Retailing: The Other Four-letter Word

To many college kids, retailing’s rep is torn and frayed.

Many people think it’s a second-class career, said Claudia Mobley, director of the University of Arkansas’ Center for Retailing Excellence.

“Students say, ‘I don’t want to fold sweaters for a living,'” she said. “Parents don’t want their kids to be a store manager.”

Even though the largest company in the world is a retailer, and a Wal-Mart store manager can earn more than $100,000 a year, the majority of people just don’t grasp the scope of retailing, Mobley said.

Retailing involves marketing, sales, logistics, consumer behavior and overlaps with several other areas of business.

Although the UA’s Walton College of Business doesn’t offer a degree in retailing, Mobley said there are opportunities in retailing for all students in the Walton College regardless of major.

The interdisciplinary overlap isn’t always obvious.

Mike Duke, president and CEO of the Wal-Mart Stores Division, got into retailing after earning an industrial engineering degree from Georgia Tech in 1971. During college, he didn’t realize that analyzing consumer behavior and designing stores based on that information could vault him into an executive position with the world’s No. 1 retailer.

“When you ask any of the [Wal-Mart] suppliers up here why they went into retailing, they’ll say, ‘I’m not in retailing.’ I tell them, ‘Yes, you are,'” Mobley said.

A big part of Mobley’s job is helping rid retailing of its negative reputation. As the United States shifts from a manufacturing to a service economy, retailing is playing a bigger role than ever before.

Wal-Mart Connection

The Walton College’s Center for Retailing Excellence was formed in 1998 with part of a $50 million endowment from the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation. The center’s mission is to become one of the nation’s foremost enclaves for retail studies.

A total of 32 companies are represented on the center’s 38-person board including Wal-Mart, Walgreen Co., Coca-Cola, General Electric, Procter & Gamble and Pfizer.

Wal-Mart has three executives on the advisory board: Bob Connolly, executive vice president of marketing and consumer communications; Don Harris, retired executive vice president of merchandising; and Pat Curran, senior vice president of operations.

Last year, Connolly volunteered his time to teach 15 students in the Walton College’s senior-level marketing honors colloquium. The class met once a week for 15 weeks. It was co-taught by Tom Jensen, Wal-Mart Lecturer in Retailing and chair of the marketing and logistics department.

Mobley said Northwest Arkansas is currently the capital of retailing with Wal-Mart bringing in $256 billion in sales last year and more than 200 suppliers opening offices in the area.

“We’ve got this incredible community up here,” she said. “We thought, ‘What can we do to take advantage of it?'”

In last year’s colloquium, students worked on a marketing project for baby products.

“I can’t tell you what they are because they’re actually using some of this,” Mobley said, referring to Wal-Mart.

“The plan they created was presented to a panel of Wal-Mart marketing managers,” according to the center’s annual report. “The students had access to Wal-Mart’s advertising agencies, buyers, vendors and consultants to create their proposals.”

Don Bland, vice president of Wal-Mart’s International Division, will teach the colloquium this year.

Emerging Trends

On Oct. 7, the center held its fourth annual one-day symposium called Emerging Trends in Retail.

Mobley said she had 547 people signed up, at $500 a pop, for the 500 slots available. Most of those folks are retailers and suppliers.

“Our original intent was, ‘O.K., let’s support what’s here in our own backyard,'” Mobley said.

Wal-Mart’s Duke was the keynote speaker this year.

Previous speakers included two other Wal-Mart execs: CEO Lee Scott and Tom Coughlin, vice chairman and executive vice president.

Mobley said it’s a challenge to present retailers and vendors with new information.

“Their time is precious,” she said. “What can we give them that will help them in their business?”

The first Emerging Trends symposium included a session on radio-frequency identification tags at a time when the phrase was foreign to most business people.

Now, RFID technology is a major concern for retailers and suppliers. Wal-Mart currently has an RFID pilot project in the works involving its top 100 vendors (and 37 volunteer companies) shipping to and from three north Texas distribution centers. Its top 300 vendors are required to use RFID tags on crates and pallets by January 2006.

Mobley said the symposium funded five four-year scholarships (about $150,000) last year, and she hopes it will do the same in each subsequent year.

Rush to Retail

Mobley, who came to the UA in 1992, was an instructor in apparel studies in the Bumpers College before moving across campus to the Walton College five years ago to help start the retailing center. She had spent the previous 20 years as a wholesaler in the Dallas Apparel Mart.

In addition to the Emerging Trends symposium and executives in residence program, Mobley took 15 students on a 14-day tour of London and Paris last year. Kathy Smith, the current apparel instructor in the Bumpers College, helped administer the international field trip.

Every spring and fall, the center holds a Retail Rush, which Mobley described as a “private career fair.” This fall, about 50 companies and 300 students participated, giving students a chance to meet recruiters and apply for internships.

Mobley said several Wal-Mart suppliers attend the Retail Rush events (including Newell Rubbermaid, Nestlé Purina PetCare and General Mills), but if students are hired, it usually means they have to leave Northwest Arkansas to begin a career with those companies.

The center also works closely with Wal-Mart in other ways.

Through Wal-Mart executives on the advisory board, the center has been able to “leverage Wal-Mart’s expertise in our curriculum,” Mobley was quoted as saying in the Walton College’s 2003 alumni magazine, Business Perspective.

The article said Mobley took 13 students to Wal-Mart’s “Big Picture” planning meetings that year.