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Commentary and Discussion From the Retail Community
P&G CEO Advises Candidates to Stay Positive
Procter & Gamble’s chairman and chief executive A.G. Lafley wants the future President of the United States, whomever that may turn out to be, to remember that there is a…
Retail Crime Fighters
How worried are retailers about crime? Retail shrinkage accounted for $34 billion in 2007, according to the preliminary results of the National Retail Security Survey presented at the recent NRF…
Speculators Blamed for High Gas Prices
Michael Masters, portfolio manager of the Masters Capital Management hedge fund, thinks Americans are getting hosed at the gas pump. According to Mr. Masters and others, the price for a…
Hygiene Ratings Suggested For U.K. Supermarkets
Tesco, Sainsbury and Asda have all protested the ways and means that might be used to measure their food hygiene standards under a current proposal from the Britain’s Food Standards…
Letting Pricing Help Guide Assortments
DemandTec has come up with an assortment optimization solution providing enhanced functionality for retailers to understand shopper behavior, which specifically promises to enable pricing analysis to play a much larger…
Another Setback for In-Store Clinics
A May 7 piece on the Wall Street Journal’s website discussed how the bloom was off the walk-in clinic rose in retail stores. Now, comes word that another operator has…
Study: Self-Service Transactions to Triple by 2012
A new study from the IHL Group projects that transactions at self-service kiosks in North America will top $607 billion this year and grow to over $1.7 trillion by 2012…
BrainTrust Query: How is the food supply chain adapting to the new cost environment?
Weak Links in the Food (Supply) Chain – That was the headline for an article appearing in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. It explored how participants in the distribution of food…
Amazon.com Invades Staples’ Territory
Amazon still has plenty of product categories to conquer and its latest target is the office supplies market. The online giant announced it has launched its own office supplies store…
Groups Urge EPA to Reverse Course on Biofuels
A coalition of food and retail industry groups has joined together to send a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) urging it to revise the food-to-fuel mandates included…
Willie Randolph and the Art of Firing
The firing of Willie Randolph by the New York Mets has been widely seen as a colossal human resources disaster. Yet it also provided lessons across corporate America on the…
Offline Still Driving Direct Marketing Campaigns
According to a survey from the Direct Marketing Association, five out of the top six shares of direct marketing budgets go to offline media like direct mail, catalog, direct response…
Retailers Try to Control Overseas Manufacturers
For the past few years, retailers in the U.S. and Europe have reassured consumers about their overseas manufacturers’ working conditions and have particularly emphasized steps taken to eliminate child labor…
Supply Chain Digest: Companies Pulling Out All Guns to Thwart Counterfeit Goods
The International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition estimates that the level of counterfeiting has grown more than 10,000 percent over the past two decades, spurred on by globalization and rising economies among developing…
Retiring to Retail
According to a study from the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research group based in Washington, D.C., nearly 350,000 senior men and women earn paychecks in the nation’s stores. The reason…
Retailers Backing Out of Shopping Centers
The combination of increased construction costs along with the prospect of slowing sales growth has led some retailers to pull out of planned shopping center projects. Others that continue to…
Elle Survey: Eight Percent of Women ‘Recession-Proof’
According to a survey commissioned by Elle Magazine, eight percent of all women in the U.S. are “recession proof” shoppers. At the median age of 29, this shopper is affluent…
Best Buy, Toys “R” Us Feeling Good About the Holidays
There’s plenty of gloom to go around these days. It’s for that reason that two separate reports coming out of the Reuters Consumer and Retail Summit are of interest because…
Grocery Rivals Share Rides
The consumer products business is pretty competitive and you don’t expect to see rivals working together today. Over in the U.K., it would appear to be “expect the unexpected” time…
CPGmatters: Retail Study Tracks Behavior of Online Printers
Online coupon users tend to be younger, have larger households, and are wealthier and better educated than clippers of newspaper FSIs and the general population. Eight of ten of these…
McD’s Franchisees Unhappy Over Giveaways
Talk to some people and they’ll tell you, “You’ve got to give something to get something.” Others, on the other hand, will remind you, “There’s no such thing as a…
