Plain Talk Archives Index

School of Hard Knocks (7/11/2008)
Although the first bell won’t ring for most kids for another six weeks or so, retailers (and parents!) are already gearing up for back-to-school. Both typically look forward to the season (for different reasons) but this year it may generate more fears than cheers (for the same reason – money.)

Positively! (7/3/2008)
Glass half empty? Or half full? It’s the classic determiner of whether you’re a pessimist or an optimist. But it may not be a totally accurate metaphor for life because, no matter how you look at it, the actual amount of liquid in the glass will never change. That may not be the case with life, where pessimism may actually accelerate a downward spiral – in effect, draining the glass.

The Power of Passion (6/27/2008)
Passion. It’s an invisible lifespark that energizes anything, raises it above the mundane, and inspires our loyalty. It’s what wildly successful entrepreneurs possess in vast quantities.

Mythinformation (6/20/2008)
Mythinformation (a 'fact' everyone knows, but is not actually true) oozes in to fill the cracks in our understanding of just about everything – the world of business is no exception, and retailing is not immune. It effectively obscures reality beneath a mosaic of half-truths, misinterpretations, and lies and becomes the ‘truth’ we believe.

The E’s Have It (6/13/2008)
It’s hard to talk, or think, about much else these days besides the Big E’s – the economy and the environment. The economy has worked itself into such a gridlocked snarl that we – consumers and businesses alike – are stopped in our tracks, unable to do more than, metaphorically, honk our horns in frustration. And the inconvenient truth of the tenuous state of our environment has (thanks to the skyrocketing costs of oil) finally grabbed the attention of business, if only as desperately-needed cost-cutting and PR measures.

Summer Staycation (6/5/2008)
One of the many casualties of skyrocketing gas prices this year is the summer vacation getaway. So retailers – attempting to make lemonade out of these particular lemons handed them by life – are touting merchandise that will help make at-home vacation-time (dubbed staycations) more fun and special.

Need, Want, Euphoria (5/30/2008)
Do I need it? Or do I just want it? It’s a distinction that doesn’t matter all that much during times of plenty. But in times like these, it’s a question that terrifies retailers.

My Customer’s Keeper? (5/12/2008)
An interesting philosophical conundrum: what (if any, or to what extent) obligation do retailers have to reach outside their purpose (selling goods) to act for the public good (especially if doing so could be bad for business?)

Vegas: Deal Me In (5/9/2008)
Vegas. (Call it whatever you like, the May ICSC convention will probably always just be ‘Vegas’ to most of us.) It epitomizes what trade shows are all about – the chance to put faces to names, forge connections, and actually communicate without the intervention of Blackberries, IMs, emails, or telephones.

We're In the Money! (Or Are We?) (5/2/2008)
The idea of hundreds of dollars hitting millions of consumersï¿½ wallets has retailers elbowing one another out of the way as they vie to grab the most stimulus dollars.

Event(ual) Success (4/25/2008)
“Whaddayou wanna do?” “I dunno. Whaddayou wanna do?” “I dunno. Whaddayou wanna do?” It’s an exchange heard ‘round the world – as it’s probably been since the beginning of time. Our highly-developed human brain bestows upon us the capacity for boredom but, ironically, not always the power to think up a solution. And that’s where retailers and restaurants come in…or should, or could but, too often, don’t.

Green: The New Black? (4/17/2008)
Could green be embraced any more enthusiastically than it is right now? Doubtful. The headlong rush to eco-friendly greenness is at once overdue, admirable...and worrying.

Tote, Tote Too? (4/6/2008)
Fees and surcharges are never welcomed with open arms – and they can be a serious pain in the wallet that people just don’t need right now. But that’s precisely what makes them invaluable when attempting to change a deeply ingrained habit – in this case the use of disposable plastic bags.

This Piggy Brings Kids to Market (3/28/2008)
Breaking the fourth wall is a television term used when a character steps out the self-contained world of the show and addresses the viewers directly – thereby forming a connection, a sense of intimacy that a traditional format does not allow. Theoretically, the concept could be applied to retail as well but too often shoppers are left, as it were, isolated on the other side of the fourth wall of retailing, mere consumers of merchandise who are never truly engaged in the process.

Hope Springs Eternal (3/21/2008)
Well that’s Easter behind us. Baskets still needed filling, of course, and obligatory family gatherings undertaken but this holiday seemed to come so hard on the heels of the fall and winter ones we’ve barely had a chance to recover enough energy, enthusiasm, or financial wherewithal to joyously leap into another.

Escal-ads: On The Way Up? (3/16/2008)
I don’t know if it’s entirely safe – or even legal in the US – but a new trend that has apparently been escalating overseas is certainly very cool. It’s escalator advertising. These “escal-ads” use and transform the steady, regular motion of an escalator to create an advertising venue with visual pop that will grab the attention even of (or perhaps particularly of) those used to blocking out the everyday inundation of high-tech marketing.

Landfills Clothes’d (3/9/2008)
Bet you never thought much about what happens to that outgrown, outdated, or just plain worn-out outfit that you toss in the trash. Luckily, some retailers have.

Legal Pitfalls For 'Joint Employers' (3/2/2008)
by Kenneth M. Alweis, Esq.. Goldberg Segalla LLP, Guest Columnist
Companies must diligently guard against liability for wage claims lodged by the employees of their independent contractors. A January 28, 2008 decision by a Maryland federal court sheds light on how corporate employers can reduce the risk that might be deemed to be “joint employers’ with the contractors for the purposes of benefits and wages.

Expanding Bookstores’ Borders (2/15/2008)
Borders is redefining the bookstore. It’s certainly a gutsy move, as true bibliophiles tend to be staunch traditionalists in some ways (after all – in a world of razzle-dazzle electronic immediacy, we revel in the power of the silent printed word to transport our imaginations, we savor the papery rustle of the turning page, and take pleasure in the satisfying heft of the covers as we close them.) But the world has moved on and booksellers must keep up or be left behind.

Custom(er)-Designed (2/8/2008)
"I Did It My Way" could well become the anthem for retailing if the trend that has been dubbed gravanity continues to grow. Though easier to implement for some market segments than others, customization and personalization are powerful sales drivers that speak to some primal, core need in the human psyche. In other words, people want what they want the way that they want it. (And, if possible, they want some glory for thinking it up.)

You’ve Got to Love This Month (2/1/2008)
The hearts and flowers, wistful, romantic secret admirers ethos that once imbued the month of February has given way to sex and violence – and retailers are loving it. After all, there’s nothing easier to sell – particularly to a sales pool that is predominantly male. (While both sexes do buy February-holiday-related merchandise, men are by far the bigger spenders.)

Rats! It's a Lucky Year (1/24/2008)
You might say you’d sooner kiss a pig – but you might seriously consider embracing a rat this year, particularly if your marketplace is made up of people of Asian descent – or of trendy sorts who adopt cultural elements on the basis of fashion or appeal.

Do-Gooders Do Better (1/18/2008)
Haves and have-nots have always been and probably always will be. Retailers’ interest, of course, centers on the haves and ensuring that those haves always have as much as they can possibly afford (and sometimes more.) But, every once in a while, a retailer turns its focus on the have-nots. And when that happens, it’s a win-win-win scenario.

Belt-Tightening Strangles Holiday Sales (1/11/2008)
The Monday morning quarterbacking that traditionally follows the holiday shopping season seems this year to be less an enthusiastic rehash than a listless, collective sigh. The best that can be said for holiday 2007 is that it’s over.

Three Kings = Retail Full House? (1/4/2008)
Retailers have never shied away from getting behind a holiday if it meant a chance to fill their stores with shoppers. And, given this past year’s lackluster winter holiday season, it’s perhaps not a surprise that we’re hearing of a surge of interest in Three Kings Day – a holiday some retailers are banking on as a nascent merchandising opportunity in the otherwise barren month of January.

Bag It (12/21/2007)
Shopping bags – particularly those from the most prestigious retailers – have long served as icons, instantly identifiable indicators of the status of the person carrying his or her purchases home from the store (and nice, free little billboard advertising for the retailer along the way.) Shoppers have always been loath to throw away such a useful item as a handled bag and they have traditionally been carefully folded and repurposed later on. But penny pinching over the last decade or so left some bags – even from upscale stores – so flimsy, chintzy and easily ripped that they barely survived one use, much less subsequent ones. And that’s an expensive mistake many retailers are scrambling to fix.

It’s All in Your Head (12/14/2007)
Imagine marketers essentially crawling inside your brain, force-feeding you messages. You can hear them, though people just a few yards away do not. They appear to be so close, so immediate, that they trigger your internal proximity sensors – the ones humans evolved over millenia to signal our brains to pay attention, that there is something important, or possibly dangerous, nearby – so they are virtually impossible to ignore. Well, you don’t have to imagine any more. It’s real. And it’s just possible that they may become a part of our lives whenever we venture into a public place, or retail store.

Now You’re Talking (12/7/2007)
Being the Great American Melting Pot is one of our country’s greatest strengths – after all, alloys are almost always more resilient than ‘pure’ elements – but one of the costs of continually folding in new cultures is the issue of language. According to a recent article, for example, the Queens Center Mall in New York is its own Tower of Babel, with shoppers speaking in some 150 tongues. How many sales and tempers must that have been lost there before the mall decided enough was enough? And why haven’t more malls and retailers followed suit?

The Food Court's Hot (11/30/2007)
Food courts aren’t just for food anymore. They seem to be becoming the hot location for retailers after kids or teens and it’s not hard to see why. After all, both demographics are always hungry – especially for the kind of fried, sweet or otherwise tasty fast food that typically fills food courts. And both are impulsive and are likely to be attracted to something intriguing placed nearby.

Traditions: Senseless (But Dollar-Full) (11/25/2007)
Traditions don’t have to make sense. In fact it’s pretty much their defining factor: something we do only because it has been done for years. The holidays are full of traditions, of course. But the main winter one – at least in terms of retail – is that otherwise sensible people draw up lists of merchandise they want other people to buy for them while simultaneously running around spending more money than they have buying merchandise that others have requisitioned. A subset of that merry tradition is, of course, Black Friday.

The e-Kids Are Coming (11/16/2007)
Is retail ready for children who have been shopping like pros since they were toddlers? These mini-consumers haven’t been hitting the malls or toting home real clothing or home furnishings but millions of them have been kitting out their Toontown, Club Penguin or Webkinz homes and avatars every day for years.

Shopping = Pressure (11/11/2007)
Holiday shopping is stressful enough. In 2007, it’s a pressure cooker. And smart retailers will release that tension any way they can.

As Beautiful as Life (10/18/2007)
Our existential dread about death makes it difficult to frankly accept it – and the idea of making money on the pain and suffering involved seems downright distasteful. But, think about it. Don’t drug stores exist solely because of pain and suffering? But we accept that fact because we understand that they do not cause the suffering, they ease it. The same could be said for a carefully thought out store that catered to the needs of the dying and the people who love them.

Define: Women (10/12/2007)
"You can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself," went the old song. Of course, retailers and manufacturers who please only themselves don’t survive long, but if you replace "yourself" with "your core customer" it becomes a refrain that should continually loop through corporate minds.

An ICE Idea (10/5/2007)
If you had to brainstorm a mall-based event that would positively impact everyone from shoppers to retailers, from mall management to manufacturers – even a country – it would be hard to improve on "Italy at South Coast Plaza."

Scaring Up Sales (9/28/2007)
Psychologists could probably have a field day analyzing why a holiday celebrating torturous death and eternal torment gains popularity every year. But as far as retailers are concerned it’s all good.

Mall Branding for Life (Insurance) (9/21/2007)
What does life insurance have to do with retail and entertainment? Usually not much. But Thai Life – Thailand’s second-largest insurance company – partnered with Major Cineplex Group and its sports entertainment unit Major Bowl Group to create the Thai Life entertainment mall at The Esplanade on Ratchadaphisek Road in Bangkok, a venue expressly designed to encourage families to enjoy each other’s company. (Along the way, of course, raising brand awareness among the young and middle class who are likely to frequent it.) And this just might be an idea US companies and malls should consider.

Lingerie’s Bottom Line (9/15/2007)
Underwear is hot and suddenly it seems everyone wants a piece of the action – Chico’s has Soma, American Eagle its aerie, and Lane Bryant Cacique. And all this new pressure on the marketplace explains in part (but not by any means all) why Victoria’s Secret these days is that its undergarments just aren’t supporting it the way they used to – and that its bottom line is sagging.

Retail’s Fear Factor (9/7/2007)
They say ignorance is bliss. And when it comes to shopping, that is certainly the case. Not that long ago we were able to stroll serenely amidst store shelves casually picking up anything that caught our eye, secure in the knowledge that if it weren’t perfectly safe, it wouldn’t be there. That, surely, someone was watching over us.

Innovation, Transformation (8/23/2007)
For the innumerable women who have overwhelming family, home, and career responsibilities – and all the stresses and time-pressures that go with them – the prospect of trip to the mall looms as a time-gobbling, exhausting nightmare, far more to be dreaded than savored. There seems little appeal in the idea of slogging through hundreds of stores, crisscrossing back and forth what feels like hundreds of miles in search of a particular item. (And the sense of horror increases exponentially if shopping with children.) But there is hope – Searchable Solutions.

Hooked, (On)line, and Sinker (8/17/2007)
It’s hard to blame marketers for grabbing desperately at some way – any way – to connect with, and sell to, a demographic segment that has turned its back on virtually every traditional path of marketing: its use of print newspapers and magazines and even radio has plummeted – even TV (though often on while a computer is in use) gets far less "mindshare" than it used to, and far less than the myriad of online venues.

Nuggets of Branding Wisdom (8/10/2007)
Much is being made of the recent Stanford study that indicated children were swayed by branding (since kids said that the chicken nuggets from a McDonalds bag were better than the identical ones from a plain wrapper.) But the real question might be, why is this a surprise? Isn’t that the entire purpose of marketing? Isn’t this mental sleight of hand the bread and butter of mainstream retailers and restaurants?

Invasion or Infusion? (8/3/2007)
The British are coming! The British are coming! Oh, wait. Some, like Virgin, are already here. And – in terms of buzz-generating retail concepts – so are the Swedes (H&M), the Spanish (Zara) and the Japanese (Uniqlo), among others. What is it about them? Is it just the novelty factor? Or do they actually have something that US homegrown concepts should examine…and learn from?

Holiday Wishcraft (7/27/2007)
It was a hot and sultry day…and sleigh bells were jingling. That’s a sentence not typically heard in Connecticut. But, sure enough, while flipping through radio stations, Jingle Bells filled the car – thanks to an XM special, Xmas in July.

Mini Me (7/20/2007)
More often than not, restaurant servings lean heavily toward the gluttonous. Salad enough to feed a large family, entrees that exceed days’ worth of recommended calorie intake and desserts best described with words like "slab." But that’s changing.

Stores...Stories. (7/13/2007)
In day-to-day business – as in day-to-day life – we are so concerned with managing the concrete realities before us that we seldom think about what lies behind, or beneath. But look, really look, and it’s amazing what unfolds. Once you look past the mundane buildings and infrastructures, merchandise and operations you see – at the core – a story. And retail is filled with them.

Custom(er) Made (7/6/2007)
Toys today are cheap and abundant – kids can be almost overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what they own. They could easily have dozens of stuffed animals, boxes of Barbies, buckets of cars and hundreds of other toys of all shapes and sizes. How can retailers possibly break through?

Citrine, Tastings, Solutions (6/29/2007)
It’s the eternal question that has plagued mankind (or more realistically, womankind) since the dawn of time. "What’s for dinner?”

Cool and Calculating (6/22/2007)
Can a computer program know us better than we know ourselves? Can it intuit what we will buy for a certain price? Can it outperform tried and true formulas or plain old common sense merchandising? That’s what a small but growing number of retailers around the world are trying to find out.

Scorning Women a Big Old Mistake (6/15/2007)
Considering Gap’s ongoing efforts to drag itself back onto the profitable growth track it once enjoyed, it’s not surprising that it has, in a relatively short time, made a few changes. But it’s amusing (in-a-not-funny-at-all-kind-of-way) to see that it apparently determined that – despite the fact that it’s desperate for money and despite the fact that America is continually growing older and heavier – it desires the dollars of only the young and slender.

What A Difference a Décor Makes (6/8/2007)

What Would You Do? What Would It Take? (6/1/2007)

Investing in Satisfaction (5/18/2007)

Shift Happens (5/13/2007)

Fixing Up the Food Chain (5/6/2007)

Cyborg Sales Staff? (4/29/2007)

The Patient-Customer (4/21/2007)

Retail: Weather or Not (4/15/2007)

The “Classy” Mall (4/8/2007)

Lucky Seven (3/25/2007)

Hype, Hope and Holidays (3/16/2007)

Ideals...Sold Cheap (3/11/2007)