Know Your Shoppers (Collection)

Chapter Sixteen. And finally ... how we got here

I want to finish the store section of the book with a look at the history of retail. It doesn’t properly fit here but I didn’t want to relegate it to an appendix either. This stuff is important and it will help you to be a better retailer. The lessons are all there for us.

Righty ho—I’m going to take us through the early years, up to somewhere around the 1950s. There are a few reasons for doing that—the first is to prove a really important point: Retailing is not about inventing new stuff.

Eh? “But you’ve gone on and on about ideas being the lifeblood of retailing and that ...”

That’s true, I have—here’s the thing: Ideas are of course vital, ideas are about change, improvement, and development, ...