I promise you that there are a lot of people involved in various kinds of retail activities who think they have a crucial role in the economy, and they're right.
The ecological impact of book manufacture and traditional book marketing - I think that should really be considered. We have this industry in which we cut down trees to make the paper that we then use enormous amounts of electricity to turn into books that weigh a great deal and are then shipped enormous distances to point-of-sale retail.
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.
There's a game called Checkout where there's grocery items and it's how much you think the manufacturer's suggested retail price is and we add up your total, then your total has to be within $2 of the regular total. I don't think I could ever win that game.
In Peru, awareness of fake currency is so high that retail shops regularly provide cashiers with hole punchers. When a fake bill is received, the cashier quickly pops out a few holes before curtly returning the bill to an oft-surprised client.
I bought into Saks as a personal investment because, when I was a young man and went to America for the first time, it seemed to me that Saks was like a cathedral of retail. I never dreamt that I could one day be a part of it. And now I am.
For food service industry and retail, I'm for the minimum wage being increased to at least $12. Not for manufacturing. Software and robotics are going to revolutionize manufacturing in the next 10 years. In the meantime, we have to compete with overseas manufacturing.
I have always been drawn to fashion from an aesthetic and consumer standpoint. I honestly never thought that I could take my business training and apply it here. I worked in retail and was into fashion. It was something I liked, and people trusted my opinion.
Lending has come back in retail; it has come back in working capital. It has also come back in other forms, like government contract being given out to companies.
'Personalization' is a popular word in retail, and people often misuse it to describe simple marketing tactics, like segmenting emails or using big data to identify the likely gender of a visitor to their websites.
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.
As retail goes through a fundamental shift into the digital world, I believe Ocado's model and the high standards of customer service it provides will see it emerge as a powerful online player.
People are scrambling to figure out how they can prolong the life of an album. But as long as the shelf space continues to shrink at retail, there's just no room for them anymore... which is fine with me! I would love to be the next person in country to just release digital singles, but I think we're probably a little ways from that.
We're the only major company in the U.S. that is solely in the professional beauty industry. We promised hairdressers when we started that we would stay with them. If I went retail tomorrow then we would be four times our size overnight, but I'm going to be the one guy who kept his word.
