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.

I think we all kind of find ourselves in uncharted waters right now.

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.

As crucial as first impressions are, so too are last impressions.

Studies show that a customer forms an impression about your store within the first seven seconds of walking through the front door. And those seven seconds may well determine whether or not you make a sale.

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.

Do you look ahead to the future and wonder what will become of your business when you’re ready to retire?

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.

I can hear you already: “Well, duh, of course it is.” But I’d be willing to bet that it’s not for the reason you think.

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.

Last month I wrote a piece about why you need to take every deal regardless of the price, in which I shared my thoughts on profit margins.