For today's retail business, nothing new under the sun

Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NIV) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

This has always been for me a very interesting quote from the Bible. What does it have to do with retail, you ask? Retail was forever a service business, not a product business. A change occurred somewhere shortly after WWII with the huge economic boom that followed and the commoditization of retail in the form of lower product prices over service. Everyone can now be "rich"! At least that was the dream.

The switch from service to product was subtle and took a number of years to fully catch on. It was a race for who could get big enough to control product price. In retail the ...

read more