When Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) Senior Financial Editor, Kathryn Hopkins wanted to speak to an expert on the impact of Hurricane Florence on the retail sector and economy of the Carolina’s she asked Dr. Lessie Branch, Associate Dean of the MCNY School for Business to step up with important statistics.
Florence: Retailers Start to Reopen Stores in Carolinas by Kathryn Hopkins 9/16/18
“Total retail for 2017 grew by 4.2 percent. The positive gains in 2017’s retail sector were made against the backdrop of seven hurricanes that hit the U.S.,” said Dr. Lessie Branch, an associate professor and associate dean in the School for Business at Metropolitan College of New York.
“With the exception of Maria in Puerto Rico, the same is likely to be the case for Florence and other storms. Those economies will be briefly interrupted, but they will bounce back.”
Read more in WWD
About Dr. Lessie Branch
Lessie Branch, Ph.D., is an associate professor and associate dean in the School for Business at Metropolitan College of New York. Branch is a Fulbright Specialist in Race Ethnicity and Religion in Politics, an Affiliated Scholar with Scholars Strategy Network out of Harvard University and a Senior Research Fellow at the DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy at Medgar Evers College. Her research examines the gulf between Black optimism about group progress and the actual data on continuing disparities and speaks to wider questions of social knowledge, social beliefs, and relative group position; even to questions of “consciousness.” Dr. Branch publishes on the role racial attitudes and rhetoric play in socioeconomic inequality. Her public scholarship has appeared in Racism Review, Scholars Strategy Network, and TEDx. Her book Optimism At All Costs: Black Attitudes, Activism, and Advancement in Obama’s America was published with University of Massachusetts Press (2018).
