How Retailers can Cope with Slowing Growth

In  Knowledge@Wharton,  Non -Technical, but quite strategic these days.  Recall talking to Marshall Fisher while in the enterprise.   (See his book)

How Retailers can Cope with Slowing Growth

Wharton's Marshall Fisher discusses why retailers must break their 'addiction' to top-line growth.

Podcast:

"... Successful retailers can grow quickly in their early years simply by opening new stores. But eventually they run out of real estate, and then they need the discipline to stop opening new stores and focus instead on driving more sales through their existing stores. They can boost sales and profits dramatically by making changes in the way they run their existing stores, such as with help from analytics and the use of technology.

In fact, several such small changes brought in profits that helped 17 retailers outperform the stock performance of the S&P 500 index, according to a new study titled “Curing the Addiction to Growth” published in the Harvard Business Review by Marshall Fisher, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, along with his co-authors, Vishal Gaur (who has a PhD from the Wharton School and now is a professor at Cornell’s Johnson School) and Herb Kleinberger (who has an MBA from Wharton and for many years led PWC’s retail practice).    .... "