Copyright 2013 JDA Software Group, Inc. - CONFIDENTIAL

Breaking the Wedge

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Can you imagine a retail world without Walmart or Target? Without Amazon or eBay? Without McDonald’s or Starbucks? If you are under 50, you probably can’t. That was the world of the 1950s, before the tremendous explosion of mass merchandising occurred, and with it, the emergence of the proverbial wedge.

Read: Breaking the Wedge

What’s the wedge? It’s the shape of assortment plans when traditional methodologies are used to create assortments based on store size and volume.

For six decades this assortment wedge concept worked marvelously, providing mass merchandisers with a guideline on how to push the most products to the stores with the size and volume to handle it best.

And then along came Steve Jobs, Jeffrey Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Meg Whitman who all understood what the customer wanted and found new ways to leverage this information to get new products to them in new and interesting ways. And in doing so, they forever changed the face of retailing.

Meet the Author:Scott Welty is JDA Software’s

global vice president of retail strategy. With widespread experience within the retail industry, he is responsible for strengthening executive-level relationships with JDA’s retail customers and key prospects.