This paper seeks to examine the practices of food store chain organizations in the North Texas area regarding the development of store management personnel.

Purpose - This thesis aims to describe the strategies employed by omnichannel experts in Swedish retail shops during the Covid19 pandemic. Furthermore, the integration of the physical and online channels is studied to describe the methods used to increase sales, especially in the online channels. Methodology – The study applies a qualitative method where semi-structured interviews were conducted with omnichannel experts from retail businesses. Findings – The aim of the retail shops during the Covid19 pandemic has been to perform in- store and online shopping despite the partial restrictions. Retail shops had to adapt to the changes in the Swedish market and the consumer behavior. The challenge of maintaining sales and remaining competitive has shown that Swedish retail shops have remained resilient and that adaptation has been key to their business strategies. Practical Implications – Retail businesses worldwide were forced to close their business except for their online services. However, Sweden is a particular case where retailers had to find solutions to their physical and online retail operations. Partial restrictions allowed them to carry out business activities in the Swedish market. Therefore, the current pandemic has influenced Swedish retailers to help them identify business strategies to boost their sales, especially online sales. As well as the data collection and literature findings, both cases suggest that adapting to new technologies is the key to increasing sales in all channels. Therefore, retailers should introduce new ways of working with the help of technological tools to become more competitive and provide excellent service to an increasingly demanding and technologically savvy customer. Contribution – This study contributes to the area of research that looks at how omnichannel retail structures can be improved to increase sales. And how they adapt to change market situations that influence consumer behavior.

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Whore Foods is a poetry thesis exploring the life of a cashier at an organic grocery store. To be the cashier is to be exposed. To be a femme gay body in public is to become heterosexual. A community can be formed through isolation. Cashiers and customers made individuals through capitalism form collectives. Through pleasure, through community, the work seeks to gather.

A new numerical methodology to examine fluid-structure interaction of a wing/pylon/store system has been developed. The aeroelastic equation of motion of the complete system is solved iteratively in the time domain using a two-entity numerical code comprised of ABAQUS/Standard and the Unsteady-Vortex-Lattice Method. Both codes communicate through an iterative handshake procedure during which displacements and air loads are updated. For each increment in time the force/displacement equilibrium is found in this manner. The wing, pylon, and store data considered in this analysis are based on an F16 configuration that was identified to induce flutter in flight at subsonic speeds. The wing structure is modeled as an elastic plate and pylon and store are rigid bodies. The store body is connected to the pylon through an elastic joint exercising pitch and yaw degrees of freedom. Vortex-Lattice theory featuring closed ring-vortices and continuous vortex shedding to form the wakes is employed to model the aerodynamics of wing, store, and pylon. The methodology was validated against published data demonstrating excellent agreement with documented key phenomena of fluid-structure iteration. The model correctly predicts the effects of the pylon induced lateral flow disruption as well as wing-tip-vortex effects. It can identify the presence of aerodynamic interference between the store, pylon, and wing wakes and examine its significance with respect to the pressure and lift forces on the participating bodies. An elementary flutter study was undertaken to examine the dynamic characteristics of a stiff production pylon at near-critical airspeeds versus those of a soft-in-pitch pylon. The simulation reproduced the stabilizing effect of the stiffness reduction in the pitch motion. This idea is based on the concept of the decoupler pylon, introduced by Reed and Foughner in 1978 and flight tested in the early 1980's. NOTE: (3/07) An updated copy of this ETD was added after there were patron reports of problems with the file. / Ph. D.

In recent years, combat aircraft with external stores have experienced a decrease in their mission capabilities due to lack of robustness of the current passive wing/store flutter suppression system to both structured as well as unstructured uncertainties. The research program proposed here is to investigate the feasibility of using a piezoceramic wafer actuator for active control of store flutter with the goal of producing a robust feedback system that demonstrates increased performance as well as robustness to modeling errors. This approach treats the actuator as an active soft-decoupling tie between the wing and store, thus isolating the wing from store pitch inertia effects. Advanced control techniques are used to assess the nominal performance and robustness of wing/store system to flutter critical uncertainties. NOTE: (10/2009) An updated copy of this ETD was added after there were patron reports of problems with the file. / Ph. D.

Grocery store associates in the deli-bakery departments serve and prepare an increasing amount of ready-to-eat foods. This increases the need for a detailed, effective food safety training program in retail grocery establishments to prevent food borne illness. This research examines food safety knowledge, training preferences, needs, and current practices of grocery stores deli-bakery employees in Southwest and Southern Virginia. This research had two phases. Phase I: employees completed a thirty-four question needs assessment survey concerning background, food safety training needs, preferences and knowledge. Phase 2: 15 employees (from phase 1 locations) food behaviors were observed for approximately six hours each (89.05 hours total). Observational data collection focused on glove use, cross-contamination, and hand washing. The results showed that most grocery food handlers desired hands-on, interactive and one-on-one training that occurs frequently, but is short: less than two hours in length. Overall, most grocery food handlers had general safe food handling knowledge; however, the observational behavior data indicates behaviors do not reflect their knowledge. Greater than 95% understanding was found on the subjects of hand washing and glove use; however, these items were observed practiced incorrectly the most with bare hand contact with ready-to-eat foods and lack of hand washing prior to glove use. The creation of short, hands-on or interactive trainings for retail grocery food handlers that focuses on changing food handling and preparation behaviors may be more effective than current training. / Master of Science in Life Sciences

Today's large-scale, high-performance, data-intensive applications put a tremendous stress on data centers to store, index, and retrieve large amounts of data. Exemplified by technologies such as social media, photo and video sharing, and e-commerce, the rise of the real-time web demands data stores support minimal latencies, always-on availability and ever-growing capacity. These requirements have fostered the development of a large number of high-performance storage systems, arguably the most important of which are Key-Value (KV) stores. An emerging trend for achieving low latency and high throughput in this space is a solution, which utilizes both DRAM and flash by storing an efficient index for the data in memory and minimizing accesses to flash, where both keys and values are stored. Many proposals have examined how to improve KV store performance in this area. However, these systems have shortcomings, including expensive sorting and excessive read and write amplification, which is detrimental to the life of the flash. Another trend in recent years equips large scale deployments with energy-efficient, high performance co-processors, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Recent work has explored using GPUs to accelerate compute-intensive I/O workloads, including RAID parity generation, encryption, and compression. While this research has proven the viability of GPUs to accelerate these workloads, we argue that there are significant benefits to be had by developing methods and data structures for deep integration of GPUs inside the storage stack, in order to achieve better performance, scalability, and reliability. In this dissertation, we propose comprehensive frameworks that leverage emerging technologies, such as GPUs and flash-based SSDs, to accelerate modern storage systems. For our accelerator-based solution, we focus on developing a system that features deep integration of the GPU in a distributed parallel file system. We utilize a framework that builds on the resources available in the file system and coordinates the workload in such a way that minimizes data movement across the PCIe bus, while exposing data parallelism to maximize the potential for acceleration on the GPU. Our research aims to improve the overall reliability of a PFS by developing a distributed per-file parity generation that provides end-to-end data integrity and unprecedented flexibility. Finally, we design a high-performance KV store utilizing a novel data structure tailored to specific flash requirements; it arranges data on flash in such a way as to minimize write amplification, which is detrimental to the flash cells. The system delivers outstanding read amplification through the use of a trie index and false positive filter. / Ph. D.