Relative efficiency

Once you get past the fact that no matter what you want to buy, some nearby store is probably selling it really, really cheap, there's a lot not to like about what retailing has become. Merchants used to drive the business; now accountants do.

That's not to say that cost was ever unimportant or that retailers were once bright-eyed idealists. The name of the game has always been making a buck. But it used to be that you had to get close to your customers to do it. Now there sometimes seems to be no limit to the distance a retail company will put between itself and the people it wants to sell to.

Like everything else in the world, of course, this is all Wal-Mart's fault. Relentless pursuit of economic efficiency turned a small discount store operator in Arkansas into the world's largest company and left the less efficient fighting for survival. But it's fantasy to think that if Wal-Mart had overlooked the opportunity, no one else would have noticed it. The only difference is when we would have arrived at the current state of affairs, not whether.

At any rate, we're here, and if you're in retailing it's likely you're either sending out memos about cutting costs or receiving them. If you're a consumer, most of the time you're on your own. Stores don't have a lot of people to help you, and most of them don't know much about whatever you're asking.

Maybe it just seems that bad because most of us expect a routine chore like shopping to go along without a lot of difficulty. But few would question that there's a significant and growing disconnect between the retailer and the consumer.

A couple of recent examples help to make that point. Meijer, Inc. of Grand Rapids, Mich. and Giant Food, Inc. of Landover, Md., once known for fostering a sense of family among their workers, have continued to shed those images in favor of the efficiency culture that's necessary to compete.

Meijer, which invented the supercenter, fired 1,900 managers last month, the biggest downsizing in its history. That followed layoffs of 400 employees in 2001 and 350 in 2003, so the shock value of such moves was declining. But the reported reactions of employees and communities still gave you the feeling that the family was throwing cousin Harry and the kids into the street in the middle of a Midwest winter.

Maybe that's what you have to do to stay in business in Wal-Mart's world. What you have to give up in the bargain is the connection to your employees. And when that bond is broken, the people who represent your business to the public may not have any goals beyond making it to quitting time today and to payday at the end of the week.

The fact that Giant is no longer the chain that Izzy Cohen made into an integral