How to Save Holiday Cheer From Retail Rage: Hot off the Griddle
Good morning, and welcome back to the Griddle, a menu of fortified items for the busy person's media diet. Countless shoppers left stores purple-faced with `retail rage' this holiday season. Companies wooed them by lowering prices, made possible by shaving costs, but failed to deliver a good shopping experience. For businesses competing in a tough economy, slashing employee headcount is an easy target -- just ask the 13 million Americans who are currently looking for work. But Marshall Fisher of the Wharton School of Business argues that eliminating jobs means cutting the muscle, not the fat, out of retail, as he explains in this post at the Harvard Business Review (our new content partner). He studied two years of store-level data and found revenue rose $10 for every extra dollar of payroll added to a store, and by as much as $28 for stores that were especially understaffed. For customers, employees and companies, better service really should be all the rage.
And now the news:
'Super Fracking' Goes Deeper to Pump Up Natural Gas (Bloomberg)
Rio+20 Sustainable evelopment Goals Leaked (Guardian)
Ohio Town Returns to Steel Making to Fuel Gas Boom (Bloomberg)
The Year That Winter Forgot (Time)
Vestas Restructuring May See Jobs Go, CEO Stay (Bloomberg)
Uranium Ban at Grand Canyon Pits Tourism Against Mining (Bloomberg)
Texas Senators Warn of Drought on Power Generation and Growth (Texas Tribune)
Supreme Court May Limit Clean Water Act Enforcement (Bloomberg)
Japan Wind Power Installations Drop 68% as Subsidies Halted (Bloomberg)
Largest Metal Recycler Ordered to Stop Discharges (Environmental Leader)
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