NRF Miscellaneous

I recently took my daughter and nine of her friends to an Italian restaurant for her 14th birthday. Throughout dinner, the girls were texting feverishly on their cell phones.

Perplexed since all the friends were together, I asked whom they were texting: their response astonished me. It seems these “Millennials” were texting each other, preferring to communicate via some strange encrypted language rather than a real-live conversation.

The dean of a leading university recently told me that it has become increasingly difficult to reach students with almost any message. Today’s students, he said, do not read any notices the university posts — and faculty members feel lucky if they still read their textbooks.

Similarly, newspaper publishers have noted a marked reduction in readership among younger people, and advertisers have reacted by cutting their newspaper ad budgets. It is a dilemma that has caused alarm among marketers — yet young people continue to shop in their favorite stores.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote something akin to a “Dear John” letter to our landscaper. Like most letters of that ilk it basically said, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

My husband and I have always been more than satisfied with the services of this company; our lawn has never been greener, the bushes are thriving and our property looks neat and manicured. But during a recent kitchen table review of the official family budget, we came to the painful decision that some things just have to change. And, sadly, the landscaping service ended up on the “expendable” list.

Each year, NRF gathers a dozen or so of its most important partners from retailing and the businesses that support retailing for a weekend of in-depth discussions about the future of our industry. These wide-ranging conversations between and among a broad and diverse array of experts generally elicit some interesting observations and predictions.