Your PR Architect

Three recent unrelated retail experiences did little to assure me that we'll be shopping in actual stores for nonperishable goods, five years from now. Each event was so illustrative that I decided to name each store below. I don't know if there's any PR strategy that would persuade me to alter my opinion about each merchant. Because retail involves hundreds of individual interactions between the store staff and shoppers, rather than a massive message campaign. Here's today's scorecard: By M.O. Stevens (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Dollar Tree - I don't expect concierge service in a discount store with "dollar" in its name. But when a heated, f-bomb-laden shouting match breaks out between two surly males at the slow-as-molasses checkout, I expect the store's staff to do more than stand around and watch the drama unfold. Kids in line were crying. Ís dialing 911 too c...

By Keith Allison (originally posted  to Flickr as Michelle Wie)  [CC-BY-SA-2.0  (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons caption Not a golfer. Never have been. If there's no tiny windmill on the course, you won't find me. But I worked behind the scenes at a few LPGA golf tournaments in Rochester, NY, doing the PR and community relations thing. In a temporary building with air conditioning. Next to the microwave fries table. As I said, I'm no golfer. When the LPGA announced this morning they were abandoning Rochester for the greener (as in cash) greens of metro New York City, after 38 years in Rochester, I had a few observations: LPGA's timing sucks. Really? Announce a 2015 move to NYC two months prior to the 2014 tournament in Rochester? Why not just set fire to the ticket booth at Monroe Country Club? Waiting to make the announcement after August 2014 would still sting, but it would not have insulted the upcoming Rochester ev...