Sure, companies might pay retailers for favorable placement or fancy displays for their products, but how do they know whether those ads are working or the displays are set up as requested? Every day, there’s a flood of customers walking past those displays carrying tiny computers with good quality cameras on them. What do those two things have to do with each other? [More]
retail
Bankruptcy For RadioShack Is Probably Unavoidable
By 9.11.14
Wall Street analysts, the people who make big bucks keeping track of these things, say that bankruptcy for Radio Shack is probably inevitable. They were saying that after the retailer announced its quarterly results yesterday, losing money for the tenth straight quarter in a row. [More]
The Afterlife Of America’s Dead Malls
By 9.10.14
When a mall dies, what happens to its corpse? If the mall failed because of too much competition, renovating the mall space and building a new one doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. As America deals with the massive carcasses left over from the heyday of in-person commerce, dead malls are being re-used in many ways: some that you might expect, and others that you might not. [More]
The Fashion Industry Wants To Make Buying Ill-Fitting Clothes Easier
By 5.29.14
When you order clothes online, do you order two different sizes, figuring that one will fit you and you can take the other back? Joke’s on you, over-ordering person! That consumer behavior is one of the reasons why women’s clothing manufacturers are switching clothes from numbered sizes to small, medium, and large. [More]
Barnes & Noble Might Have Smaller Stores, Still Won’t Price-Match Own Website
By 4.18.14
It’s pretty intuitive that you don’t need a lot of retail floor space to sell e-books. Even a display of e-reader gadgets doesn’t take up as much room as shelf after shelf of books. that’s why absolutely no one should be surprised that Barnes & Noble might be considering stores with a smaller footprint. [More]
Sears Hometown Store Owner Refuses To Open On Thanksgiving Day
By 11.27.13
A Sears Hometown franchise owner is standing up to her corporate overlords and refusing to open on Thanksgiving. Opening their doors at 6 A.M. on Black Friday? Sure. No Brown Thursday at her store, though. [More]
Amazon Moves Right Into Suppliers’ Warehouses To Get Toilet Paper To Us Faster
By 10.15.13
Do you buy toilet paper, diapers, and shampoo over the Internet? Very few Americans do: about 2% of all non-food household staples are sold online. Amazon.com wants to change that. To make it cheaper and more convenient to ship bulky staples to your doorstep, Amazon has started to put their own mini warehouses right inside their suppliers’ facilities. [More]
CEO Equates Bricks-And-Mortar Retail With Sex, Says Neither Are Going Away
By 9.13.13
While some futurists predict an end to bricks-and-mortar retail shopping, with everyone shopping online and getting their purchases delivered (or 3-D printed) to their homes, there are an awful lot of people who still enjoy the experience of going out to the store and getting their shop on. And one retail tech CEO thinks that, like other human desires, the availability of the Internet can’t fully sate this lust for real-world shopping. [More]
Is Your Hair Acceptable For Abercrombie & Fitch?
September 3, 2013
Are the highlights in your hair sunkissed and subtle with complementary shading? Then maybe you can work for Abercrombie & Fitch. But those of you with “chunks of contrasting color” can go work at a store that doesn’t think plus-size consumers are the “not-so-cool kids.” [via Buzzfeed, which has many other details from the Abercrombie employee handbook] [More]
Walmart To Offer Employees’ Domestic Partners Health Insurance In 2014
By 8.27.13 — Updated: 8.28.13
This week, Walmart employees will receive a postcard in the mail with news that could be irrelevant or that could be life-changing. At the beginning of next year, the company will join most of the rest of the Fortune 500 in offering health, vision, and dental insurance benefits to the domestic partners of employees who are eligible. [More]
Target Expands To Canada, No One Really Likes It
By 8.20.13 — Updated: 1.19.15
Target opened its first stores in Canada earlier this year and plans to take over some now-closed Zellers locations. Now that it’s about six months into their tenure north of the border, how are they doing? Canadians aren’t really warming to Target, as it turns out. [More]
Why Does Everyone Love Costco So Much?
By 6.12.13
There aren’t a lot of shining successes in American’s most recent recession, but one company that has done well and even managed to grow is Costco. Why is that? The traditional wisdom is that customers love the prices and selection: for Consumerist readers, it’s also the return policy and the warranty extension. What’s the deal with why we love Costco so much? [More]
Kate Spade Store Demands Proof I Didn’t Steal My Wallet Before Repairing It
By 4.11.13 — Updated: 1.31.17
The zipper on Ali’s Kate Spade wallet would no longer zip. She likes the wallet, so she checked whether the company would repair it for her. They would! Yay! She made plans to bring it to the Kate Spade store at her local mall and send it off for repair from there. Only the store manager wouldn’t accept the wallet without some kind of proof that she had bought it…with an implied “proof that she hadn’t stolen it.” Here’s the funny thing: she writes that when her friend walked in the store and handed over the wallet for repair, she was not asked for a receipt or any proof. Oh, incidentally: Ali is black. Her friend is white. [More]
Survey Says: Retail Workers Feel Least Connected To Employers
By 2.4.13
While there are plenty of people working in all levels of retail who want to do a good job, a new survey shows that only half of U.S. retail workers have the sense that they are even moderately engaged with their jobs. [More]
What A Black Friday Logistics Disaster Looks Like From The Other Side Of The Register
By 11.27.12
We mere consumers sit here waving our credit cards, whining about how we missed this or that great holiday deal, or our orders were canceled. But what’s the winter shipping frenzy like on the other size of the counter? One employee of men’s clothing store Joseph A. Bank reached out to us to explain the chain’s Black Friday logistics mess from the other side of the register. In addition to regular in-person shopping frenzy traffic, employees had to fill online orders if they happened to have the inventory. This worked pretty well until orders started to come through in multiples. [More]
Missed Black Friday 2011? Don’t Worry, Most Retailers Are Selling Same Stuff At Same Sale Prices
By 11.14.12
Did you miss shopping Black Friday sales last year and have regretted it ever since? Don’t. Our friends over at NerdWallet nerded over this year’s “leaked” Black Friday ads and determined that so far, nine out of ten stores are offering the same exact items on sale at the same exact prices. [More]
How Retailers Can Turn Your Complaints Into Clothing You’ll Actually Buy
By 11.9.12
Usually when I’m caught commenting to a friend that “that shirt looks like my baby nephew threw up on it and then tossed glitter on it” by a store associate, I cringe. Because they work for that company and I just said something awful. But at some retailers, like Zara, sales associates actually take that kind of feedback to the powers that be so they can make clothing customers will want to buy. Fancy that. [More]
What Happens If You Try To Hold A Board Meeting In The Office Chair Department Of Staples?
By 10.25.12
Have you ever looked at the furniture set up in an office-supply store and asked yourself, “I wonder what would happen if I brought a group of people and tried to hold a business meeting here?” To be honest, neither had we, but that’s why we don’t run Improv Everywhere. The NYC-based group has staged events like the No-Pants Subway Ride and flooding a Best Buy store with ordinary shoppers wearing plain blue polo shirts to see what would happen. For their latest mission, they rounded up 24 middle-aged actors, put them in suits, and held a board meeting right in the furniture section. [More]
