A veteran designer with roots in retail reflects on the changes he and his extended family have seen in the industry.
In this debut memoir, Stein combines personal reminiscences with business insights derived from a half-century of experience, both as the child of a midcentury retailer and as an experienced designer and brand manager. Stein places his story within the context of cultural and geographic trends. Born shortly after the end of World War II, he grew up in Milwaukee’s Jewish community and was part of the family business. His father and uncle opened a jewelry and toy store, then a small chain of drugstores. Although he studied interior design and initially pursued it as a career, Stein found himself returning to his retail roots in recent decades as companies began to understand the importance of managing the customer’s entire shopping experience. The book abounds with insider details (the precise lumen range of the Apple Store’s lighting system) as well as broader analyses of the evolution of retail in the late 20th century. From his Midwest base, Stein is in prime position to describe the changes caused by Minnesota companies Target and Best Buy, among others, but as a seasoned trend-watcher, he draws on examples from throughout the United States to explain the role of the mall and experiments with large chain stores designed to blend into urban spaces. The book also examines the challenges contemporary retail faces from the growth of online shopping, and Stein makes a convincing case for a sustained resurgence of independent businesses. Elements of personal history and industry analysis are woven together throughout the book, which at times dilutes the narrative’s focus but more often humanizes the bigger picture; the changing opportunities for store design, for instance, become far more vivid when Stein realizes that adding employees to his firm makes it less convenient to live in his office.
A broad but detailed look at the evolution of retail in the United States through the story of one Midwestern family with a long history in the business.
Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1592989560
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Beaver's Pond Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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