To loosely quote a memorable Martin Luther King passage: “We face some difficult days ahead.” Perhaps no words more accurately capture the current situation facing the nation’s mass retailers. The notification, hardly surprising given the current state of the industry, that the National Association of Chain Drug Stores has been forced to cancel its annual
The Long Hot Summer is upon us. Or perhaps it will turn out to be the Winter of our Discontent. Either way, there are some difficult days ahead — and mass retailing, perhaps more critically than any other segment of the U.S. economy, will just have to rise to the occasion. That’s hardly an easy
The hundreds of thousands of employees who make the retail marketplace function, those staffers who are frequently overlooked, routinely unnoticed by their superiors, and all-too-frequently underpaid, undervalued and underappreciated, have emerged as the heroes and heroines of the coronavirus pandemic. They have routinely accomplished the impossible, working exhaustingly long hours with little rest and less
The coronavirus has become, in very short order, the compelling story of the year, a year in which the upcoming presidential election until recently threatened or promised to drown out every other story. Simply put, America, and the rest of the world, doesn’t know how to respond, or indeed if any response is either adequate
It skirts the edges of trivia to announce, yet again, that David Glass transformed Walmart as he redrew the parameters of mass retailing in America. Glass, who led Walmart during its halcyon years when it roared to the very pinnacle of the global retailing community, passed away earlier this year at the age of 84.
Under the innovative and productive leadership of Greg Farrar, ECRM, the retailer- and supplier-focused sales and marketing organization, has emerged as one of the most important trade organizations serving the mass retailing community. This didn’t happen overnight. When Farrar signed on as ECRM’s president some seven years ago, the organization, which had been founded over
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Recognizing the dramatically changing mass retailing marketplace, the editors of Mass Market Retailers have selected Walmart as the initial recipient of the publication’s newly created award for the most outstanding U.S. omnichannel retailer. The designation of Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, for this recognition was not a difficult decision. In 2019, the
It’s that time of year again, the time the editors of MMR select the outstanding retailers of the year. Sometimes we recognize an individual; at other times we choose a company. In either case, it is our annual attempt to isolate the best and the brightest, to designate those people and organizations that have distinguished
On the day before Thanksgiving an acquaintance of ours wandered into a CVS drug store in Mendham, N.J. There, at the store’s entrance, was a display, a Disney Lionel train set. Price: $79.95. Our acquaintance, a longtime Lionel train buff, immediately snapped it up, took it home, assembled the track and, by 8:00 that night,
Unlikely as it sounds, New York City is quickly emerging as a retail Mecca, the scene of much that is new and exciting and innovative in the retail marketplace. That’s right. New York — scene of hourly subway snafus, constant traffic snarls, mind-numbing construction on every street, and all manner of inconveniences and holdups —
Wegmans, arguably the finest grocery retailer the United States has to offer, opened its first supermarket in New York City late last month, a 74,000-square-foot store in Brooklyn. So significant was the opening that The New York Times, often referred to as America’s newspaper of record, devoted the back page of its first section to
Lots going on in the mass retailing community these days — as is usually the case. With the holiday season fast approaching, mass retailers are sharpening their games, extending their reach, unveiling some dramatic new concepts and honing their basic skills. With all the activity, the editors of MMR have arbitrarily selected five must-visits in