Last weekend I had some time to kill while my daughter was at a birthday party, so I took advantage of the party’s location and went to Trader Joe’s. The good news is that I made perfect use of 90 minutes. The bad news is that I violated one out of two cardinal rules of grocery shopping:
- Always have a list
- Never go hungry
While I did have a general list, I was starving…and boy did it show at the checkout. Do you know how hard it is to spend $200 at Trader Joe’s? My grocery bill at regular ol’ Harris Teeter never hits $200, even when I use Instacart; my small family just doesn't consume all that much. So this was an eye-popper.
Had prices unexpectedly increased at Trader Jo...
Last week we shared Part 1 of what we might call “lessons gleaned from reading a bunch of books on ancient Greece.” For a quick refresher, Jason with the Golden Fleece reminded us that a popular brand loses value without execution, and Odysseus showed us that success depends on strategy and planning over brute force.
Today’s dispatch takes us from Crete to Mt. Olympus, which is a real place on the map and in the hearts of all us who’ve loved D’Aulaires Book of Greek Mythology since elementary school.
💔🗡️⛰️
Part 2: What I learned from Ariadne, Agamemnon and Mt. Olympus
🤝 Your business partner is a life partner.
For all the attention our culture gives to choosing romanti...
Sheila here, saying Χαίρετε! That’s hello in ancient Greek, apparently. If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you know that I love to connect my nerdy interests du jour to retail real estate. Today we’ll visit the 12th century BCE, where the drama would definitely be on Bravo if Andy Cohen had been there.
Some months back, I wrote about the story of Oedipus, and how (obviously) it’s a cautionary tale about retail real estate. Lucky for you, my off-duty self hasn’t left the ancient world, and I don’t see a departure anytime soon. Firstly because there’s about a thousand years of material, and secondly because it’s basically Game of Thrones on a recognizable map.
Whil...
This is probably not news to you, but since we send these newsletters every week, I basically move through life asking myself how to make this thing I [saw / heard / experienced] into content that at least mildly connects to retail real estate. When I find something that provides multiple angles, I’m thrilled. So thank you, Disney and Taylor Swift, for making the six-part docuseries The End of An Era about the record-breaking The Eras Tour. Also, thanks to my sister who told me I should watch it and that I’d probably cry. She was right about both.
To refresh your memory, the tour included 149 shows in 51 cities on 5 continents over the course of 21 months. At each performance, Taylor an...
My favorite part of the Dream Space Accelerator comes at the very end. Without fail, right when we’re finally done with the Powerhouse Business Plan, I get to hear some version of this:
🤯 I am so grateful that I did this, because there was so much I hadn’t thought about. I had no idea how much I had to consider, and I was sure I’d covered everything before we started.
And then I respond with some version of this:
🎭 How could you have known? Unless you’ve opened a retail business before, you’d have zero reason to know 75% of this stuff. Retail is theater!
And it truly is. What we experience as consumers – picking up a latte, going to a yoga class, ordering a beer – is the sta...
Imagine for a moment that you’re dating someone you really like. You’ve been together for six months, and so far, so good. You’re excited about your future together.
Now imagine a fairy swoops in and says it’s time for you to commit to being with this person for the next 10 years. What would you say? Certainly if you’re dating Christian Bale or Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises (just me?), you’d say yes. But anyone else? That would feel like a lot of pressure to put on a new relationship.
That’s exactly what’s happening when a new business signs a lease. No wonder the typical five to ten-year lease terms can feel really intimidating.
Turns out, people with advanced degree...
Remember the Presidential Fitness Test from elementary school? If you’re reading this newsletter, the answer is most likely, yes. Evidently the program was replaced in 2013, but my daughter’s PE curriculum still includes a nearly identical version, so it’s very much a part of my life again.
Since I didn’t actually enjoy exercise of any form until my mid 30’s (thank you, Peloton), those fitness tests were somewhere between annoying and dreadful. I recall sit-and-reach being kinda fun, but I didn’t like the mile run, and I downright hated the pull-ups. Even when we got to do the remedial version, the “flexed-arm-hang,” I could never, ever seem to do it. I wasn’t alone. I’m pretty sure that...
We all know that Ben Franklin was right about death and taxes, but there’s another certainty of life that he left out. If I could Bill and Ted my way back to the 1790’s (no thanks), I think he’d agree that when you want something is rarely when you can have it...if you can have it at all.
Obviously I’m not talking about anything money can buy, since you can buy anything on the internet and have it within 2-3 business days. But for the big stuff that really matters -- security, health, relationships -- as hard as we will something into existence, we have limited control.
All we can do is dig deep and have hope and patience. Well, that’s exactly what Cara and Travis Loving did.
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