Lean is one of the most prominent ideas in Operations and Supply Chain Management (OM/SCM) in terms of uptake among practitioner organizations (particularly manufacturers), as well as in terms of lean’s diffusion in the academic literature and across the business school curriculum. The performance effects of lean on manufacturing have been studied with surveys (e.g. Inman and Mehra, 1993; Droge and Germain, 1998; Shah and Ward, 2003) and with secondary data (e.g. Irvine, 2003; Capkun et al., 2009; Cannon et al., 2008; Egolu and Hofer, 2011; Koumanakos, 2008; Swamidass, 2007). The literature generally supports the fundamental notion that leaner inventories and capital stocks are associated with better performance, although this is not a universal finding; and moreover, with respect to inventories especially, the relationship with performance may be non-linear (Eroglu and Hofer, 2011; Isaksson and Seifert, 2014; Kesavan and Mani, 2013). Lean thinking has also migrated into service operations (Dobrzykowski et al., 2016; Gupta et al., 2016; Lee et al., 2008; Malmbrandt and Åhlström, 2013), including retail operations (Carmignani and Zammori, 2015; Cox and Chicksand, 2005). The impact of lean initiatives in retail is worthy of inquiry as this industry is the third largest non-government sector in terms of employment in the United States. Retail accounts for 10% of employment in the United States versus 8% in manufacturing (Figeroa and Woods, 2007). Similarly, in the European Union, retail is the third largest sector, accounting for 8% of the total employment, versus 15% in Manufacturing and 10% in Health and Social Services sectors (Reynolds and Cuthbertson, 2014). The economic significance of retail means that it is important for OM/SCM scholars to understand how prescriptions from our field play out in in the retail context. Perhaps more importantly from a theory perspective, there are important differences between retail and  manufacturing. Therefore studying lean in retail can help us understand some of the boundary conditions of lean as a theory. Lean is certainly one of the most formidable paradigms in OM/SCM. However, thought leaders in the field should be judicious when it comes to predicting and prescribing to one area, such as retail, based on theory developed in other areas (primarily manufacturing in this case). Indeed several theories and empirical findings from the literature suggest that retail may be outside of the boundary conditions within which we should expect lean theory to hold. Two bedrock tenets of lean improvements are reductions in inventory slack, which measures inventory in excess of what is anticipated to meet demand, and capacity slack, which measures sales generated per dollar of plant, property, and equipment (Hendricks et al., 2009; Isaksson and Seifert, 2014; Kesavan and Mani, 2013; Kovach et al., 2015; Modi and Mishra, 2011). In manufacturing, reductions in inventory contribute to profitability by reducing costs, such as those related to storage, material tracking, obsolescence, pilferage and the like. Inventory reductions also have positive indirect effects on profitability (e.g. effects associated with increased quality). Certainly many of these same direct and indirect effects accrue in the retail sector.