Is retailing earning respect from business schools?
Retailing has not had a good reputation. Students come in with the attitude it’s all minimum-wage jobs. To get their attention, I use a quiz with questions like how much does the 32-year-old manager of a Walmart discount store in Gainesville make. I used $100,000 as the answer until the actual Walmart manager suggested I should bump it up a couple notches. When I got here, most faculty found theoretical research more interesting and worried the school would lose its academic purity with an applied science like retailing. It’s not as sexy as developing the next microchip. That’s changed because the industry has grown so big. Data mining analysis opened doors to retailer supply problems that used to be manufacturer problems. It takes more sophisticated managers to handle today’s HR challenges, managing the bottom end of a labor force that is far more diverse and deals in multiple languages. The notion of working your way up from a 16-year-old part-timer on the sales floor won’t cut it an
