Jon Huntress works for Tenagra Corp in partnership with Peter de Jager, and his address is jon@year2000.com . ====================== quote Year2000.com Announcement List, Special Mailing September 20, 1999 This is part five of our special coverage of the BrainStorm Year 2000 National Symposium Series that took place in San Francisco, CA June 28-30, 1999. The next BrainStorm Group Year 2000 Conference will be held in Chicago September 22-24, 1999. See: http://www.brainstorm-group.com/Y2K_Chi99.html Covered by Jon Huntress, jon@year2000.com, for the Year 2000 Information Center: http://www.year2000.com/ =========== Kathy Hotka and the National Retail Association Kathy Hotka is the Vice President of Information Technology for the National Retail Federation and she gave a session on year 2000 issues for retailers. The NRF is the largest retail trade association in the world and includes the leading department stores, discount stores, mass merchandise specialty and independent stores and it is one of the few trade associations that has a technology staff. NRF represents 1.4 million retail concerns that employ more than 20 million people. NRF also has an international membership The NRF represents anyone who sells "stuff." The NRF Survival 2000 Project was launched in 1997 and 150 members are participating in an attempt to create a shared industry approach to Y2k. Getting disparate retailers to get together has been difficult because most of the retailers think they are unique, and don't need to partner with others. But Y2K is different because it literally will affect everybody. Kathy said flat out that we will see companies that will tank because they will not be able to fix their business processes. Early on the NFR realized that it did no good to get retail involved unless manufacturing was along too. They began calling manufacturers and quickly began focusing on EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) which allows automated ordering of merchandise. There is no substitute for this. If Wards wants to order jeans from Levi Strauss, they can't do it by phone because there is nobody at Levi to take the call anymore. Kathy said the NFR created a test to see if a 00 will pass through a translator. Over ten thousand companies have taken the test so far and some of the companies flunked, which told the NFR and the retailers that there were issues to deal with here. Kathy said that outside the US, all bets are off. One of the members of NFR is a big retailer in Spain. He spent the last two years going around Spain and the European Union trying to interest people in the problem and made no progress at all. In addition to the manufacturers, there are shippers, port authorities, customs and the switch to the Euro to worry about. In addition to this there is the EU Privacy Directive, which basically says if you do business with Europeans and keep any data on them, such as if they are a credit card customer, then you must give them the option of "opting in" in order to keep that information. This creates a very large IT overhead that has to be maintained. Other issues to deal with are small and obscure phone companies who may or may not have problems. Some retailers, such as L.L. Bean, do most of their business on the phone. Kathy said she got a surprise when she brought up the possibility of a power outage. Many stores have contingency plans to move their stuff out into the parking lot in case there is an outage. They are even prepared to sell prescriptions drugs off the back of a truck. Home Depot is prepared to turn their largest trash containers into impromptu cash registers if necessary. There is a precedent for this. When Hurricane Andrew hit Florida, Homestead was leveled but the Home Depot there was open. In the matter of product liability, the Consumer Electronic Manufacturers Association is claiming that all consumer electronics are compliant. This would seem to be an issue between the manufacturer and the consumer, but in reality if something doesn't work people will take it back to the store, so retailers need to take this into account. The manufacturers of consumer items became part of their group because they have nothing equivalent to the NFR. There are a lot of unique issues that the retail establishment must deal with. What do you stock up on? Kathy pointed out that nobody has any kind of an idea of how many batteries people will want to buy before January. Also the NFR is just beginning to find out if industries are going to go on the offensive and recommend buying their product. The bottled water association has decided not to take advantage of Y2K to sell more water, not because they don't want the sales, but because of the fear that those big five gallon returnable bottles won't be returned. They are afraid of running out of containers! Retailers have the added problem of having no space for extra product. For instance, there is a difference between soft and hard goods. Canned food can be consumed later, but items specifically purchased for a disaster that are not used may be returned. Kathy said that generators, water purification units, and barbecue grills will be coming back to the stores January 1 at noon! Retailers sell 40% of their sales during the holidays, so buying stuff for a potential disaster might cut into this. She said that especially on the East Coast, nobody is thinking about Y2K or planning for it but they will probably think about it later. Later in this case is usually the second day after Christmas. This is the December 28th Scenario, as she described it. December 26 is spent with your family eating left-over turkey. On December 27 some friends come over for dinner. The next day you think you should go down to the store and get some stuff just in case. If everyone does this it is going to be a real problem. The stores will be empty overnight. Retailers, like everyone else, are committed to due diligence, but with Y2K it is sometimes very difficult to determine just what due diligence is. Nobody has been through Y2K before and there is no precedent. Consulting firm advice and analysis usually focuses on the past and is not much help. The NFR's position is that networking is the best solution and this includes networking with manufactures, consumers and the Y2K groups in the area. Education and advocacy are natural roles of a trade association, and this is the role they have chosen to play. The NFR thinks that short-term interruptions are likely and this is the line they are taking. They are following and advocating the Red Cross advice on Y2K preparedness. The NFR is in a difficult position here because they, and their retail members, don't want to be seen as telling people to go out and buy stuff. We don't know what people are going to buy and the manufacturers don't know how much they should make. Battery makers want to know if they should crank up some more assembly lines. Recommendations that are good for some are not good for others. Some gun dealers wanted a recommendation to buy guns, but if people buy guns they might not buy jewelry, so the NFR left that one alone. She said the White House asked the NFR to run a "Y2K in April" campaign for last April where they would push people to plan and buy at that time. The NFR passed on that one too because they didn't feel the message was appropriate for several reasons, one of them being the crossed message that the everything is alright and all the stores will be open in January but you still need to buy now. Kathy said the word still needs to be gotten out, and one of the options was to have a sponsor for the messages. The senate said this would be OK as long as it wasn't very controversial. Two sponsors they would not like to see are Smith & Wesson and Depends. The NFR is worried about how people are going to react. East of the Mississippi there doesn't seem to be any reaction at all. She said the topic of Y2K never comes up in cocktail parties. There is no buzz at all and the community preparedness groups are saying they aren't worried about panicking, they are still concerned with awareness. Kathy said at first she was concerned about sensational stories in the tabloids but now her main concern is news from the network news shows that focus on the sensational such as a woman storing many pounds of M&Ms in her garage. She also said she has been planting corporate preparedness stories in the press and she urged everyone there to do the same and to establish a dialog with their local media and tell them what they are doing. The networking and joint action is paying off. She told of one major national retailer who was planning on doing no testing at all until they found out through the NFR that everyone else was doing it. She told of another large maker of consumer products who has come to the conclusion that a number of their suppliers are just not going to get it and so they are sending their own people to help them. Everyone is going to have to do this in order to avoid the December 28 Scenario. Her take on the outcome is that things will get messed up but it isn't going to be just awful. She gave the example that all the mushrooms on Pizza Hut pizzas come from China, so if there is a problem with the China supply chain, Pizza Hut will have to find a new source. She said the person they want to target is your mom. Is your mom going to act in a rational manner or is she going to freak? She said the smartest thing she has seen so far is the letter the American Bankers Association sent to Ann Landers. Kathy's recommendations are to shop early and often and don't encourage the nuts. I called her to see if she had anything to add as the conference was two months ago. She told me she won't give this presentation again, as they are starting now to focus on "Roll-over Weekend." The NFR is creating a command center which will be the central source for the entire industry. They plan on calling every single one of their members the first few days of January to find out how everything is going. The White House thinks this is a great idea too. She had just gotten back from San Antonio where she gave a talk that was supposed to scare some of these people. There wasn't much interest as they listened to possible technology problem until she mentioned that there was going to be a lot of people walking around with fifty dollar bills in their pockets. (The extra money the Fed is printing is in fifties.) Do the math -- if you need a quick extra few billion, you can print it a lot faster if you do big bills. It is kind of like the old Soviet Union production quotas. The quota for glass was in pounds instead of area, US production is figured in acres. The Soviet glass factories easily made their quotas by making all their window glass half an inch thick. Kathy asked them what they would do when a customer buys a bottle of wine and gives them a fifty, and the next customer also has a fifty, and the customer after them too. They began thinking very hard after that. Maybe we need to begin stockpiling one dollar bills. I've always had trouble doing that. Best Practices, Jon Huntress jon@year2000.com Copyright 1999 The Year2000.com Partnership