Underscoring the many challenges facing the department store sector, Kohl’s, J.C. Penney and Nordstrom all last week reported disappointing first-quarter earnings. What are the toughest hurdles the basic department store model faces as its remaining players work to reinvent themselves?
Move over Amazon.com and Walmart — Target wants a bigger piece of the retail advertising pie. Will owning advertising businesses become a major competitive advantage for large retailers such as Amazon, Target and Walmart?
With summer just around the corner, many retailers are in full-force seasonal hiring mode. Yet beyond finding solid candidates to work your selling floor, shouldn’t it be just as important to train them? What tips would you have for getting the most out of seasonal hires?
Facial recognition technology has many practical applications. But while these use cases seem reasonable to most people, not everyone is enamored with facial recognition technology or how it’s being used. Are the benefits of facial recognition technology more trouble than they are worth for retailers?
The NPS is a metric used by management to determine customer satisfaction or lack thereof with a company at a given point in time. But unlike traditional consumer surveys, the NPS process is intended to correlate to business growth. Are retailers using the Net Promoter Score metric properly or misusing it?
Some big retailers are working with a startup that’s putting a 21st century twist on a classic method of making packaging reusable — a pick-up service akin to the one used by the mid-20th century milkman. What factors will determine if customers make the decision to sign up for a service like Loop?
Sales promotions, product launches and best practices from headquarters aren’t being heard and acted upon consistently by stores. What advice would you have for improving communications between headquarters and individual stores?
A new women’s clothing rental startup, Haverdash, is billing its $59 a month subscription plan as the most affordable unlimited rental service on the market. How big an impediment is price for consumers subscribing to monthly clothing rental services, and what’s the right price point?
Fine-tuning data science solutions to optimize results has been the easy part. Taking advantage of the new insights is the more complicated task, said IT execs at the 2019 Retail Innovation Conference. How can retailers reduce the learning curve around machine learning or AI tools for marketing, merchandising and other departments?
Bernie Sanders is not a fan of Walmart’s business practices and plans to attend Walmart’s annual shareholder meeting to introduce new shareholder proposals. Do you think retailers would benefit from having store associates represented on company boards?
