RECENT discussions
Discussions
Commentary and Discussion From the Retail Community
Tesco’s Sir Terry Rails Against Centralized Management
In his new book, “Management in Ten Words,” Sir Terry Leahy, who retired from Tesco in March 2011, states that one of his major challenges upon becoming CEO in 1997…
BrainTrust Query: Building Relationships Starts With Trust
Salespeople need to be taught to go beyond the traditional skills of their craft. One of the key challenges for a salesperson is to build a relationship with his or…
Sharing the Real, Live Love With McDonald’s
McDonald’s U.K. wants to engage with customers in a dialogue about the business. They want to know what people think, to encourage questions and provide answers. To what degree…
Consumers Don’t Think Retailers Are Listening
Many consumers share the experience of filling out a form or perhaps speaking with a department manager about products they should stock or other steps they could take to make…
Americans Gas Up at Big Boxes
New research from Market Force Information shows that consumers are driving past traditional oil company gas stations to fuel up at big box stores. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist…
BrainTrust Query: Men are from Mars, Retailers are from Venus
Last week the planet Venus made its transit across the face of the sun. That’s something like a solar eclipse by the moon, except much rarer and harder to observe…
Study: Customers Are Not Happy
Consumers of the world unite! The results are in and many are not happy with the service they’ve been getting from retailers. According to a report the level of satisfaction…
Starbucks Joins ‘Made in America’ Movement
It’s a small step from a manufacturing standpoint, but Starbucks is looking to do something big when it comes to putting Americans back to work. The company announced yesterday that…
The 800-Pound Gorilla is a Retail Myth
A new study by supply-chain researchers at the University of Arkansas shows relationships between major big box stores and their suppliers are collaborative in nature, rather than adversarial. Are relationships…
CPGmatters: New Opportunities for Growth in Grocery Center Store
Center store accounts for 75 percent of sales and 77 percent of profits, according to the Willard Bishop consulting firm. Yet using unobtrusive video cameras and customer tracking software, VideoMining…
The Return of Customer Service
Bringing product back, even to stores we frequent often, is not always easy. “Hassle-free returns and exchanges rank above average in terms of importance for shoppers but rank low in…
Retail TouchPoints: Retailers Focus On Testing In-Store Mobile POS and POP Solutions
According to a recent study from Motorola Solutions, 23 percent of retailers have mobile POS or POP solutions deployed. However, results point to more rigorous pilots of smartphone and tablet…
Consumers Don’t Want to Engage with Brands
According to a study involving more than 7,000 consumers from Corporate Executive Board, only 23 percent of consumers indicated they have a relationship with a brand, and for most consumers,…
WSJ Columnist: Penney’s Too Gay for Straight Shoppers
Forget the explanations from Wall Street analysts and retail industry experts about why J.C. Penney is having so many problems. A columnist for Dow Jones Newswires writing on The Wall…
BrainTrust Query: Will Google Shopping Force Small Merchants Into Oblivion?
Google Product Search is now morphing into a new pay-for-placement service called Google Shopping, changing a decade old organic search feature into a revenue based advertising tool. Is Google compromising…
Barnes & Noble Says E-Book Deal Bad for Company, Consumers
A proposed settlement of the government’s lawsuit against several book publishers for alleged price fixing would result in “higher overall average e-book and hardback prices and less choice, both in…
As the Best Buy Turns
Daytime dramas have nothing on Best Buy. The consumer electronics chain has seen market share steadily decline, former CEO Brian Dunn resign abruptly, and now Best Buy founder Richard Schulze…
Target Looks to Go Downtown
Walmart isn’t the only big box retailer looking to develop a smaller box alternative. Target, while not going to the extreme like Walmart Express, is looking at urban centers to…
FD Buyer: Kroger – A Lesson in Market Share
Why hasn’t Kroger seen the market share losses that other traditional grocers have through channel shifts in consumer spending? Kroger’s chairman and CEO believes it’s because the company takes a…
Kiosk Krazy
Yesterday’s vending machines are today’s technologically sophisticated kiosks and, they are popping up everywhere. Just look at news from the past week. How big a part will kiosks play in…
‘Sale’ No Longer a Four-Letter Word at Penney
Attention J.C. Penney shoppers: The department store chain, which had eliminated use of the term while trying to sell consumers on its new “fair and square” pricing strategy, is going…
