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It’s remarkable the impact that that has on store teams and their merchandising strategies. The store has all of a sudden gone from this… Well, the store is a showroom to now the store is a showroom, but it’s also a fulfillment center, and it’s also a place where we might be aggregating items for delivery. Tom, how great of an impact would you say that things like BOPUS and curbside and all of these new delivery models have made on merchandising? Especially because of the last year, it’s the elephant in the room, we still have to talk about all of the change that was enacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, tons of innovation, things rolling out in six weeks that should have probably taken a year or more. That’s much better than those 47 page PDFs.Ĥ7 pages, that blows my mind. So, yeah, it’s always exciting when I get to see someone get introduced to something like what One Door and the team do, because they kind of sit there and go, “Man, that’s brilliant. It’s a really scary area that people don’t… It’s not that we’re choosing not to, we’re just cognitively not aware that we should be, or that there are new ways to do it. Yet we’re still holding these teams back with these ancient tools. Now as we see that the current trend of retail and what the importance of stores is, and the increased importance of stores, especially when it comes to merchandising, retailing is merchandising at the end of the day. The teams themselves have gone through ebbs and troughs of being the front of a retail business to then kind of being a operational arm that’s been left to being pulled left, right, and center from all the different parts of the business. For whatever reason, it’s kind of been left in the dark ages when it comes to how we do it and how we run it. Visual merchandising is one really, really big part of that. There are so many parts of the process of retail, running a good retail business. There’s like hand-mailed, hand-drawn, who knows? But yeah, so many retailers haven’t innovated in this space. I thought maybe the fax, the teletype, maybe they. It might have been faxed, I think, instead of Xeroxed, Tom. The Dairy Queen is still here and the paper planogram is certainly still out in circulation. Tom was painting the picture and I think the Buick Skylark, that was probably the only thing in that story that doesn’t exist anymore. Can I hear your take on that, Andrew? Are you still seeing this or have you seen this with the retailers you’ve worked with?Ībsolutely. People are still back in the ’70s almost, using paper planograms today, which is totally ancient. I think the big connection here that we’re making with One Door is that it’s still happening. And you know the phrase, they say, “Oh, this person peaked in high school or peaked in college.” I think Kmart as an entity, it went from innovating this paper planogram, being the top of the retail food chain, and I think we can all pretty much agree that it peaked back then and no longer continued to blow us away. And then you drove home, in your Buick Skylark and I guess went to the Dairy Queen on your way home and got something, but that was your job. It was so different from what everybody else was doing. And so they used this way of communicating to their associates. They were the first ones to figure out that if you optimally placed products in a particular place, in a store, you could sell more. It was the first time, 1971, Kmart invented the technology of the paper planogram. And you went around the store and you set the shelves for your summer job using this diagram. I guess they really didn’t even have print outs back then, right? Did they have Xerox machines in 1971? I don’t know. And so as a store associate, you would get a paper print out of a planogram or a paper diagram. And the planogram was this far out, out of sight thing that Kmart used to figure out where to put products optimally in the stores. In 1971, there was this really cool innovation at Kmart called a planogram. You got in your parents’ Buick Skylark and you put on the AM radio and you headed into the store.
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You were working at Kmart for your summer job. The retail in the ’70s, you were what? You were a high school student. Tell me a little bit about what it was like many years ago as a retail merchandiser in the ’70s. We’re going to take you back a little bit to the 1970s talking about retail. We’re here today with Tom Erskine, the CEO of One Door and Andrew Smith, a retail consultant, innovative thinker and author.