Legacy retailers have to put their mountains of purchasing data to work to create the kind of personalization and automation shoppers are getting online
Many of the stores that once filled the malls of America have become “zombies,” while online retailers capture ever more of the most valuable consumers—the young and affluent.
Data is King
For brick-and-mortar retailers, purchasing data doesn’t just help them compete with online adversaries; it has also become an alternate revenue source when profit margins are razor thin. For example, Unilever might buy store sales data to figure out which products are in high demand and when people buy them.
.. Can physical retailers build intimate digital relationships with their customers—and use that data to update their stores—faster than online-first retailers can learn how to lease property, handle inventory and manage retail workers?
.. In the past, new brands had to persuade store buyers to dole out precious shelf space; now the brands can prove themselves online first... Andy Katz-Mayfield, co-founder and co-chief executive of Harry’s, is skeptical that traditional retailers like Wal-Mart can make the leap, even if they invest heavily in technology.
This is what American teenagers want to be when they grow up
Few people in this age group want to punch a time clock or sit at a desk for eight hours a day, even though 15% of Americans have office/administrative jobs
.. 20%, the largest percentage of teens surveyed, want to be an athlete, artist or entertainer.
.. Out of 400 teens surveyed, none wanted an office/administrative job. What’s more, only 1% wanted to work in sales, farming and fisheries, and only 2% wanted to be a manager, chief executive or politician, or marketing/public relations executive. Another 2% wanted to work in personal care and service occupations
.. Some 15% of respondents say they’d like a job as a doctor, nurse, veterinarian, pharmacist and/or dentist. The researchers said these are considered noble, prestigious and, yes, high-earning occupations.
.. They see people, sometimes their own peers, who are making a ton of money making videos.
.. Teenagers don’t know about financial literacy because adults have a low level of financial literacy too
Russell Moore’s Job On The Line
More than 100 of the denomination’s 46,000 churches have threatened to cut off financial support for the SBC’s umbrella fund
.. What’s stunning about this is the blow Moore’s firing, if it comes to that, will be to Southern Baptist credibility and witness.
.. If the Southern Baptist Convention removes him from the presidency of the ERLC, it will signal a dramatic win for the old-guard Religious Right within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. It will also spark the biggest war within the Southern Baptist Convention since the 1990s fight between conservatives and liberals.
.. If the Southern Baptist Convention removes him from the presidency of the ERLC, it will signal a dramatic win for the old-guard Religious Right within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. It will also spark the biggest war within the Southern Baptist Convention since the 1990s fight between conservatives and liberals.
.. I saw a cultural Christianity cut off from the deep theology of the Bible and enamored with books and audio and sermon series tying current events to Bible prophecy—supermarket scanners as the mark of the Beast, Gog and Magog as the Soviet Union or, later, Saddam Hussein or al-Qaeda or the Islamic State as direct fulfillments of Bible prophecy. When these prophecies were not fulfilled, these teachers never retreated in shame. They waited to claim a new word from God and sold more products, whether books or emergency preparation kits for the Y2K global shutdown and the resulting dark age the Bible clearly told us would happen.
.. I was left with the increasingly cynical feeling—an existential threat to my entire sense of myself and the world—that Christianity was just a means to an end. My faith was being used as a way to shore up Southern honor culture, mobilize voters for political allies, and market products to a gullible audience.
.. So when, in the middle of my spiritual crisis, I saw the name C. S. Lewis on the spine of a book called Mere Christianity, I was willing to give him a chance—and he saved my life.
.. All I needed was for this drinking, smoking, probably dancing and card-playing man on another continent to tell me the truth, to point me to a broad, bustling Church that took serious questions seriously
.. At its best, the religious right reminded all of us that there are realities more important than political or economic success
.. At its best, the religious right kept the focus on a vulnerable minority that easily becomes invisible to those with power: unborn children. Douthat is correct that without some form of religious right, the space left behind can all too easily be filled by European-style ethno-nationalism or Nietzschean social Darwinism.
.. if Moore is fired, that is. There are a lot of younger Southern Baptists who are not willing to return to the Republican Party at Prayer mode of public engagement.
.. This conflict, and its resolution, will have a serious impact beyond the SBC. It will determine the future of Christian conservatism in America.