99th National Retail Federation Expo, NYC, Jan 10-13, 2010

Every player in the retail arena will be at this flagship NRF event for the retain industry. I hope to catch the latest buzz in retail O.R. and fathom customers appetite for O.R. methods, and tab about it when I get back. Retail is still a relatively young field when it comes to O.R., but its like an iceberg. Most of the cool O.R. stuff is in products rather than journals. While journals provide valuable insight into the kind of problems faced by retailers, I haven't seen too many solutions presented in the literature as yet that consistently work well in practice, although I expect to see this trend reverse in the near future.