One of the biggest challenges, and perhaps least "sexy"problems of retail is managing inventory. Traditionally the retail "sale" was a way to manage over-stock of inventory while clearing the sales floor for the next season - making way for winter from fall, spring from winter, etc. It was definitely conventional wisdom when I was growing up to wait for the end of season to get the best deals, which, of course, meant that by the time winter rolled around again, I had forgotten about the cool sweater I purchased the year before. With today's finicky customer and even tighter margins, retailers can't afford to blithely follow these long-seated expectations. Today's brand has to practically engage in some sort of pseudo-fortune telling to predict what moderately affluent, 16 year-old girls living in suburban Atlanta will want to wear come November if it is raining more than usual.

The U.S. has many rituals that define the progress of the year, some quite traditional like Christmas and Thanksgiving, and some with an air of shared ridiculousness like Black Friday. It is now a deep-seated American tradition to revel in the shared gluttony and community of Thanksgiving and then exercise those calories off the next day in the way we Americans know best - shopping! The term Black Friday comes from 1950's Philadelphia to describe the barely controlled chaos of thousands who poured into the city for the Army-Navy game the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Since the 80's, the world has changed, particularly in the world of retail, in which the shopper has changed as much as the shopping center, with technology playing a massive role in those changes. For example, in I the past couple of years, Big Data and Machine Learning have gone from being fringe technologies to must-haves.