“Peter James Ryan understands the real needs of retail businesses – and his knowledge is based on extensive global research and experience. I’m a big fan.”
Before we get too far into the subject of environmental sustainability and what it means to retail I must declare a few things. Firstly I am an optimist and believe that human beings have an incredible capability to solve any problem or issue that is thrown at us given the necessary enablers. Secondly I am not a fan of taking media headlines at face value. I believe that if something is of importance, you should do the research and form your own opinion.
A client of mine once described me as a man who makes elephants disappear. I think it was a compliment. What he meant was that in every change exercise there are bound to be issues and problems that raise their ugly heads. Big, angry elephants that stand between you and your goal.
Every retailer’s performance is determined by context. The category (market) context. The customer context. The competitor context. The company context.
Almost every industry can be accused from time to time of seeing the world from the inside out rather than from the eyes of its customers. As a result, often what the industry in question thinks matters to its customers is at best in their mind a nice to have but rarely a deal breaker.
The media is a powerful, all pervasive beast. It surrounds us with noise that is usually black or white extremes of depressive negativity or intoxicating euphoria. Neither is helpful to people trying to plan and successfully run a sustainable retail business.
Inflation is defined by dictionary.com as “a persistent, substantial rise in the general level of prices related to an increase in the volume of money and resulting in the loss of value of currency”. While we have had tax cuts in this country and government surpluses these have not had a dramatic effect on the money in supply nor the value of the currency.
