Retailing can be immensely satisfying—and incredibly frustrating, sometimes in the same ten minutes.

Nothing about retail is rocket surgery, but putting it all together tests the skills (and sanity) of every wannabe Wanamaker.

Here are six of the "truths" retailers experience:

1. It’s not whether you can do it; it’s whether you can do it best.

The challenge isn’t just offering products the public wants to buy; you’ve got to do it better than all of your competitors.

Each shopper chooses only one store for his purchase—the one he feels offers the best value (not just quality and price, but convenience, security, atmosphere, etc., etc.)

The winner takes all. Second place gets nothing, no matter how great the effort or how close the race.

2. So few ways to succeed, so many ways to fail.

Ultimately there is just one way to succeed in retail: provide products customers want better than all your competitors.

But there are countless ways to get into trouble—buying mistakes, uncontrolled expenses, theft and fraud, ineffective personnel, inadequate collection, poor people management, pricing too high, pricing too low, poor product selection, ignorance of laws, accounting mistakes, too many or too few employees, inaccurate financial projections, overly optimistic expansions, etc., etc., etc. All the world conspires against a retailer.

With profits typically 1-3% of sales, the margin for error is frighteningly small. Every mistake is serious; combinations are often fatal.

3. A good retailer is a compulsive improver.

Discontent is the driving force of retail. A retailer tweaks and fine-tunes his business, determined to make every feasible enhancement he can conceive or plagiarize.

Nothing exists in retail that can’t be improved: merchandise can be better organized; displays can be more attractive and more descriptive; salespeople can know more about the products and about human relations; marketing can deliver a more stimulating message to a more promising audience; products can be more attractive and less expensive; selections can be broadened; stock-outs can be reduced; paperwork can be more efficient; handling can be reduced; shrinkage can be decreased; collections can be sped up and bad debts reduced; customer relationships can be broadened and deepened, etc., etc.

A retailer is often tired but never bored.

4. There is no finish line.

No retailer gets all the details right. Those who claim to are either dishonest ("puffing" in their advertising or salesmship) or fantasizing; a strong dose of their customers’ perceptions would shock them back to reality.

Even if it were possible, the feat would be short-lived; our competitors would quickly copy our formulas and techniques, close the gap, and require us to add new details and methods to again separate us from the pack.

Retailing is constantly evolving and improving. The best stores of twenty years ago are antiquated and uncompetitive in today’s markets.

There is no ultimate store, no ultimate service, no ultimate customer experience—and no rest for the retailer.

5. A store is a portrait of its owner.

Perhaps most people wouldn’t consider a retail store art. But a store is indeed an artistic creation, emanating from the founder’s vision, interpreted and shaped according to his talents and skills, and made inevitably unique in its innumerable details.

The individual character of a store develops and evolves gradually—the accumulation of many large and small decisions made (or ignored) over the course of its existence.

We rarely step back during this process to recognize the creation accruing from our daily routine. But eventually every characteristic of the store—location, décor, staff, products, displays, organization, policies, style, methods, attitude, marketing, etc.—has been determined, directly or indirectly, by its owner.

The owner’s vision is adopted by the staff, his priorities become the goals, his habits become the standards, and his style becomes the culture. Despite his (politically savvy) protests that many people play roles, he is indeed the producer and the product is his.

If you want to know the owner, walk through his store.

6. You must be present to win.

To be successful a retailer doesn’t have to be brilliant, highly educated, charismatic, eloquent, refined, or unusually talented. But he must mind the store.

Luck, ideas, relationships, and even intelligence are dwarfs next to effort. In retail as in most of life, the winner is almost always the most focused and dedicated. Success is the product of hard work.

Retailers who are irresistibly distracted by hobbies, personal and family problems, civic and industry associations, charities, and outside business ventures, pay dearly for their diversions. A well-established store can sometimes survive a little inattention but when ignored long enough its momentum turns in the wrong direction; less-rooted stores seldom survive less than full focus for even short periods.

An 8-hour day isn’t long enough; taking off is out of the question.