Word: retailing
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...campus as he is visible. He is most often heralded as a beacon of dressy-chic style. He devotes 20 hours a week to working at the Banana Republic on Newbury Street, a job that has ensured him an extensive wardrobe of chic business casual. He has worked in retail for the past five years, including stints at the Gap in Harvard Square. Yet his Mather dorm room has taken on a very un-Banana tone since he desperately sought to fill his empty common room in his first year. At a fabric store he found a giant leopard-print...
...Nebraska, during the most recent session of the legislature, lawmakers increased taxes on retail sales (to 5.5%, up from 5%), cigarettes (to 64¢, from 34¢ a pack) and income (a new average rate of 5.1%, up from 2.36%, starting in 2003). The hikes were vetoed by Republican Governor Mike Johanns, but the veto was overridden. The sales-tax increase targets some services, including software training, pest control, automobile cleaning and roadside assistance. That tax hike is expected to raise $100 million a year...
...coincidence that Despair is booming at this particular moment. Kurt Barnard, a retail consultant in Upper Montclair, N.J., says, "Anytime consumers see an opportunity to get even with corporate America, they'll do it." But Despair is on to some fundamental, painful truths. Gene Hendrix, a lecturer on organization design at San Francisco State University, starts every class with a discussion of a different Despair poster. "What I'm trying to get students to do," he says, "is deal with corporations the way they...
...more than twice as much at restaurants and hotels, and about 2.5 to 3 times as much on books and cars. Larger stores would help increase efficiency and bring down costs, but government regulations designed to keep people like Nakamura in business prevent that from happening. The Large Scale Retail Location Law, for example, gives small-business owners a significant say in the approval process for new stores larger than 1,000 sq. meters opening in the area. Likewise, a combination of low property taxes and high capital-gains taxes encourages struggling sole proprietorships to bumble along for years rather...
...other industrialized nation, to offer up Nakamura as a typical retailer, as a representative of anything other than a holdover from a bygone era, would be unfair. In other advanced countries, mom-and-pop shops are niche operators, accounting, for example, for only 19% of retail employment in the U.S. (measured by hours worked) and 26% in France. But in Japan, mom-and-pops are the rule not the exception, making up 55% of the retail labor force. They are, in other words, still the way the nation sells things. And they are woefully unproductive, generating only...