Is Customer Control A Fool's Endeavor?

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

On Tuesday, (1/3) at 2:00 ET, I’ll join Erin Harris and Jim Roddy on a Webinar call, where we’ll recap some of the important themes we observed coming out of the NRF show. I hope you’ll dial in for the call. You can register at http://ow.ly/GXqhI .

When we convene on Tuesday, we’ll discuss the technologies we saw at NRF that will have an impact on the industry over the coming year or so. In the meantime I thought I’d address a more philosophical observation from the show. It’s about retail executives’ deep-seated control issues. We saw a lot of it on display at NRF. Not all of it was healthy.

Supply chain control? Check.

Inventory control? Check.

Operational cost control? Check.

Workforce control? Check

Customer Control? Ch—

Wait, what? Customer control?

Yup. There’s a prevalent theory among retail execs that it’s their job to in some way “control” the consumer’s journey on the path to purchase. It’s a throwback to the days when customers could be controlled because they had no other choice. Ceridian Dayforce’s John Orr and I were reminiscing about those days at the show a few weeks ago. Back when our moms took us back-to-school shopping for those stiff-legged blue jeans we used to wear, an out-of-stock meant a rain check at best. There was no consumer choice. There was no showrooming. There was no Internet. The retailer had control, even when it didn’t have inventory.

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