Author: Gordon Hecht

Facebook blew it off the map. You probably have a Blackberry sitting in a drawer next to a jar of pennies, and a box of video cassettes you can’t bear to toss out.

This past week I was honored to have my hotel room upgraded to the Chicken Little Suite. You may remember him, the fowl who thought the sky was falling.

The old “Help Wanted” section of the newspaper has been inconsequential for many years now.  Social media, especially LinkedIn, is the home of many “now hiring” posts.

Pearl Elementary School, most of it didn’t affect me.  Yet I still carry the lessons from one dramatic event that school year into my business career.

There was a time when the country’s biggest-selling magazine was a pocket-sized digest called TV Guide.

Working the business calendar in our retail world is like running a marathon or playing double overtime in the Super Bowl.

There’s an old story about the difference in the way a sober person and an intoxicated person uses a lamp post:  Sober people use them for illumination and intoxicated people use them for support.

We all hope for the Perfect Day in retail. Spacious shops with reasonable rents, smokin’ hot high profit merchandise and an engaging sales staff ready to sell to a steady flow of wealthy and credit-worthy shoppers. 

You’d probably need to find someone born between the time when there were 48 U.S. states and the TV dial had 12 channels to know what the phrases “It’s a doozy” and “That’s ritzy” mean.

It’s fairly common these days to feel a bit of technology overload. Just when we finally mastered the skill of getting the thermal paper loaded in the fax machine, they put Zoom, Slack, TikTok, and Whoop-Dee-Doo on our laptops.

This Sunday, July 4, is the 245th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Fifty-six colonists hopped on the 18th-century version of a Zoom call and told King George III of England, “Ye can shinny up a thy flagpole.”

It was about 150 years ago that one of the first “how-to” books, Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help, became a bestseller.

It’s a great time to look for a job! And in a weird way, a great time to hire people too.

It’s almost half-past 2021 and it’s business as unusual out there.

A key to achieving business success is growth.

Whether choosing to grow within a market or extending reach statewide, nationally or internationally, businesses must expand continually. The opposite choice — to remain motionless — is to be resigned to stagnation and demise.

Records (especially ’80s glam rock) were made to be broken. It’s true in our retail world too.

Perhaps, if you think about it, you can remember the experience of having a first date.

It’s very likely that your incoming bedding shopper never buys the cheapest wine, cut of meat, athletic shoe or automobile. They probably don’t live in the cheapest house in town. Yet they come in looking for the cheapest mattress.