Operations

As a small business owner, you may be well acquainted with the owners of your neighboring businesses, but if you want to open more of a dialogue in your business community, a social networking site is here to help. It’s called Alignable. Alignable is a free …

So you’ve decided to build, or update, your company’s website. That’s a smart move—in a world where technology is ever-increasing, it’s important for retailers to use that technology to reach their audience. Whether you’re making your website simple and to …

The annual Cost of Doing Business Study from the North American Retail Hardware Association (NRHA) is the industry’s only inclusive benchmarking study and has been conducted annually for almost 100 years. The study provides detailed financial information from hardware stores, home centers and …

In the April issue of Hardware Retailing, we spoke with five retailers who have taken on inventory projects to address a critical point where their inventory cycle hit a snag and caused problems in the rest of the process. In addition to …

To view a PDF of this story, click here. To download a helpful inventory accuracy tool or to use an inventory calculator, which helps you determine the amount of lost sales due to out of stock inventory, click here. By: Liz Lichtenberger llichtenberger@nrha.org and …

Ironically, one way to increase sales in your store is to have a lenient return policy. Big-box stores have figured it out. They’ve made it easy to return almost any item, sometimes even without a receipt. Retailers with lenient return …

A job interview can be nerve-wracking for the candidate, but it can potentially put an employer in a tricky situation, too. It’s important to be careful which questions you ask, as some that seem innocent can actually be illegal (or, …

Lowe’s recently got praise from reporter, business advisor and author Ian Altman writing for Forbes, who used the big box retailer as an example of how to get good customer service to last from the sale to the end of a product’s …