Your Success In the Retail Business (Collection)

Chapter Three. Keeping it simple

Selling stuff in shops is incredibly straightforward. It’s not easy—easy and hard are different things to simple and complex—but it is straightforward. You’ll come across retail businesses all the time that tie themselves in knots of complexity, you might even work for one of them, and it almost always leads to eventual disaster.

Equally, retailing isn’t about inventing brand-new ways of doing things, have a look in the “History” section in Chapter 16 and you’ll see that there have only ever been four genuine innovations in retail history. That’s liberating: You don’t have to be the fifth person in history to come up with something brand new to be a great retailer. Rather it’s about creatively applying simple ...