— By Ted Stouch — Parking area liability: are you vulnerable? In a retail or restaurant setting, a dark and foreboding parking lot or garage is a business owners’ worst nightmare. While a perfect setting for a horror movie, in real life, an unlit or poorly lit parking area is a recipe for disaster. Assault, robbery, rape and even murder are a few of the rampant occurrences plaguing parking areas across the U.S. They have low lighting, shadowy expanses and distractions, which make for a tempting invitation for criminals. According …
Industry Voices
— By Dr. Nancy Troyano — The most common pest issues in restaurants by month — and what you need to know to defeat them. With plenty of food, sugar-rich beverages, moisture and heat, restaurants are essentially the perfect environment for pests. Battling pests is a daily, year-round war, but it can be hard to prepare if you don’t know what the enemy looks like or from what direction it is coming. Based on an analysis of 2 years’ worth of data from restaurants, we were able to determine …
— By Jay Hart — How businesses can plan for the growing concern of active shooters and workplace violence. Active shooter incidents used to be rare. But now, people realize they are more likely to be involved in an active shooter incident as the frequency of such events increases. According to a 2018 FBI report, 21 states around the country, from California to Maryland, saw active shooter incidents in the 2-year period from 2016 to 2017 — 10 more than in the previous 2-year period. The report found most …
— By Gene Belli — What retail and restaurant facility owners need to know about environmental and condition assessments. At some point or points during the life of a thriving retail or restaurant property, it will inevitably require an assessment of sorts in the form of a Phase I Environmental Site Assessment (ESA), a Property Condition Assessment (PCA), a Facility Condition Assessment (FCA) or a Compliance Audit/Safety Assessment. The importance of these evaluations can often be underestimated due to their relative infrequency. That said, owners and managers of these facilities …
— By Carol L. Carey — How to control social media and news coverage of your establishment through effective, preventative pest control. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, local news outlets and even national television cover everything: the good, the bad and the ugly — and not all publicity is good publicity. Contrary to the types of stories you want printed about your establishment, negative stories can “go viral” quicker than positive ones. If someone finds a rat in the produce section at a local grocery store, or food poisoning at …
— By Dan Brickner — Now trending: right-sizing and reducing the store footprint with smaller-format stores. Retailers have discovered there is no longer a “one-size-fits-all” approach to market expansion. As a result, astute retailers are “right-sizing” their retail footprints and introducing small-store formats that are tailored to specific demographics in both urban and suburban areas. Through available data, retailers have the ability to tailor smaller store formats and curate their merchandising to better serve the needs of their customers. Take a look at how small-format stores are redefining retail real …
— By Mike Rosen — How your parking lot can drive down operating costs. Of all the areas you’re responsible to maintain, the parking lot is one of the largest. And, in the fast-paced retail and restaurant industry, it isn’t always convenient to make repairs to it. This is a significant challenge for c-stores in particular where downtime is especially costly. How do I know? Recently, I had the privilege of attending the National Leadership Conference for a leading retailer of gasoline and convenience merchandise. My participation gave me …
— By Charlie Slater — Consistent elevator & escalator maintenance is helpful to the bottom line. It’s no secret that elevators and escalators are essential to a building. They provide the building’s occupants safe and efficient vertical transportation to their desired location. With these conveyances being relied on by hundreds — if not thousands — of people in a single building on a given day, their safety is on the line. This means that building owners and facility managers cannot be too cautious when it comes to having their …
— By Ted Stouch — The financial benefits of converting parking lot lighting to LED. Anyone who has been in any part of the facility business, for even a short amount of time, has read, talked about or spoken to someone on the benefits of converting their facilities’ lighting to LED. For those of us on the service and project side of LED retrofits, we talk about the same concepts over and over. Retrofitting to LEDs will save on energy consumption, save on maintenance, and your lighting performance will …
— By Megan Varano — Changing the game from reactive to proactive facility maintenance protocols. The last decade-plus has brought tremendous change in the FM industry. It’s been thrilling to be part of the evolution. Working on both the retail and the service sides has given me a unique perspective on both the challenges and the opportunities. I started out managing work requests on pieces of paper. The dispatcher would take a phone call or read an e-mail and then write out the dispatch to the field; the work request …