If you had a job interview in 1991, you shopped at Casual Corner first. The blazer. The coordinated separates. The sales associate who somehow made every woman feel like she was buying exactly what she needed. Casual Corner didn't sell clothes, it sold a version of who you
Same macro environment. Same interest rate cycle. Same headlines. Opposite outcomes, depending on whose balance sheet you're looking at. Ask anyone outside this industry what happened to American retail last year and you'll get the same answer: it contracted. Joann liquidated. Party City liquidated. Rite Aid
Fifty entries into this series, and this one might have the best name of them all. If you were a 90s parent who refused to buy whatever was advertised during Saturday morning cartoons, Noodle Kidoodle was your store. Educational toys, demo stations, kids playing in the aisles. The slogan said
The most important word in CRE right now isn't AI. It's place. It's always been place. Let me explain how I arrived at that conclusion, and why it took a trip to Las Vegas to remind me. I just came back from ICSC. Two
Why an industry built on the Power of Where has confused data with understanding, and what it costs the people making real decisions. Walk into any commercial real estate strategy session, retail planning meeting, or lender review. You will see a heatmap. It will be beautiful. It pulses with reds
Before Home Depot owned every weekend DIYer's imagination, Builder's Square was already there. Founded February 1970 in San Antonio as Home Centers of America by Frank Denny, a former W.R. Grace executive who saw the warehouse format coming a decade before most retailers did. Unusual
Here's a pattern nobody's naming. A VP of Real Estate or a CRO gets hired. They inherit a data stack. They spend four months learning what the platforms do, which ones to trust, which reports matter. Somewhere around month six, they start asking the right questions.
Sit through enough data vendor demos in #CRE and you start to notice something. Every dataset is "proprietary." Every platform has a "unique edge." Every company is the only one who can give you "this view of the market." Funny thing - pull back the
Every conference. Every pitch deck. Every vendor demo. The message is the same: AI will save you. Faster decisions. Smarter insights. Automated everything. The hype is real. And honestly? Some of it is more than deserved. AI is transforming how we work. But here's what nobody wants to
Retail Success Is a Chain Reaction. Data Tells You Where the Links Are Breaking. I've been saying for a while now that "experiential retail" has become one of the most overused and misunderstood terms in the retail industry. The brands that succeed don't just
If you walked through any mall in the 80s and left with an acid-washed jean jacket, parachute pants, or a skinny leather tie, you probably know Chess King. In 1967, traveling salespeople from Melville Corporation's Thom McAn shoe division spotted a gap: young men had nowhere to
A few months ago, I wrote about how traditional trade area analysis is dead. Radius rings and demographic overlays can't capture the micro-market dynamics that actually drive retail performance. But here's what I've been thinking about since: if AI and dynamic location analytics