NEW YORK -- Retailers are making general merchandise a bigger part of their efforts to take advantage of solution selling, said Roy White, vice president, education, General Merchandise Distributors Council Educational Foundation, based here.
"Solution selling integrates various departments of the store, and that's one of the crying needs of the supermarket business. GM can play a major role in it," he said.
For example, over the last five or six years, "supermarket chains have increasingly embraced seasonal selling, and GM is front and center on that," White said.
"Partly because of the studies GMDC has done on seasonal merchandising, supermarket operators have delved more deeply into it. That has given GM another opportunity to contribute sales and profit dollars to the overall store performance," he said.