Ed says yes, Bill ...NO

I did a deeper dive on the two subjects below and like the headline says ... BUYER BEWARE

Ok, I admit it...I'M A NEWS JUNKIE!

The one thing I hate more than anything is when so called journalists create headlines that create false hope, only highlighting what "they" want their readers to know. 90%+ of the time, they hide the real facts....WHY IS IT do you think? Because some research clown says that we only want good news, or maybe news has to be entertaining, who knows? What I do know is that those people/companies that are well educated and focused on the "real world" are those companies succeeding

As you will quickly realize, I'm not a person that believes much of what I hear or what the news headlines try and report. I ALWAYS do my due diligence and search for the real data in order to contribute something meaningful. So with that said, you may want to stop reading the rest of this article, because what I'm about to report is NOT good for the retail economy.

Why would I be such a HERETIC.... you ask? Because I really care about retail, especially the home furnishing industry

• What is a Heretic you ask? It's a person holding an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted.

So here I go. The goal in reporting the truth behind the headlines is so retailers and brands can prepare for the "worst case scenario". If you prepare, you don't get ambushed, if you don't, consider yourself a statistic.

This is apolitical.  As far as I'm concerned, most, if not all politicians, are not ethical and seem to be more interested in rhetoric and their reelection than addressing real problems surrounding our economy. They focus on social issues and forget the socio-economic crisis consumers are having that directly lead to consequences for brands and retailers.

First I'm going to show you the REAL state of the economy as it pertains to employment, then over 100 facts/links to show you that all is NOT good in our economy. The Government would like to claim that the recession is over, BUT they've been skewing the unemployment numbers since 1998 to NOT COUNT people who are chronically unemployed and not  receiving any unemployment benefits. (REALLY...you use all your unemployment benefits, get kicked out of the system and you're not counted? Only with government accounting does this work)!

Why Is It Everyone Thinks The Unemployment Rate is 5.3% When It Is Not?
UnemploymentThe government tells us that 8.69 million Americans are “officially unemployed” and that 92.90 million Americans are considered to be “not in the labor force”.  That means that more than 101 million U.S. adults do not have a job right now.

1. Why is it they say unemployment is 5.3%. How is that calculated when the BLS reports that 93,770,000 people (16 and older) were neither employed last month nor had made specific efforts to find work in the prior four weeks?
2. The number of people outside the workforce in July increased 144,000 over June’s record when 93,626,000 were not in the workforce.
3. July’s labor force participation rate however remained the same as June at 62.6 percent. Before last month the labor force participation rate had not been that low since October 1977, when the participation rate was 62.4 percent.
4. The BLS reports that the civilian labor force did experience a slight uptick from 157,037,000 in June to 157,106,000 in July after the month of June saw it drop by 432,000.
5. While the labor participation rate remains at the lowest it's been since the late 1970s, the BLS highlighted that the unemployment rate remained at 5.3 percent and nonfarm payroll jobs increased by 215,000.

You figure it out, I can't

Originally published in RetailerNOW Magazine
​Click the logo to read it there

August 2015 --

On a recent rainy day, I was channel surfing when I came across a documentary about Amazon. It’s safe to say there are few people who have the business vision Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos possesses.

Bezos recognized early on that the Internet would forever change the way we conduct business. He envisioned a place where we could buy millions of products with the greatest of ease. Today, of course, there is no one who plays the online retail game better. Amazon had more than $80 billion in online sales last year. That’s more than the next 14 largest retailers’ sales combined.

But don’t be intimidated. You can beat Amazon at its own game and stay relevant in retailing (especially with Gen X and Gen Y) if you take these three steps. They may not be easy or instantaneous, but they’re worth it.

Retailers need to be a 2015 disruptor much like Amazon has been the past 20 years. You can’t be a complacent thinker who only dreams about acting, you need to be a visionary who puts those dreams into action.

That’s what Bezos did. His first step was to study retail and look for a complacent model he could exploit with his vision. That model was the neighborhood and national book store chains, a $16 billion industry. Why? Because he knew a typical 5,000-10,000-square-foot store had a finite number of options a consumer could shop. Bezos asked himself: What if consumers could shop all the millions of titles that have been printed, and purchase them online at one location?

He knew that by o ering an unlimited number of titles, someone would buy one of something. That’s the definition of the Long Tail.

“The theory of the Long Tail,” says Chris Anderson, former editor-in-chief of WIRED magazine, “is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of ‘hits’ (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.”

As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, Anderson argues there is less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. “In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare,” he says.

Anderson predicts that demand for products not available in traditional brick-and-mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are.

Books, along with their distribution outlets, were a perfect target. They were entrenched in the old model of limited selection, which required customers to make a special trip to browse and discover which titles were available, with the hope of finding what they were looking for, and then hoping it was in stock. The old model was controlled by a few distributors who decided what was available to consumers. Of course there were millions upon millions of selections consumers may have wanted to read, but didn’t know about because of the limited selection. In the old days, newspaper or magazine book reviews, in-store recommendations and friend’s recommendations drove sales. They are still a primary source in the buying process, but not before the Zero Moment of Truth, the information consumers are looking for online as their first step in the purchase process.

Bezos believed in his vision and he implemented it with passion and commitment. He had no problem exploiting the old model of retail, and to this day, he is committed to continuing this passion for his vision everywhere, in any retail sector, that becomes complacent.
Does this sound a little familiar?

The home furnishings industry has long displayed the same attributes as the bookstore model, opening the door for Wayfair, One Kings Lane, Overstock and, of course, Amazon to disrupt the status quo.

Why? Because consumers may not like or want the limited sofa selection on your  oor or the slightly larger selection on your website. When consumers feel constrained by your store’s selection, they turn to the Internet, incorporating the Long Tail search for the sofa or dining room table they want.
Retailers need to put their entire inventory online because study after study shows more than 80 percent of consumers want to buy local, especially Gen X and Millennials. If they can’t find it locally, they will have no problem buying it from another retailer online whether that retailer is 20 states away or across the ocean.

Think about this: Why would you want to limit your store sales and pro ts by creating a limited selection? Is that how you prefer to shop? One or two choices of toothpaste, shampoo, T-shirts, etc? If not, why would you assume others want to shop only your limited selection?

That’s why Wal-Mart and other big box retailers exist. They offer choices, thousands of them, and even that is now under attack because of Amazon’s model. This isn’t a fad or trend, this is retail today. The more you show, the more you’ll sell and the more you’ll make.

Home furnishings products come in a variety of colors, shapes, sizes—thousands of manufacturers and distributors with millions of SKUs. Why limit your selection to brown or black, when there may be one or 100 consumers in your market who may want purple? Have you been following DIY shows and trends? It’s all about “my design,” not “my store’s design.”

​The baby boomer generation, 76,000,000 strong, are now between the ages of 47-64+ and have driven the economy for the last 20+ years. We all know that the prime demographic for furniture buyers are between the ages of 32-45 years old and predominantly female. The baby boomer may be buying their last mattress or a couple of pieces like a recliner, but they are not the primary consumers of home furnishings. Generation X & Y, totaling 112,000,000 are the new demographic for home furnishings and they are "wired for the internet." And these wired consumers have NO tolerance if you do not deliver a content rich environment for them to explore that is also optimized for tablets and Smartphones!


Today’s consumers do not drive their father's Oldsmobile.  They know virtually everything about your products before they come into your store. They find incredible detail online from every possible source, about the brands and products that matter to them. They search for, tunnel, explore, visualize and master their information requirements, and then they’re ready to visit your store and buy with confidence. And what they learn, and the experience they go through, they share with others.