This Newbie Has a Good Grasp of Lean
I get a lot of emails from regular readers or people who have just stumbled across my blog. I try to be as helpful as I can (although I’m not really a good connection for Lean healthcare jobs that people…
I get a lot of emails from regular readers or people who have just stumbled across my blog. I try to be as helpful as I can (although I’m not really a good connection for Lean healthcare jobs that people…

It’s been interesting to follow the rise and fall of former Apple retailing executive Ron Johnson during his less-than-two-year stint as CEO at long-struggling retailer JC Penney. Johnson was often cited as the genius behind the generally outstanding Apple stores,…

As my wife and I are in the process of moving to San Antonio, we’ve visited the local Central Market grocery store there during our house hunting trips. Behind the prepared foods counter is a visual management indicator for employees…

Readers outside the U.S. might not know the UPS advertising slogan of “What Can Brown Do For You?” This often refers to the iconic brown trucks that deliver packages (and the brown uniforms of the employees). One of the challenges…

Over the weekend, I went to a local Texas Target store to buy a Christmas-themed gift card. I checked a few registers and all I could find were for new babies, birthdays, or “LOVE.” Not a single Christmas, winter, or…
Lately, there have been many stories in the news about supermarkets ripping out self-service checkout scanner, stories like this: “Supermarkets start bagging self-serve checkouts.” 10 years ago, the supermarkets saw this technology as a clear cost savings – reducing labor…
I’m finally blogging about a Wall Street Journal article from just before Christmas – it’s still a generally interesting topic, I think. The article was “Holiday Help: People vs. Robots” It compares the labor and productivity strategies of two retailers…

I’m not one, generally, to worry about consumer privacy with stores and them tracking my purchases. I like that amazon.com keeps a record of my purchases, as they can make recommendations for related items and my shopping history is available…
Starbucks Gossip: Starbucks tests “lean” operations in Ohio and Kentucky stores We’ve known for some time that Starbucks has been trying to figure out how to use Lean principles in their stores. If you click on the “Starbucks” tag at…

So it’s Sunday morning, I have a cup of coffee at the ready… nice quiet, peaceful, sunny Sunday morning (you can tell we don’t have kids). Last Sunday, my wife and I went to a local restaurant that had been…
by Dan Markovitz Best Buy is generally not talked about as an exemplar of lean. (It’s best known for its Results Only Work Environment; read about ROWE here and here.) But yesterday’s WSJ article on Best Buy shows that the…
Recently, I blogged about management practices at the midwest retail chain Meijer. It was a sad (and not uncommon) story of quotas and threats to employees — if you don’t work at a certain speed, you’re fired. My post drew…