Category: Tools and Information

The Future Of Retail Won’t Be So Good For Consumers | TechCrunch

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Shopping — both online and offline — is a great luxury of the modern era. People can enjoy a great selection at lower prices and shop from the convenience of their home, while still having the option of going to a local mall or retailer to peruse the aisles for instant gratification.

But consumers can’t have their cake and eat it, too, and the retail world as we know it today can no longer give it to them.

Retail Will Change Forever

Technology is killing the traditional retailer. Victims will include those selling commodity brand-name-type products like consumer electronics, appliances, sporting equipment and furniture, and may even include those selling consumable goods.

Price wars, combined with technology shifts, will eliminate national, regional and local competitors who just can’t keep up. Many of today’s vendors will cease to exist as online shopping takes larger shares of all sorts of markets. Just look at the trends in companies like Best Buy, Staples, Radio Shack and Sears.

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Student Loans Stunting Small Business Growth | Business News Daily

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Student loans aren’t just negatively impacting you financially; they’re also hurting your chances of starting a new business, research finds.

Entrepreneurship is significantly hampered in parts of the country where residents carry more student loan debt, according to a recently updated study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

For the study, student loan debt across the United States was analyzed by county and compared with small business creation in those areas. Researchers discovered that between 2000 and 2010 a one standard deviation increase in student debt reduced small businesses in those counties by an average of 14 percent.

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Resetting and How It Can Help You Achieve Better Results | Getentrepreneurial

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During a recent conversation about all that I try to juggle, a friend suggested I might want to embrace resetting as a regular practice. This was after I belted out a list of the roles which were important for me to not only to play, but to also be darn good at (!): a present Mom, impactful Coach, thriving Business Owner, attentive Wife, Daughter, Friend, etc. etc.  etc. Whew!  Makes me exhausted just thinking about all I sometimes try to do.

A quick look in the dictionary told me that one definition of “reset” is “to change the reading of” like a clock.  I could go for that.  Pausing, taking stock, breathing deeply, and then determining the “right” next step also seem a propos to me.  Indeed, with these descriptors and given what I was trying to achieve, I could clearly see how resetting could be my ally.

Later that day, I went to a yoga class where the theme was, guess what?  Resetting.  Resetting the placement of my feet on the yoga mat so as to have a firm foundation.  Hmmm, resetting and a firm foundation.   So, does that mean that not taking the time to reset would cause my footing to be unsure?  It would seem so.

Given the conversation I had just had with my friend an hour earlier, I couldn’t help but make the connection between my postural repositioning and my friend’s suggestion of resetting throughout my daily challenges. Not allowing the time it takes to reset, from the ground up, the flow of my daily life and the place of all the people in it leads to a lot of needless stumbling.

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7 Content Marketing Misconceptions CMOs Are Tired of Hearing | All Business

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Content marketing is enjoying a nice stay of popularity as one of the most useful online marketing strategies of the modern era. It’s been adopted by small and large businesses of all kinds of industries, and marketers continue to scale up — in fact, 70 percent of B2B marketers are producing more content than they were a year ago.

By this point, most people have heard of content marketing, even if they don’t understand it, and as you might imagine, the misconceptions surrounding the strategy are rampant.

CMOs and other marketing experts immersed in the world of content marketing are tired of hearing these widespread misconceptions — and it’s worth your while to know why they aren’t true:

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Five Rude Emails You Send Every Day | Inc.com

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getty_143921954_9706479704500119_60092Even the most likeable and well-mannered among us can still look like jerks in an email. Writing an email that comes across just like you do in person is a fine art.

During a conversation, you adjust your tone, facial expression, gestures and posture in order to fit the mood of what you’re conveying. You do this because people tend to be much more responsive to how you say things than to what you actually say.

Email strips a conversation bare. It’s efficient, but it turns otherwise easy interactions into messy misinterpretations. Without facial expressions and body posture to guide your message, people look at each word you type as an indicator of tone and mood.

Most of the mistakes people make in their emails are completely avoidable. The following list digs into these subtle mistakes and hidden blunders.

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New LAEDC Research: People, Industry, Jobs in LA County | Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation

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The LAEDC’s Institute for Applied Economics has published a new study on LA County’s workforce needs, occupational forecasts, and skills required by occupations, to provide workforce development intelligence as part of our ongoing partnership with our regional Workforce Investment Boards (WIBs) and other education and workforce development partners.  The study, titled People, Industry, and Jobs is available to any interested readers below.  Both the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County are detailed.

Get Report.

Why Do Certain Retail Stores Cluster Together? | Planetizen

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Ever notice how competitors like Target and Walmart tend to cluster together? Ken Steif has, and through a close analysis of retail location trends in NY, NJ, and CT, he examines which businesses tend to agglomerate and why.

I spend much of my free time digging for old records.  Philadelphia, my home, has a rich history of soul music and its countless thrift stores and flea markets offer a fiend like me plenty of opportunity.  There are times however, when I prefer the efficiency of shopping at a record store, and although there are record stores in Philly, there is no better cluster of record stores anywhere on the planet than in the Lower East Side of New York City.  As it turns out – this pattern can be explained by two extremely important planning-related theories, Hotelling’s Law and Central Place Theory.

Stores like Good Records and A1 Records are approximately 2.5 hours from Philly via a combination of bus, subway and walking – but on occasion I will make the journey because the selection at these stores is nothing short of extraordinary.  But why do they insist on locating so close to each other?  Wouldn’t it be more advantageous for these stores to locate farther apart so that they can each enjoy their own dedicated market area?

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15 Things To Do When You’re Tired of Being Broke | Marketing for Hippies.com

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I recently wrote a post called ‘I’m Broke (And I Don’t Care).’ It got well over 100 comments from readers on it and has been shared far and wide.

I think it resonated with people because they’re tired of feeling like their self worth needs to be tied to the amount of money they make or that their choices to work with people with less money, or to take time off for fun are wrong. And maybe they liked knowing that someone they might have assumed always had money sometimes went broke.

But since writing it, I’ve wanted to write this to talk about the other side of it: sometimes you are tired of being broke.

And that’s okay too.

Sometimes it can be fun to be reckless and a bit irresponsible and go on adventures, buy things we shouldn’t because it adds joy to our lives.

And sometimes there’s the aftermath.

There’s the non profit we wish we could give money to that we can’t.

We aren’t able to pay rent or our bills and we feel mortified about it.

We owe money to dear friends who trusted we’d pay them back soon and we just haven’t been able to.

Our spouse or partner is breathing down our neck and needing us to pull it together.

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Why Do I Bruise Easily? | Live Science

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bruise-easilyA contusion, or bruise, is a reddish-purple discoloration of the skin that doesn’t blanch, or turn white or pale, when pressed upon.

Bruises typically form when a localized injury, such a blow or impact, causes capillaries to break open and leak red blood cells under the skin.

A person may start to bruise more easily than before for a number of different reasons, though bruising doesn’t necessarily indicate a serious health issue.

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