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Walmart’s Hire-a-Vet Program: Patriotic Gesture? Or Good for Walmart?

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American veterans returning from war have had a history of finding employment at Fortune 10 companies. After the Korean War they got engineering and sales jobs at IBM and Texaco. After Vietnam they became production technicians and manufacturing coordinators at Dupont and Monsanto.

Those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan will be working at Walmart. Now that’s what I call economic progress.

At January’s National Retail Federation Convention in New York, CEO and President Bill Simon announced the Bentonville behemoth’s pledge to hire any returning veteran who wants a job, in a program it will kick off on (when else?) Memorial Day. It will result in 100,000 jobs for returning military personnel over the next five years.

This is a wonderfully patriotic gesture, and a great opportunity for all those returning vets, right? Or is it? [Read more...]

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Posted March 4, 2013

JCP, Argo, the Golden Fleece, Odysseus, and the Sirens

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greek_chorusThere is some irony to JCP’s heavy sponsorship of the Oscars relative to Argo winning “best picture.” The fact that the mythical Greek ship Argo and its crew were searching for the elusive Golden Fleece while being protected by the goddess Hera might be a good omen for Ron Johnson. However, there doesn’t seem to be even a mythical protector anywhere in sight, much less a real one. In fact, using another mythological metaphor, Johnson could be like Odysseus, being warned of the Sirens by the Greek goddess Circe. The Sirens were trying to lure him and his ship’s crew to their certain death, being tossed by the sea into the very same rocks and cliffs that Argo was able to sail past. Circe told Odysseus to put beeswax in the ears of his crew and if he felt he couldn’t resist listening, he should have his crew lash him to the mast. [Read more...]

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Posted March 3, 2013

Nordstrom: Ghost of Vince Lombardi Lives On

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With Some 65,000 Quarterbacks

I wrote an article in 2004 in which I compared Nordstrom with the Green Bay Packers at their peak between 1958 and 1968 under coach Vince Lombardi. Guess what? Lombardi’s spirit lives on within the Nordstrom team, roughly 65,000 strong, and all of them “quarterbacks.” To revisit the past, the opening paragraph I wrote eight years ago was as follows:

Cover_02.04_FlatThe late, great Vince Lombardi, renowned coach of the Green Bay Packers from 1958 to 1968, never got confused over the concepts of “strategy” or “tactics.” And he never confused his team about them either. He viewed football as a “game of inches” and the superior execution of the “basics” of the game, such as blocking and tackling. I know the Nordstrom family hails from the city of Seattle, and I know basketball was their game. And basketball certainly is not a game of inches. However, to hear Blake Nordstrom, President of Nordstrom, talk about their recent “wins,” it’s like listening to the ghost of Vince Lombardi, albeit at a somewhat lower decibel level.While many experts at the time cited technological initiatives for Nordstrom’s huge earnings and sales gains that year, Blake Nordstrom was quoted as saying:  “I think any gains that we’ve had have less to do with technology and more to do with Retail 101.

I thought ‘hmmm,’ sounds like “blocking and tackling” to me.

Now, eight years later, sales are estimated by FactSet to increase by 14% to about $12 billion for 2012 (a roughly $5 billion increase over 2004 revenues of $7.1 billion). Making these numbers even more impressive are the year-in, year-out, profitability metrics: same store sales and sales per square foot, (see accompanying chart).

Also, during the past eight years, Nordstrom continued to invest heavily in technology and perfect its “omnichannel” capabilities. In fact, they are widely acknowledged as being a technology leader among their peers. But, again, Blake Nordstrom, in his humble demeanor, would say the same thing: essentially, it’s not about technology, it’s about “Retail 101.” [Read more...]

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Posted February 12, 2013

Y Do I Care?

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ydoicareAnd Why You’d Better Care About These Five Words of Activation

Brands love me. They find me in the recesses of my social interactions and they ask (read: incentivize) me to be their brand ambassador. Who am I? I am any Millennial/Gen Y, and broke as we are reputed to be, we are quickly (like in the next five years) about to start outspending your other favorite customers, our parents, the Baby Boomers. And brands (not all, but definitely the ones we will be interacting with for years to come), are quickly taking the initiative to not only put themselves where we are, but also to make themselves known as one of us.

You might ask, “How do they do that? How does Nike become a twenty-something?” I will tell you how: they speak to us like we speak to each other. Because for the first time, your brand is in conversation between posts made by my own twenty-something friends. And how better to relate your brand to me and my friends than by using terms we use, or that excite or interest us. Clearly, I am not talking Internet-speak (LOL)—I am talking activation words; words that convey to us who we want to be; how we understand the world to be; or even how we would like the world around us to become. Because those who understand the way Gen Y ticks, understand that more than anything else, we are an aspirational generation. Helping us aspire—feeding your brand vocabulary with words or concepts we aspire to—activates us as customers that want to interact with your brand, both socially and commercially.

I’m going to share with you five words of activation that have the potential to activate your Gen Y or Millennial customer, and why knowing what each one means and why it matters will let them know you know the “Y.” [Read more...]

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Posted February 12, 2013

The 10 Commandments of Home

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tencommandmentsTO: Ron Johnson, Plano, TX
FROM: A Higher Authority
RE: The Way to the Promised Land

Cecil B. DeMille, where are you now that we need you?

The expedition that Ron Johnson is leading the Penney-ites on will not last 40 years – he’ll be lucky if he gets 40 months – but in just about every other way, the trek is of biblical proportions. Johnson is trying to free one of the most enslaved retailers in the business from what seems an eternity of lackluster merchandising, dysfunctional buying and a generally disjointed business strategy that seems to go in every direction but forward.

Frogs and pestilence have nothing on this saga.

Whether he can lead the company to the Promised Land remains to be seen. Frankly, 2012 was just a warm-up and the real test comes this year when JCP has to start anniversarying its lame numbers that started last February. If they can’t beat those comps, Bill Ackman – the hedge fund honcho who has been manipulating this whole thing from the other side of the balance sheet – is going to show why patience is not one of his virtues and there’ll no doubt be a new

sheriff in Plano before long. So, as Johnson tries to part the retail seas and find a route for JCP to succeed, I say it is his Home business that is going to help lead the way. More so than at any other national general merchandise retailer, JCP Home is a larger percentage of overall sales, led by soft home. That has always been a core strength of what those in the trade still call “The Penney Company,” and regardless of the name over the front door these days, if Home doesn’t work, JCP doesn’t work. [Read more...]

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Posted February 12, 2013

Sam & Sandy

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Sam is Palestinian with family in Ramallah. He has lived in the USA for more than 25 years. He and his cousin run a small convenience store on West Fourth Street in the middle of New York’s increasingly tony West Village. It has almost everything—from fancy cookies, canned goods and cleaning supplies, to charcoal and stomach remedies. For 15 years, I’ve bought newspapers, juice, quarts of milk and an occasional BLT (cooked by the Mexican counter man; after all, Sam is a good Muslim). Sam, his cousin, or younger relative, Ali, is on location from 4:00 in the morning to midnight, seven days a week. As this historic neighborhood has gentrified, the population density has declined. The brownstones that were cut up into small apartments 25 years ago have been restored into huge single-family houses for aging globetrotters, many of whom have more than one home. Sam sells coffee and sandwiches to the local residents’ workmen who are constantly upgrading the properties; and bottled drinks to the tourists coming to visit the ‘Sex in the City’ block. Street traffic may be up, but business is trending down.

Pacco_Illu-01

Immigrants have long been the back-bone of American retail entrepreneurship. Unlike Europe, there is no tradition of a merchant class; no long history of selling goods to a built-in clientele. In the new world, the willingness to invest one’s heart and soul, put in long hours, and often enlist family members to labor for nothing other than meals and clean sheets has been the price of entry. Like the family farm in the American frontier, it has been the family store for the immigrant classes in America for the last 125 years. [Read more...]

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Posted February 12, 2013

Finding the Best Fit: The Modern Woman’s Solution

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PrintMe-Ality™ Market Insights from Unique Solutions

Women are clearly leading the way to the future. With more and more women holding significant positions in today’s workforce, it’s no secret that professional parity continues to improve. According to a recent Pew Research report, women made up almost half of the workforce in 2009. Furthermore, in terms of education, women earn more bachelor’s (57.2%), master’s (60.4%), and doctoral degrees (52.3%) than men, and just fewer than half (49.0%) of all first professional degrees. (National Center for Education Statistics, 2010)

It’s also no secret that today’s “Wonder Woman” wears many hats for many different roles: working professional, supportive partner, caregiver, and primary shopper—just to name a few.

Today’s Modern Woman is a multi-tasking, working mother. According to the Department for Professional Employees (2008), 71.2% of women in the overall labor force had children under the age of 18. Many of these women are single mothers as well. Even in households with two caregivers, recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2012) found that housework duties still fall predominantly to women. Moreover, 74.9% of women identified themselves as the primary shoppers for their households in 2011, according to the annual MRI Survey of the American Consumer.

But it’s not all on equal footing at home. Despite overcoming obstacles to achieve professional equality with their male counterparts, domestic traditions for women such as household shopping still persists in today’s society. [Read more...]

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Posted February 12, 2013

MK is no LV: It’s Not Coach Either

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Is this any way to manage a Jet Set brand? Maybe, if you’re looking for a quick exit.

Listening to Michael Kors CFO Joe Parsons speak at ICR on January 16, 2013 on the Kors Jet Set aesthetic—spanning wings, wheels and water—I was reminded of the brand Louis Vuitton, also rooted in luxury travel.

iStock_000019271426MediumI make the comparison to Louis Vuitton for several reasons, beginning with its origins as a provider of luggage in the 1850s. In October 2010, I visited Paris (not just because I love to travel… and I especially love Paris) to see the installation of a Coach shop-in-shop at the Printemps flagship on Boulevard Haussmann, and do a store tour of Ralph Lauren’s new Left Bank flagship on Boulevard Saint-Germain. While I was there, I visited the Musée Carnavalet (the museum of the history of Paris). I never quite understood the fascination and demand for Louis Vuitton until I walked through the museum’s exhibit, Voyage en Capitale, Louis Vuitton & Paris.

On exhibit were the tailor-made trunks for nobility, celebrity and the wealthy. The exhibit told the brand story rooted in travel, a phenomenon that excites the imagination with the romance of new places and people, and different cultures and experiences. What holds more allure than travel? At the show, I discovered the basis of the brand’s aspirational DNA, which combines best-of-class quality and aesthetic with fashion’s excitement and superior execution at every touch point.

Is Michael Kors brand association with Jet Set travel designed to be the LV of the 21st Century? [Read more...]

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Posted February 12, 2013

Tesco Felled By Hubris, Leaves USA

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Quitting the country is the easy part. Now, what about all that infrastructure?

Chronicle of a Failure Foretold

Years from now, MBA students will be puzzling over how Tesco, the British food retailer, could have stumbled so badly in its venture in the United States.

Well, more than stumbled. As I predicted more than a year ago in a news feature in the Robin Report, Tesco has called it quits in the U.S., just five years now after entering the country. Tesco racked up a horrendous record: it managed to open about 200 stores in this county, most in California, plus a few in Arizona and Nevada. It burned through well in excess of $3 billion counting startup costs and cumulative losses during its time in this country. At no time did Tesco turn even a modest profit with its Fresh & Easy stores, as they were dubbed.

farewell_fresh

That dismal outcome stands in ugly contrast to its stated ambitions. Tesco predicted it would have many hundreds of stores in the U.S. by now. It envisioned a quick leap to the East Coast with fill-ins elsewhere yielding a network of 10,000 stores.

The reality of the situation has cost the career of Tim Mason, Tesco’s U.S, chief officer. When Tesco announced in December it was quitting this country, it also said Mason would immediately leave the company. Mason was a 30-year veteran of the company and at one time was seen as the next chief executive officer of all of Tesco. Mason gave it a good shot. He moved to California from Britain with his wife, Fiona, and three of their seven children to direct the fledgling Fresh & Easy empire. Fiona took up golf to wile away the hours while Mason toiled. To the good for Mason, he left with a huge buyout and an astoundingly generous pension.

Tesco now faces the challenge of how to withdraw from the U.S. without abandoning its assets here entirely. [Read more...]

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Posted February 12, 2013

How Can You Get There if You Can’t See It?

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The Robin Report

Click to Enlarge

What performance measures and goal-setting metrics are you currently using? How do you know they accurately reflect individual store performance? Are they helping to create a high-performance culture? We are immersed in a data-driven environment and increasingly dependent on metrics and tools to measure and monitor our businesses. But most of us are willing to admit that transforming data into valuable insights is an ongoing challenge.

In the December Robin Report, I introduced a new customer-centered metric—Return-On-Visit (ROV)—that enables retailers to uncover hidden opportunities to drive incremental sales. Before we take a deeper dive into how ROV and other new metrics can provide better insights, let’s take a quick look at the limitations of traditional performance measures and goal setting.

Do Your Metrics Provide a Complete Picture of Performance?

There is no shortage of measurement tools and management reports. The era of “big data” has clearly arrived on the retail scene, principally fueled by:

  • Advanced POS systems that capture and disseminate vast amounts of transactional-level information.
  • The development of data-mining techniques that pinpoint the buying habits of customers.
  • Easily created custom reports at all levels of the organization that may or may not lead the end user to make the right decisions. [Read more...]
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Posted February 11, 2013

Nervous Consumers Go to the Mattresses

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Will Clouds Lift in 2013?

Last month, when the Commerce Department released its report on December 2012 personal income, spending and savings, there was barely a mention of it in the usual financial corners – which didn’t faze me much, since these figures are usually nothing to write home about.

After looking at the numbers, however, I did something uncharacteristic: a double-take.

Personal income rose by a whopping 7%, its biggest monthly jump in six years. Great news for retailers, who were offering tempting Holiday price promotions everywhere you looked, right? [Read more...]

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Posted February 10, 2013

“Innovate Or Die”

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kennethwalkerI ask you, is this the face of innovation or death (or both)? Most of you elder statesmen out there, like myself, know this guy. He’s Kenneth Walker, architect, retail design consultant, speaker, teacher and industry gadfly at large. He’s also a friend and colleague of mine and playfully reminded me recently, that I used his original, but now very generic declaration: “innovate or die,” without attributing it to him. It happened to be my opening line for The Robin Report article: “Innovation: Ill-Defined, Misunderstood and a Rare Occurrence.”

Why would I attribute him? As I said, it’s generic because when he first used it at an NRF convention 17 years ago, he didn’t see fit to protect it in any way (not sure he could have anyway). The whole IP issue at that time (pre-Internet dominant) was nascent at best. So it’s like the Kleenex brand today; used generically by most consumers to describe all tissues. Ken says it’s the title of his lecture series when he speaks at the Columbia Business School. His phrase has become part of the cultural conversation; a recent WRC speaker tried to use the title and was asked to change it, which he did. Well, good for you Ken.

Regardless of this little kerfuffle, my innovation article provided some new insights perspectives regarding fundamental and game-changing vs. incremental innovation. So, if you haven’t read it, by all means do, and it’s even worth a re-read. You can read the entire article here >> , and when you read the first sentence: Innovate or die; you can remember it came from this guy.

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Posted January 29, 2013