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Commentary and Discussion From the Retail Community
Gender Diversity Called Business Imperative
A new white paper from the Network of Executive Women (NEW), Leveraging Management Diversity for Competitive Advantage, says companies in the retailing and consumer goods industries have made some strides…
Former Diversity Director: Actions Speak Louder Than PR
Richard L. Cozart, who was once the director of Kmart’s supplier diversity initiative, said his former employer said all the right things publicly but, in practice, discriminated against suppliers run…
Hard Hitting Loyalty Initiative Sacked
According to foxsports.com, MasterCard has asked the Redskins to rescind an earlier requirement that season ticketholders who use a credit card to pay for season tickets, use only a Redskins…
Super Dull Bowl
In newspaper sports sections all across the U.S. today are stories about the New England Patriot’s win in Super Bowl 39. Yesterday in households across the America, however, many were…
Union Asks For Arbitration in Wal-Mart Talks
The United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) representing employees at a Wal-Mart store in Jonquiere, Canada have asked Quebec’s Labor Minister Claude Bechard to appoint an arbiter to get…
Is a Third Nordstrom Too Much of a Good Thing?
Nordstrom has done very well catering to upscale shoppers with its two stores in the Atlanta market, but at least one industry veteran thinks the chain is making a mistake…
GHQ Cover Story 02/05: Anomalies of Scale
The moral of the Grocery Headquarters’ cover story for February is that size doesn’t matter when it comes to being successful in the grocery business. Try doing without some innovative…
Dallas Is Wal-Mart’s Promised Land
If you’re a Wal-Mart shopper and you’re looking for the closest thing to Wal-Mart heaven on earth, don’t even think about going to Arkansas. No, the Promised Land for Wal-Mart…
Target: It’s All About Customer Service
Target doesn’t mind a little stiff competition, reports the Los Angeles Daily News, even if it’s coming from itself. In one area of Southern California, the retailer currently has…
Amazon’s Got A Brand New Plan
Jeff Bezos is fixated on cutting prices. As an article in USA Today points out, he “believes strongly in driving sales growth and cash flow through low prices, mainly by…
Americans Choose Healthy or Wealthy in Unwise System
A new study conducted by Harvard University researchers and published in the Health Affairs medical journal says nearly half of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. may be the result of…
Shoppers Give Grocer The Finger
Shoppers at Thriftway Stores in the Seattle, Wash.-area have been giving the supermarket the finger for years and the grocer wouldn’t have it any other way. Since 2002, Thriftway has…
The Great Spanglish Controversy
At the 11th SRI Hispanic Marketing Conference, there was a striking shift in the content of the program and the attitudes of the attendees. This generation of marketers are using…
S&P Says Pathmark Has Tough Climb
If you’re a stakeholder in Pathmark, it would be easy to get down after reading the latest evaluation of the company’s prospects by Standard & Poor’s. According to the credit…
Name That Retailer’s Tune
A report in the National Retail Federation’s Stores magazine said retailers, such as J.C. Penney, are finding that old time rock and roll is not only good for the soul…
Feeding Friends and Influencing People
Milton ‘Milti’ Parker, owner of the famous Carnegie Deli in New York said he and his then partner, Leo Steiner, had a simple criterion for determining how things were going…
Family Dollar To Clean Up Its Act
Memories of the old five and dime stores may include dirty; unopened boxes, fallen merchandise, and workers with some combination of personality and personal hygiene issues. Today’s version of the…
7-Eleven – Listening to Customers 24/7
A $500 million investment in technology over ten years doesn’t always deliver results. It has, it appears, changed 7-Eleven for the better. According to David Podeschi, 7-Eleven’s SVP of merchandising,…
The Sad State of Customer Service
According to a report in The Christian Science Monitor, customer complaints about retail stores were up 104 percent between 2000 and 2003. Many of those complaints originated from problems with…
Wal-Mart: Immediate Family Includes Same-Sex Partners
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier in the week, Wal-Mart acknowledged as much when it expanded the company’s definition of “immediate family” to include civil unions…
‘It’s the employees, Stupid’
One of the things Stuart Silverman was impressed with at NRF this year was the number of companies selling solutions to improve or “optimize” employee productivity. Are retailers beginning to…
