Wednesday, October 7, 2020, will be remembered or fondly recalled by mass retailing aficionados as the day a microcosm of the mass retailing community assembled, virtually, to discuss the past, debate the present and predict the industry’s future. As background, the event was conceived, assembled and choreographed by Scott Emerson, founder and CEO of the
This is a story about a three-year-old group founded by several women business executives in 2017 to nurture talent and further the careers of women in the health care industry. The name of the group is WE, and among its founders is Andrea Fallin, a senior sales executive at Racher Press, publisher of MMR and
As anyone who really cares already knows by now, John Standley has been named president of Walgreens. The appointment is both surprising and logical. Standley is a smart and savvy chain drug executive, having learned his way around the industry through many years of toil and a variety of challenges, most recently at Rite Aid,
Retailing, it can be safely and accurately argued, appears to have emerged as the least cohesive segment of the U.S. business community. A case in point: the brouhaha over the wisdom of compelling customers and staffers to wear protective masks while on the premises. By any standard of measurement, wearing masks will do no harm.
There appeared recently an op-ed piece in The New York Times written by a (presumably) young mother of two, carrying the headline “Target, Don’t Tell Me You ‘Stand With Black Families.’ ” The article recounted the experience of this mother’s two Black children, one 13 at the time of the incident, the other 10, as they
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