Natural Foods Merchandiser and Nutrition Business Journal have teamed up and done a very insightful survey in to the current state of affairs at natural products retailers around the country.

The old saw is that “the best defense is a strong offense.” I couldn’t help but apply that concept today when reading about K-Mart’s plan to add delivery service to Chicago.

Consumer Reports recently released its survey from more than 30,000 shoppers about the state of shopping in America’s retail stores. The results were nothing to brag about.

Trade shows are very dynamic happenings – with new technology and enhancements being added every year. This weekend, however, I was privileged to be a part of something different – and incredibly worthwhile.

There are two recent consumer trends that caught my eye.  Neither are particularly surprising, but both raise concerns for specialty retailers, like those in the natural products marketplace.

Many times when we see something that is brilliant, we only focus on the end result thinking that such an accomplishment would be too much for us to come up with. If we focus instead on meeting needs, innovation and brilliance will follow.

Forbes just came with its list of fastest growing retailers – and there is a lot of learn from this list. None of them retail natural foods – or are grocery stores (unless you consider that Amazon does sell some food), but they all have plenty of aggressive competition – that they are besting!

OR – Mr. Crawford comes to Washington.  (Does he have a clue what he is doing?)

I think that Natural Products Expo West should have its own word to describe itself. I humbly submit the word "NPEW."

I am working through a pile of things getting ready to head to Anaheim for Natural Products Expo West tomorrow morning.  To add more details to my calendar, I went to the show website and was, once again, amazed at the amount of things going on at the show!

Via the news and conversations with some indepedent retailers, I've come across some positives about the state of retailing natural products.  Could we have turned the corner?

This is a continuation of the thoughts floated in my post here yesterday - customer service is a key to successful retailing, but the definition that customers have of service is changing.

A very thought provoking article came out yesterday.  It ranks retailers on the basis of Customer Service – and half of the top stores don’t have “stores”!

Dealing with present needs - while preparing for the future opportunities - keeps us all busy in life.  Some thoughts about the need for that in your store follow.  I've spoken about this for several industry groups in the past six month or so.  There seems to be a lot of focus on dealing with the present (which is current quite a challenge) and planning for the future (when things will hopefully be better, but assuredly will be different).

Earlier this week, two very interesting – and at least partially conflicting – studies about the retail marketplace came out. How these bits of data potentially affect natural products retailers is quite interesting!