I’ve noticed that when some friends are feeling very stressed, they’ll post on Facebook that they need people to send cute pictures of kittens and puppies.  With the Coronavirus creating a high level of stress everywhere, this is an opportunity for your shop to be the equivalent of a basket of kittens to those going… Read More

We live so close to our store that I don’t have time to listen to a podcast on my five-minute commute. But if you enjoy listening to informative audio programs when you are in the car or at home, here are some suggestions that might help you improve your retail game. Retail Details is hosted… Read More

It’s easy to get down in the dumps about retailing today, with stories of the “Retail Apocalypse” flooding the news. But despite increased competition and increasing expenses, there are many ways in which this isn’t such a bad time to be an independent retailer.  It’s also not a bad time to be alive – if… Read More

“Free shipping” is one of the great misnomers in today’s retail world. We all know that it is not free to ship anything, even for Amazon.  Someone, somewhere, is paying the cost of delivering the goods to the customer’s door – it may be built into the price, or perhaps assessed in an annual membership… Read More

Walking down the main street in Haight Ashbury on a recent trip to San Francisco, I was struck by how many retail stores seem to be thriving in this colorful district.  Granted, one was the first-ever legal marijuana dispensary in the area – a store called Berner’s that has now been open almost two months. … Read More

Becky McCray and Deb Brown both come from small (very small) Midwest towns, and have seen what has happened in rural communities over the past decades. They’ve created a company called SAVEYOUR.town because they “believe small towns can best be saved by their own people using their own resources.” They offer a weekly newsletter for… Read More

In her comments about the future of retail for this blog, Gifts & Decorative Accessories editor-in-chief Lenise Willis stated that mobile payments are steadily increasing. “Consumers already rarely carry cash, favoring credit or debit cards, but in the next decade they may even abandon their plastic. Mobile payments aren’t just more convenient — with fewer… Read More

If you decide to close your store – whether because you are retiring, or going out of business for some other reason – you may have someone recommend bringing in a liquidator.  Happily I haven’t had any personal experience with this type of company, but many years ago a store in our neighborhood hired one… Read More

Back in 2014, I wrote a blog post called Vision Casting that talked about how to make sure you’d meet your store’s goals by 2020.  Certainly the past six years have brought us challenges that we couldn’t have predicted back then, including huge increases in rents, wages and health insurance – and the growth of… Read More

It’s been over two decades since the founding of OneCoast, a sales, marketing and technology services company in the wholesale gift channel. OneCoast is, according to its website, “the largest and only national wholesale provider of gift, garden, home decor, and fragrance products to retailers throughout the United States.”   John Keiser has been CEO… Read More