U.S. Retail Industry Uses Bold Strategies to Attract Customers and Repel Unions

Along with freebie mania has come the rebirth of the birthday club. Back in the dark ages, our neighborhood Woodlawn Pharmacy gave every kid a free scoop of ice cream on their birthday. Every year the bike ride up the hill to claim that cone was a huge part of the day's celebration.

Goodwill birthday freebies from merchants faded away just as neighborhood pharmacies did, but this year the Birthday Club has made a big comeback. The list of large national retail chains that are eager to give you gifts in celebration of the day that you became an American consumer is very long.

Between the free Disney tickets, the free Black Angus steak dinner, the free Aveda perfume, and the half dozen free ice creams and desserts I’ve been offered this year, if I spent my entire birthday in pursuit of freebies, I don’t think I could collect or consume them all.

I do appreciate the gestures, however, and those retailers who made the offers have won some positive brand exposure with me, whether I take their freebie or not. So, mission accomplished, I would say.

While retailers are being overtly generous with their consumers in 2009, they’re not so excited about the concept of “free” in their workplace. The Employee Free Choice Act will be the new hotly debated political topic, as soon as we all stop talking about the AIG bonuses. The bill was introduced in both the House and the Senate last week, but major players in the retail industry have been skirmishing on the sidelines about it for months already.

You might remember that Wal-Mart staged mandatory meetings last summer in an effort to persuade its employees to cast ballots for John McCain, which would have also been a vote against Free Choice in the workplace. Free Choice presumably will give union organizers free rein in the largest workplaces in America.

Without the ability to easily squash unionization efforts, Wal-Mart might find itself squashed under the weight of populist accountability in its own workforce. When the world’s largest corporation is fighting for its own status quo, we can expect the battle to be bloody.

Last week leaders from Costco, Starbucks, and Whole Foods formed their own union and marched a proposal for modifications to the Free Choice Act up to Capitol Hill. Reportedly lawmakers were equally happy with and amused by the proposal. While the politicians saw the new ideas as a good compromise, they couldn't see any chance that the act's opponents were ever going to be in a compomising mood.

Perhaps the current bill, stripped of the freedom that voting in private affords, is not the answer. Certainly, though, after the inequities of executive compensation, and the short-sightedness of executive decisions have been revealed to the populous, we all see that there needs to be some kind of answer. Leaders in all industries should rightfully be nervous about what that answer will be.

As a consultant friend of mine reminded me last night, the unwritten rule on the farm is "Pigs get fed and hogs get slaughtered."