By David Pinto
The perhaps premature preretirement of Colleen Lindholz after a 30-year career at Kroger underscores yet again the rapidly declining executive ranks in the mass retail community. Indeed, the list is ever longer — and the names upon that list increasingly more impressive.
At this point, it’s difficult to name a mass retailer whose executive ranks have not been dramatically thinned by retirement or departure. Name the retail company — Walmart, Target, Walgreens, CVS, Kroger, Kroger again, and a variety of grocery retailers — and you inevitably come upon a name-brand executive who no longer represents the firm.
It’s become an endless, time-worn game trying to understand or explain the many reasons behind these wholesale departures. Far more productive would be an attempt to halt this exodus and, more importantly, to try to correct the flaws in the system that encourage it.
But let’s, for the moment, forgo this exercise and instead tally those people who remain — and who continue to successfully guide the mass retailing community, one of America’s most productive.
Rather than single out individual achievers, let us instead attempt to profile those retail companies whose executive class stills excels. For openers, let’s look at Walmart, a retailer so abundant in world-class leaders that it could absorb the recent retirement of one of the outstanding leaders of our age and hardly miss a beat. Then there’s Target, much maligned of late but still teeming with world-class leadership — as evidenced by its rebound of late.
In the supermarket arena, a case could be justifiably made that its leadership ranks compare favorably with those of any U.S. business segment. Doubt that contention? You need only look at the industry’s performance in recent times — or not so recent times. Try to name the U.S. community without one or more superb performers. Enough said.
All of which brings us to the remaining segments of the mass retailing community. True, drug chains have struggled of late in terms of leadership quantity and quality. However, part of the problem is the industry’s myopic view of itself. While Walgreens and CVS have struggled — and Rite Aid has completely disappeared — America’s regional drug chains have entered a new era of success, prosperity and achievement, at times at the expense of their larger rivals.
As far as specialty retailers are concerned, this is truly their finest hour. Or day. Or year.
Which brings us once more to the apparently sudden departure of Colleen Lindholz, one of the truly talented retailing executives to have enlivened our industry in recent, or not too recent, memory.
The feeling here (and elsewhere) is that Colleen will not remain retired (her word) for very long. Rather, the conundrum she will soon face will be which offers to consider and which to spurn. In the end, the lucky retailer that secures her arrival and allegiance will be the better for her arrival — and her commitment.
In the end, it will be as it has always been: The Colleen Lindholzes of this world will keep mass retailing in a class by itself.
