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Commentary and Discussion From the Retail Community
Brown & Cole’s CEO Breaks From The Pack
Craig Cole, chief executive officer of the Brown & Cole grocery chain, isn’t looking to join with Albertsons, Kroger and Safeway in playing hardball with the United Food and Commercial…
Retailer: 65 Percent Of Emails Were Junk
As Aksh Shinh tells it, after joining the arts and crafts retailer A.C. Moore as a senior system engineer in 2002, he quickly learned the chain’s executives and employees were…
Wal-Mart To Offer Second Doughnut Shop Option
They won’t be sold in the same stores, but Wal-Mart shoppers may soon have the choice of visiting a location based on the doughnut brand they prefer. Which food service…
The High Price Of Ice Cream
Numerous stories have been written on the escalating prices of dairy products and how consumers will react to having to pay more for items such as milk and ice cream…
Fair Trade Java To Get Storefronts
The British charity organization, Oxfam, and the UK coffee roaster, Matthew Algie, announced plans yesterday to launch a chain of fair trade coffee shops called Progreso. The parties plan to…
America Is Getting Video-Gamed Out
You couldn’t tell it by the amount of hours logged on televisions and computers each month in the typical suburban American home, but sales of video games are dropping –…
Wal-Mart Listens To Customers Online, Too
A Bloomberg news service report says analysts are looking for Wal-Mart to report a rise in first-quarter profits of 13 percent with a bottom line boost coming from new services,…
Does Your ‘American’ Brand Need Bilingual Labeling?
You ask if it’s necessary to have bilingual packaging when targeting Hispanics. Well consider, based on the latest 2002 Census estimates, that the Hispanic population has grown to 38.8 million,…
Stewart Seeks Get Out Of Jail Pass on Workers
Martha Stewart and her legal counsel have to be asking themselves, ‘With friends and business associates like Sharon Patrick, who needs enemies?’ What are your thoughts on the Martha Stewart’s…
Target To Summer In Hamptons
Target is going on location in New York again and this time, instead of setting up shop on a ship docked in Manhattan, it is going out to an inn…
FMI 2004: The Good, The Bad and The Low Carb
Last week’s FMI convention was a reminder of many things right about trade shows — there was widespread networking, hundreds of new products and services, and several very good workshops…
Supermarket For Welfare Recipients
An interesting social experiment is taking place in Düsseldorf, Germany where a grocery store, stocked by donations of out-of-date and damaged products from local wholesalers and retailers, has been opened…
Starbucks Is Target of Firebombing
A Starbucks scheduled to open in the Hosford-Abernethy neighborhood of Portland had windows broken and a Molotov cocktail thrown at it last week. The store has been at the center…
Loyalty to Go
According to Matthew Kauffman, writing April 7th for The Hartford Courant, the Happy Meals program was launched in 1977 when, “…a franchisee in St. Louis asked his advertising agency to…
Morning-After Pill Not Going OTC
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has gone against the recommendations of its own scientific advisors by deciding to withhold approval for the over-the-counter (OTC) sale of the so-called morning-after…
NRF: Schumer Amendment Will Backfire
The National Retail Federation (NRF) is lobbying senators to reject a proposed amendment to S. 1637, the Jumpstart Our Business Strength Act, that would add levies to goods made in…
Of Pacesetters and Transformational New Products
Packaged salad…soy milk…restaurant-to-retail food. These, according to Valerie Skala, VP, Analytic Product Management, Information Resources, Inc., are landmark “transformational” products of recent times.With thousands of products competing for retail real…
Retail’s High-End Food Opportunity
Attending the conglomeration of food shows led by the FMI (Food Marketing Institute) convention this week, Al McClain wondered if enough attention is being given to the unique opportunity of…
CVS CEO: Legalize Canadian Rx Imports
Thomas Ryan, chairman and chief executive officer, CVS, said the high cost of prescription medicines here in the U.S. made it inevitable that people would seek to obtain drugs from…
Seeing Opportunity in Hispanic Shopper Behavior
During our presentation on Monday at the FMI Conference, we introduced some of the results from a new research study of 1,650 Hispanic shoppers, co-sponsored by ADVO, FMI and New…
Inspirational Retailing: How to Survive in a Wal-Mart World
The Wal-Mart juggernaut has been a wake-up call for most retailers. In a recent survey of retailers, the New England Consulting Group (NECG) found that most retailers are obsessed with…
