Profile of Success: Power Outage?

CS: What do you enjoy the least about the catalog business?
BE: We tend to tolerate a certain level of mediocrity in our execution — I mean this across the catalog industry. In economic downturns, that can come back and bite us. That’s when everybody starts focusing on optimizing models or getting more efficient in the mail or conserving costs. It’s unfortunate that it takes those massive, winnowing-out time frames to get people focused on doing this well. The faster we learn together, the more viable our industry becomes, and we can better maintain consumer interest and a level of performance.