Leadership Insights Series: The Art of Merchandising Has Not Been Automated – A Conversation with Retail Executive Peter Whitsett
Former Meijer EVP Peter Whitsett sat down with Partner Kevin Duffy at Buffkin / Baker on what the data cannot tell a merchant, and why he has always bet on people over experience.
Peter Whitsett has spent 40 years doing the work that decides what ends up on a shelf, and he has done it on a scale and across a range that few merchants ever get near, from groceries and golf clubs to consumer electronics and apparel. He came up from the sales floor, starting as a store manager at a Lucky store in Southern California, and found his way into merchandising through replenishment at American Stores Company, where he eventually ran the function across all four operating divisions.
What followed was the kind of run that tends to go to people who perform when the stakes are highest. Kmart moved him into merchandising as the company was climbing out of bankruptcy, and he left as SVP of Merchandising and head merchant, carrying Sears categories alongside. RadioShack brought him in as EVP of Merchandising and Supply Chain. Dick’s Sporting Goods made him EVP of Merchandising and President of Golf Galaxy. He closed out his career at Meijer, where he spent a little over 11 years as EVP of Merchandising and Marketing and built teams that went up against Amazon and Walmart every day on a fraction of their resources. He retired three years ago after thirteen moves, a run his kids still tease him about, and he would not change a thing.
That range gives him an unusually clear view of what transfers between categories and what does not. Ask him whether merchandising has become a science, and he will concede about half the point before taking it back. Analytics have gotten stronger. AI is coming into its own. None of it, in his view, removes the part of the job that requires a person to make a call without complete information and stand behind it.
The art has not gone away
Whitsett has watched retailers test the theory that merchandising can be turned over to the computers. JCPenney tried it, he says, when the company thought it could get rid of the merchants and let the systems do the work. In his telling, the results made the case for merchants better than any argument could have. He has seen at least one other large retailer start down the same path and pull back once its leadership understood what merchandising contributes.
His position is not a rejection of data. Meijer was using AI while he was there, mostly in replenishment, and he offers a small example of why it mattered. A Little League team walks in and clears the shelf of Gatorade, and no traditional forecast catches that. A model built on temperature, seasonality, and what is happening in the community starts to see the pattern. He expects AI to sharpen assortments the same way, surfacing the gaps and the dead weight. What it will not do is make the decision.
“That can be done with some level of data analytics, but there’s always going to be a component of feel that needs to be put out there.”
A good deal of that feel, he says, is leadership rather than technique. It comes down to who is willing to stand out there alone and create a vision the rest of the company can follow, and who is willing to put the chips on the table. He points to H-E-B as one of the strongest operators in the business, and to Costco, which built real urgency into the treasure hunt so that shoppers learn to buy the thing today because it may be gone tomorrow. Kirkland, in his view, reinvented private label, because the standard was never parity with the national brand. In a lot of cases it had to be better.
Learn the business from the store out
Whitsett came into merchandising sideways. American Stores pulled about 50 people from its operating divisions into Salt Lake City to centralize procurement and merchandising, and he spent two years on that re-engineering team learning the discipline as a former store manager. He arrived with a great deal to learn and one strong opinion he was not shy about.
“At the store, that is the end. You were right in front of the customer, and sitting by the computer doesn’t tell you anything about what the consumer is thinking or wanting.”
He is quick to credit the people who pulled him forward, particularly Dick Fredrickson at American Stores, who told him he would not be flying with the VPs on trips but with the senior VPs and presidents. Whitsett had always believed he could be a strong operator. He was less sure he was a strategist until he got tested and found out otherwise. He believes leaders owe the same to the people behind them, and at Meijer he built an MBA-style program for people who were smart and had shown they would invest in themselves.
The enemy is not in the mirror
Thirty years ago the relationship between the head of merchandising and the head of stores was reliably combative, and Whitsett notes that people would show up to meetings specifically to watch the two of them go at it. His own relationship with the head of stores at Meijer is the version he would hold up. It ran on respect for what each side was trying to accomplish, and it produced a clean division of accountability: you give me the plan, I will execute it. If the plan did not work, that was on Whitsett.
“The enemy is not in the mirror. The enemy is outside and you’ve got to look through the window.”
Merchandising is marketing
Whitsett ran both functions at Meijer, and he does not recommend splitting them.
“Merchandising is marketing and marketing is merchandising, and it’s hard to separate one from the other.”
His argument is practical. Under one leader and in the same staff meeting, everyone hears the financial goals of the business and everyone hears the plan meant to hit them. Separating the two starts a fight over who owns the customer, and Whitsett had little patience for the version where a campaign failed because the other side did not execute. There is funding logic underneath it as well. Great initiatives get paid for by performance, so a request to spend several million on a campaign is welcome alongside a business case that supports it.
People first, experience second
When Whitsett built teams, he screened for intellectual curiosity above almost everything else. He wanted people who were smart, who questioned the status quo, and who were authentic enough to argue in front of their peers. That last part was harder to install than it sounds. He worked to make it safe to disagree with the most senior person in the room, on the theory that competing daily against Amazon and Walmart on a fraction of their budget leaves little margin for decisions that were never pressure tested.
He tells one story more than any other. A finance director at Sears Kmart came to him and said he wanted to move into merchandising. Whitsett’s first response was blunt: what do you know about merchandising other than telling me whether we misplanned? The man said he wanted to learn if someone would give him the chance. Whitsett made him a buyer, and he went on to have a substantial career. He still brings it up, Whitsett says, to an almost embarrassing degree.
“People matter more than experience, and good people will find a way to get it done even if they don’t have the experience yet.”
The same instinct shaped how he thought about the generational gap. Whitsett is candid that social media is not his territory, so he moved younger people into roles that stretched them, and he credits them with getting him onto TikTok at all. He is equally direct that the last obligation of a leader is to step aside on time. He knows how his own career started. Someone took a risk on a store manager who could barely stack cans, and that is the debt he thinks merchants ought to keep paying forward. What holds it all together, he says, is a line he attributes to A.G. Lafley: if you are not servicing the customer, you should be servicing someone who is.
“It’s easy to say and easy to put a poster on your wall. When you really believe it, and you’re in service to the consumer, and you find a way to create that demand and then a way to make a nickel at it, that’s your job.”
Leadership Insights is a series by Buffkin / Baker that profiles exceptional leaders across industries. To nominate a leader for a future interview or to speak with our team about a senior executive search, we’d love to hear from you.
Follow us on LinkedIn to stay up to date with the latest thought leadership.