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You could say that Joel Bines wrote the book on customer-centric retail approaches, and not just because he’s been a retail consultant for more than two decades, primarily as a managing director at AlixPartners before striking out on his own to form Spruce Advisory in 2023. You also could say it because Bines did write a book on the subject: The Metail Economy: 6 Strategies for Transforming Your Business to Thrive in the Me-Centric Consumer Revolution.
When the book was published in 2022, Bines told Retail Brew that although retailers have always said they put customers first, he had observed that “rarely was the customer even part of the vast majority of the dialogue in boardrooms.”
The book argues that in today’s consumer-centric “metail” paradigm, retail executives should take a lesson from Costco, which makes the hoses on its gas pumps extra long to reach the gas tank even if shoppers pulled in on the wrong side. It’s a convenience apt to delight customers, Bines told us at the time, but it’s also a way to sell more gas, because, “if you come at it from a logistics perspective, you get massively more throughput through the gas lines than you would if you had to have cars backing up and moving around to get on the other side.”
We’ve been covering the growing ubiquity of locked display cases, which retailers including Target and CVS have installed to curb what they claim is a growing problem of shoplifting rings contributing to stores’ overall merchandise losses (aka “shrink”), so we wondered if Bines had any thoughts about the practice.
Keep reading here.—AAN
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