Total Store Expo makes its mark

The most recent edition of Total Store Expo, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores’ gala merchandising and marketing exhibition, played out in Denver late last month, the third in a series of revamped and recalibrated merchandising extravaganzas designed to pull together the various merchandising and marketing components of a 21st century retail showcase.

Whatever your personal perspective or assessment, the show must be evaluated as a huge success, especially if that evaluation turns on its ability to bring together and showcase the complex and multilayered components of a modern-day mass retailer.

The numbers alone defy comprehension. The sold-out show floor featured approximately 725 exhibitors competing for the attention of retail merchants and operating executives representing about 338 retail companies. Total show attendance was about 5,900. More impressive than their numbers was the fact that exhibitors represented virtually every non-food category across a store that routinely merchandises many thousands of SKUs.
Pharmacy and front-end merchandise and services were equally represented. Business sessions sought to enlighten visitors about the various underpinnings surrounding the modern retail store.

And social events sprinkled throughout the five-day event aimed to personalize the conference for its many and diverse attendees, no easy task in an industry that markets itself by separating many of the categories that combine, in the customer’s mind, to constitute today’s retail outlet.

Obviously, imperfections marked — and marred — the expo. Cramming so many exhibits into so small a space confused many meeting-goers. The signage and supplemental directional intelligence often failed to alleviate the confusion, resulting instead in an unending quest to locate booths that failed to materialize.

Perhaps NACDS, in an effort to accommodate everyone, scheduled too many events, too many business sessions, too many social evenings, losing too many participants in the bargain.

Amid all this activity, it sometimes became too easy to lose sight of the merchandising exposition as the show’s centerpiece. But such shortcomings were understandable, if not always acceptable, at an event where, inevitably, some attendees refused to be content, regardless of the effort — or the result of that effort.

To summarize, Total Store Expo has become, in the short space of three years, a remarkable event, one that no member of the mass retailing community can afford to miss, if the object is remaining competitive in this age of hyper-competitiveness.

That holds for suppliers as well. Total Store Expo is the marketplace of the early 21st century. It is a mandatory event — perhaps the only one — that demands attendance, if for no other reason than to remain competitive. Whatever the category, whatever the issues, Total Store Expo is the place to be if the object is to understand the issues and the stakes going forward.

Now it’s on to next year and to Boston, site of the 2016 Total Store Expo next August. The inclination, so soon after this year’s event, is to postpone thinking about next year, to put off difficult business decisions as long as possible. But one decision must be made quickly — and that decision is to participate in Total Store Expo going forward. In a short time period, this has emerged as an irreplaceable event, a critical part of the retail merchandising and marketing calendar. In a larger sense, it is the long-sought-after missing piece of the merchandising puzzle, the one event on the retail calendar that cannot be ignored or, worse, given only last-minute attention.

On that note, let the word go forth at this early date: Total Store Expo has passed quickly from the realm of new ideas to the secure place of indispensable retail event. It must be treated that way going forward — at the risk of severe personal loss if it is not.