Dear Oh you were innovative in your day as you made America the servants of the Chinese yourself the biggest corporation in the world.
Your competition killing strategies innovations were many. You introduced every day low prices by having things made by suicidal children in communist in China which rapes the environment to build cheap junk.
You gave us a massive selection of clothing and goods which tore or broke days after using them and an embarrassment of pirated intellectual property riches.
You gave us the urban blight of big box stores.
You gave us slavery again with thousands of minimum wage jobs that prey and consume the weakest of our society.
You created unique supplier partnerships by buying out the entire inventory of suppliers, and then dictating a wholesale price with minimum profits.
You instituted data-driven management practices which squeezed the last drop of blood from every pound of flesh penny out of every cost.
You had an almost invisible corporate culture which created the largest carbon footprint in the world for retailing.
But do you know what? There is someone planning an e-Commerce startup to take you on and slay you like you smote the thousands of small hardware and mom-and-pop stores across North America.
This startup will be based on sustainability. It will offer better choice but incorporate just-in-time inventory management. Gone will be the big box stores (Note to self: Call stockbroker and short real estate companies who develop and manage retail space).
This startup will go a long way to curb over-consumption because the market will not be flooded with cheap toxic goods.
This startup will be data-driven as well, but in a very different way. It will offer the online shopper just the array of articles that fit the wants of needs of that person's profile.
This startup will have the corporate culture of a knowledge industry. Smart.
This startup will not worry about currying supplier favor and relationships across the globe, because supplies can be dropped and replaced with the touch of a few keystrokes.
This startup will erase the low paying retail sector jobs and replace them with higher paying jobs in fulfillment centers.
This startup will provide selection without inventory.
This startup will have everday low prices because it will combine the middleman with retailer.
And hopefully, this startup will change the paradigm of retail shopping for good, and it will be incubated on the East Coast, and prove that visionaries like Frank McKenna were ultimately right. After all if WalMart had its start in Bentonville Arkansas, there is no reason why the successor cannot start in Riverview, Hillsborough, Sussex or a plethora of places where innovation lives in the minds of the enlightened.
