Retail in the Age of Amazon: Scenes From an Industry Running Scared

At the National Retail Federation's annual convention, a festival of consumerism housed over the past four days in New York City's soaring Jacob Javits convention center with 30,000 attendees and dozens of lectures on the wizardry of modern commerce, the hottest ticket was for a lunchtime talk about a company that wasn't even there presenting. The enigmatic title, Even Amazon Can't Do This … Yet. "If you don't think Amazon is a problem for your business, I don't care where you are in the world, you're wrong, you're living under a rock," declared consultant Lee Peterson of WD Partners.