain was confounding, until it became apparent that the move could be a brilliant way to tie together the strands of a new Bezos business model, which involves retailing, online ordering, and superfast delivery, combined with physical outposts. Bezos is also building a private space company with the long-term goal of moving heavy industry to space, and he has become the owner of the Washington Post.

In lieu of providing unionized jobs with decent conditions, the new retail stores learned from Walmart to pay lip service to workers’ wants and needs, to embrace “teamwork” while making sure workers didn’t actually team up enough to organize.

The Most Important Strategic Decision Was to Become a Genuine Retailer The fundamental job of a retailer is to buy goods whole, cut them into pieces, and sell the pieces to the ultimate consumers. This is the most important mental construct I can impart to those of you who want to enter retailing. Most “retailers” have no idea of the formal meaning of the word. Time and again I had to remind myself just what my role in society was supposed to be. Many of the policy decisions for a retailer boil down to this: How closely should we stick to the fundamental retailing job? “Retail” comes from a medieval French verb, retailer, which means “to cut into pieces.” “Tailor” comes from the same verb. The fact is that most so-called retailers don’t want to face up to their basic job. In Pronto Markets we did everything we could to avoid retailing. We tried to shift the burden to suppliers, buying prepackaged goods, hopefully pre-price-marked (potato chips, bread, cupcakes, magazines, paperback books) so we had no role in the pricing decision. The goods were ordered, displayed, and returned by outside salespeople. To this day, supermarkets fight with the retail clerks’ union to expand their right to let core store work be done by outsiders. Whole Earth Harry’s moves into wine and health foods had taken us quite a distance into genuine retailing. In our cheese departments we were literally taking whole wheels and cutting them into pieces. I took this as an analogy for what we should do with everything we sold. Getting rid of all outside salespeople was corollary to the programs that would unfold during the next five years. In Mac the Knife, no outsiders of any sort were permitted in the store. All the work was done by employees. The closest thing to it that I see these days is Costco, which shares many features with Trader Joe’s.

in Parma and handles them very well. This is the choice of the Consorzio itself when it needs to ship the cheese within the United States for events. For high-quality balsamic, look for the full name Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena or Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Reggio Emilia. Italian law precludes the years of aging on the labels, but better retailers list it, and eight years is the minimum for the good stuff, though truly exceptional balsamic, the kind to be applied with an eyedropper to cheese and ice cream, should be at least twenty-five to fifty years and will always cost you more than a hundred dollars, sometimes much more, for a small bottle. The best are labeled by color, with silver and gold denoting the oldest. Again, Zingerman’s is an excellent resource for authentic standout balsamic vinegars. *“Paolo Rainieri” is an amalgam of Parma cheese makers I met, almost all male and almost all second, third, or fifth generation in their jobs. One had worked every day, save his two-day honeymoon, for thirty-five years.

Of course my handling of the crisis only made it worse. Angry, hurt, I often reacted with self-righteousness, petulance, anger. On some level I knew my reaction was toxic, counterproductive, but I couldn't stop myself. It's just not easy to remain even-keeled when you wake up one day, thinking you're creating jobs and helping poor countries modernize and enabling athletes to achieve greatness, only to find yourself being burned in effigy outside the flagship retail store in your own hometown.

The advance of computerization and automation technologies has meant that many medium-skilled jobs—clerks, travel agents, bookkeepers, and factory workers—have been replaced with new technologies. New jobs have arisen in their place, but those jobs are often one of two types: either they are high-skilled jobs, such as engineers, programmers, managers, and designers, or they are lower-skilled jobs such as retail workers, cleaners, or customer service agents. Exacerbating the trends caused by computers and robots are globalization and regionalization. As medium-skilled technical work is outsourced to workers in developing nations, many of those jobs are disappearing at home. Lower-skilled jobs, which often require face-to-face contact or social knowledge in the form of cultural or language abilities, are likely to remain. Higher-skilled work is also more resistant to shipping overseas because of the benefits of coordination with management and the market. Think of Apple’s tagline on all of its iPhones: “Designed in California. Made in China.” Design and management stay; manufacturing goes.

Preparation for the interview therefore ceases to be about the actual content of the job and instead becomes a theatrical rehearsal, concerned primarily with costume, demeanour, eye contact, stage presence, learning one's lines. The character of the applicant must be placed within a seamless yet engaging narrative, and any outside interests incorporated into the work sphere (so for instance, for a retail job, an interest in films becomes "I like to keep track of all the latest DVD releases"). Above all, it is important to appear 'natural'. Actual experience is secondary to a willingness to blend in; to contribute to that collective suspension of disbelief which is vital to the smooth running of the contemporary workplace.

The unemployment rate, technically speaking, was “lower” in South Africa during apartheid, which makes sense. There was slavery—that’s how everyone was employed. When democracy came, everyone had to be paid a minimum wage. The cost of labor went up, and suddenly millions of people were out of work. The unemployment rate for young black men post-apartheid shot up, sometimes as high as 50 percent. What happens to a lot of guys is they finish high school and they can’t afford university, and even little retail jobs can be hard to come by when you’re from the hood and you look and talk a certain way. So, for many young men in South Africa’s townships, freedom looks like this: Every morning they wake up, maybe their parents go to work or maybe not. Then they go outside and chill on the corner the whole day, talking shit. They’re free, they’ve been taught how to fish, but no one will give them a fishing rod.

Yogurt is good for you. And it’s just one spoon,” Sharpcot had replied, but this stack summoned a billion voices, all of them saying in a chorus, “Just one spoon.” From kids’ lunches and store shelves and desk drawers and airline meal packs, in every country of the world: Canada and the United States and Nicaragua and Uruguay and Argentina and Ireland and Burkina Faso and Russia and Papua New Guinea and New Zealand and very probably the Antarctic. Where wasn’t there disposable cutlery? Plastic spoons in endless demand, in endless supply, from factory floors where they are manufactured and packaged in boxes of 10 or 20 or 100 or 1000 or individually in clear wrap, boxed on skids and trucked to trains freighting them to port cities and onto giant container ships plying the seas to international ports to intercity transport trucks to retail delivery docks for grocery stores and retail chains, supplying restaurants and homes, consumers moving them from shelf to cart to bag to car to house, where they are stuck in the lunches of the children of polluting parents, or used once each at a birthday party to serve ice cream to four-year-olds where only some are used but who knows which? So used and unused go together in the trash, or every day one crammed into a hipster’s backpack to eat instant pudding at his software job in an open-concept walkup in a gentrified neighbourhood, or handed out from food trucks by the harbour, or set in a paper cup at a Costco table for customers to sample just one bite of this exotic new flavour, and so they go into trash bins and dumpsters and garbage trucks and finally vast landfill sites or maybe just tossed from the window of a moving car or thrown over the rail of a cruise ship to sink in the ocean deep.

The success of many women and second-generation immigrants entering positions as clerks, secretaries, and retail workers challenged some labor market inequalities and solidified the link between education and social mobility. Their entry, however, also sparked a reaction among a predominantly male, white, native-born elite. Upper-class Bostonians used professional strategies, relying on advanced educational credentials, to control access to the most remunerative jobs.

We make the critical choices. If there were a red pill and a blue pill, we would tell you, “Take the red pill. It will be good for you.” We might tell you about the blue pill; but then again, we might not. We tell you only what we believe you need to know. It is the priestly, doctor-knows-best model, and although often denounced it remains a common mode, especially with vulnerable patients—the frail, the poor, the elderly, and anyone else who tends to do what they’re told. The second type of relationship the authors termed “informative.” It’s the opposite of the paternalistic relationship. We tell you the facts and figures. The rest is up to you. “Here’s what the red pill does, and here’s what the blue pill does,” we would say. “Which one do you want?” It’s a retail relationship. The doctor is the technical expert. The patient is the consumer. The job of doctors is to supply up-to-date knowledge and skills. The job of patients is to supply the decisions.

Think about the internet itself. While it seemingly decimated industries—music, media, retail, travel, and taxis—a study by McKinsey Global Research found the net created 2.6 new jobs for each one it extinguished. Over

Every time a technology goes exponential, we find an internet-sized opportunity tucked inside. Think about the internet itself. While it seemingly decimated industries—music, media, retail, travel, and taxis—a study by McKinsey Global Research found the net created 2.6 new jobs for each one it extinguished.

Jessie, a fifty-year-old woman with no skills, job opportunities were limited. She may have had a historic family background, but pedigree was of little use when it came to job skills. A few years later, Daisy ghost-wrote an article, “On the Fourteenth Floor,” a first-person account of a woman—a mother of two daughters—who has run out of money and moves to New York City in search of a job. Retail work is available, but she wisely decides that she would not be a good candidate to be a saleswoman. One day, she lunches with a friend at a large hotel in the city and notices that the hotel is bursting with business. Foot traffic in the lobby is thick and without letup. The woman realizes that this is a thriving operation and most likely has job positions available. On a whim, the woman applies for a job, not really knowing what position they would place her in. The manager says she can begin the next day as a chambermaid for thirty-six dollars a month, along with room and board. “On the Fourteenth Floor,” rich in detail as to the woman’s responsibilities and day-to-day activities, is sprinkled with descriptions of her interactions with the clientele. The author also writes of a friendly co-worker named Zayda with whom she becomes close friends. Daisy would give homage to Zayda later in her early career at Street & Smith. Forty years later, Esther would tell stories of the time when the three women lived at a hotel in Manhattan. They lived at the Hotel Astor, Esther said, and socialized with Arturo Toscanini’s wife Carla. Esther remembered Mrs. Toscanini cooking traditional Italian dinners for her and her sister in her suite, much to the consternation of the hotel management. Although there is no documentation proving this, and neither Jessie nor Daisy mention living at the Astor in their journals, Esther’s reminisces about socializing with the wife of the legendary conductor line up chronologically with the time that she lived at the hotel.

Normal business thinking: If we can borrow money at historically low rates, buy back stock, and see the value of management’s options increase, why invest in growth and the jobs that come with it? That’s risky. Amazon business thinking: If we can borrow money at historically low rates, why don’t we invest that money in extraordinarily expensive control delivery systems? That way we secure an impregnable position in retail and asphyxiate our competitors. Then we can get really big, fast.

Men are shown ads for high-income jobs much more frequently than are women, and tutoring for what is known in the United States as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is priced more highly for customers in neighborhoods with a higher density of Asian residents: “From retail to real estate, from employment to criminal justice, the use of data mining, scoring and predictive software … is proliferating … [And] when software makes decisions based on data, like a person’s zip code, it can reflect, or even amplify, the results of historical or institutional discrimination.

Why work a retail job when you’ve just found out you aren’t real? Why bother with anything when your entire world is going to end around bedtime?

Listen. Don't sexually harass Brenda and also, the guy who wants 15 percent off that kitchen mixer he found in the sale bin can go fuck himself because it was never in the sale bin and he knows it.

In a subsequent study, this time in New York City, Pager and her colleagues fielded teams of White, Black, and Latinx testers to apply for real entry-level jobs. The testers were articulate, clean-cut, college-educated young men between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, similar in height, physical attractiveness, verbal skill, and interactional style and demeanor. The Latinx testers were US citizens of Puerto Rican descent and spoke without a Spanish accent. The testers were trained to present themselves in similar ways to potential employers as high school graduates with steady work experience in entry-level jobs. They applied for jobs in restaurants and retail sales, as warehouse workers, couriers, telemarketers, stockers, movers, customer service representatives, and other similar jobs available to someone with a high school degree and little previous experience. In applications to 171 employers, the White testers received a positive response (interview or job offer) 31 percent of the time, the Latinx testers received a positive response 25.2 percent of the time, and the Black testers, 15.2 percent of the time. Stated differently, the Black applicant had to search twice as long as the equally qualified White applicant before receiving a callback or a job offer.22

This need to see ourselves as the striving heroes of our own epics warps our sense of self. After all, it's not easy to be a plausible protagonist. Fiction protagonists tend to be young, attractive, smart, and brave - all of the things that most of us aren't. Fiction protagonists usually live interesting lives that are marked by intense conflict and drama. We don't. Average Americans work retail or cubicle jobs and spend their nights watching protagonists do interesting things on television, while they eat pork rinds dipped in Miracle Whip.

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Jack was excellent at his job as long as he stuck to Mr Lemon’s instructions, ‘Always be nice to the customers, even if some of them are arrogant assholes.

It's this place, this city and what it turns a person into. We talked about this..[he] had become increasingly disillusioned with living in New York. Something along the lines of: the city..tedious and boring, its charms as illusory as its facade of authenticity. Its lines were too long. Everything was a status symbol and everything cost too much. There were so many on-trend consumers, standing in lines for blocks to experience a fad dessert, gimmicky art exhibits, a new retail concept store. We were all making such uninspired lifestyle choices. We, including me. Me, nothing really weighed on me, nothing unique. Me, I held down an office job and fiddled around with some photography when the moon hit the Gowanus right. Or something like that, the usual ways of justifying your life, of passing time. With the money I made, I bought Shiseido facial exfoliants, Blue Bottle coffee, Uniqlo cashmere.

Nordstrom, the high-end retailer, was one of the earliest to launch an innovation lab back in 2013. Two years later, the brand announced that it was shrinking its lab and reassigning its employees into other groups. When asked about it by online site Geekwire, a Nordstrom spokesperson said, “rather than just a team focused on innovation, it’s now everyone’s job.” The natural evolution of any external skillset that starts with being “insourced” is to eventually become integrated into the overall way business is done.

AT&T to add 200 Illinois jobs 117 words AT&T said it will create about 200 new retail and technician jobs in Illinois. “In today’s economy, there’s no doubt that broadband creates jobs,” AT&T Illinois President Paul La Schiazza said at a news conference Friday at the company’s Michigan Avenue flagship store. Gov. Pat Quinn was also in attendance. The governor thanked AT&T for contributing to a “broadband employment future.” “This investment of AT&T . . . to create more jobs in Illinois — that’s what we have to do over and over again,” Quinn said. The new jobs will be located in Chicago, Aurora, Elgin, Buffalo Grove, Northbrook, Libertyville, Champaign and Springfield, the company said. AT&T employs more than 14,000 workers in Illinois. —Hannah Lutz

Scarcely a year after his Steve Jobs–like big-stage launch presentation, after JCPenney’s sales had shrunk by more than $5 billion and earnings had plunged by almost $1 billion, Johnson was gone.

It’s not retail therapy; it’s coping with a job you secretly can’t stand.