Retail businesses have narrow margins. If you cut off a flow of young consumers, it's only a matter of time before the businesses struggle and fail.
I got a part-time job as a cashier at Home Depot in North Miami Beach on April 1, 1985. I didn't expect to be in retail all my life, but retail was ingrained in me from my grandmother. I enjoyed interacting with people, and I got opportunities.
My grandmother was divorced, and she had 10 children herself. She never finished high school. She started selling lace on the side of the road and then grew that into a multimillion-dollar business - a retail store selling mostly furniture and appliances.
In the racialized space of capitalist gentrification, police are not only arbiters of the peace, they are the muscle of retail racism: You can only be in this space if you transcend your blackness by showing us some green dollars. Even then, there is no guarantee that green will transcend your black skin.
I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery.
I'm paranoid about shopping. I get irritable. I find it tedious and taxing. People say shopping is retail therapy, but I need therapy after shopping.
Iowa is especially critical for underdog and cash-strapped campaigns, because the caucus system relies on grassroots organizing, enabling candidates with time for retail politicking to beat better-funded rivals. So underdogs usually seize on the state.
Successful strategic vision lay in the fact that we visualized the retail business to be much bigger, ahead of what others thought it to be.
As we were growing retail, and it was a huge growth phase, it was very important to keep our quality under control. Therefore, it was not just distribution, not just back-office operations, but also the risk-management practices. And these we learned together, supported by technology.
The majority of people are perfectly capable of interacting with retail staff without spitting on them or whipping their hides like dawdling cattle, but Planet Earth still harbours more than its fair share of disappointments.
