New adventure—working at home

Posted by on June 30th, 2007 at 12:57am

Let me back up a moment and explain this change…

Last month we moved most Store Equipment & Design editorial functions and production to our New York office. As Macfadden Communications, our parent company expands and adds more magazines, we decided it simply made sense to centralize many of these activities into one office.

Three of us will remain in Chicago–myself, Marilyn Cavicchia, SE&D’s senior editor; and Bill Averill, SE&D’s Midwest and West Coast advertising sales manager.

LOOKING TO THE FALL

Having recently completed the FMI-NRA-IDDBA convention cycle, as many of you have, I was struck by the prominence given to three issues at all three shows: labor, food safety and the Internet. It is not hard to understand why labor is top-of-mind for retailers: With the tightest labor market in 50 years everyone is having trouble finding workers, and a premium is attached to any equipment or procedure that saves man-hours. The same goes for food safety and the Internet.

All of these topics you will be reading a lot about this fall in SE&D. The issue of labor, in one way or another, will be an underlying theme in August, September and October. In our editorial coverage of “fresh” in August, and again in October, foodservice equipment manufacturers increasingly emphasize labor productivity and flexibility issues. Moreover, many supermarkets are rethinking their “fresh” departments, looking for ways through design and operations to trim the high, in-store labor costs that typically come with these kinds of operations.

The September issue will have a telecommunications technology focus. We will look at how stores are being “wired” so that more and more in-store systems can inter-communicate and can also be hooked up to remote locations. Is the goal of “interoperabilty” just around the corner?

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