Newsletter Articles
Global Retailing Conference: ‘Everything Is Retail’
23 April 2013, 10:11
The Global Retailing Conference, hosted by the University of Arizona Terry J. Lundgren Center For Retailing, is a concentrated dive into the state of retailing from the perspective of the executive suite. The conference is both a gathering place for business leaders from throughout the industry, and a teaching opportunity; in addition to all the [...]
ARTS Founder Richard Mader: On Standards, Mobile, and RBTE
12 February 2013, 13:50
For those of us who know him, saying that Richard Mader, Director Emeritus of the Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS, a division of the National Retail Federation), is “outspoken” is a bit of an understatement. It is the force of his character – and his vision – that made the organization such an influential [...]
Postscript NRF
29 January 2013, 11:10
Last week, RSR did a post-NRF debrief, highlighting the über themes from the Big Show conference/expo in NYC. You can absorb the messages from the big event on many levels. For example, there were plenty of shiny objects to get excited about. The Expo floor was chock full of them– lots of exciting technologies, that [...]
Something New for The New Year
8 January 2013, 11:05
Retail Paradox Weekly will be absent next week, but not because we’re slacking off: on the contrary, all four partners will be traveling to New York City for the annual NRF Big Show, and we’re taking a slightly different approach to our coverage this year. Regular RPW readers know that we cover the Big Show [...]
California: Much Ado about Not Much
27 November 2012, 11:09
Auburn, CA is different in many ways from the San Francisco Bay Area town that I live and work in. Aside from the obvious geographic differences, there are differences in lifestyle and income. According to various cost-of-living calculators available on the web, Auburn’s cost-of-living is about 78% of Walnut Creek’s (a suburb of San Francisco [...]
VISA/MasterCard Settlement: Damned by Faint Praise
24 July 2012, 12:50
The News On July 14th, payment network operators VISA and MasterCard announced that they had agreed to pay over $6B to settle a complaint dating back to 2005, when several large retailers, including grocers Kroger, Safeway and drugstore giant Walgreen, filed price-fixing lawsuits against the two large card networks (American Express and Discover were not [...]
Retailers and HealthCare: Opinions, Facts, and Inferences
3 July 2012, 09:00
Opinions With the big announcement last week that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled favorably on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly referred to as “Obamacare”, the two big trade organizations in the U.S., the National Retail Federation (NRF) and the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) were quick to react, although the [...]
The Retail IT Brain Drain: Shouldn’t Retail Mean These Jobs Too?
19 June 2012, 09:35
Last week I attended RIS News’ Retail Executive Summit in San Diego, CA. The venue couldn’t have been more beautiful (The Grand Del Mar), the content was strong and attendance impressive. While the subject of IT staffing was not on the agenda, it came up so often in the course of conversation that I had [...]
Jobs vs. Careers in Retail
8 May 2012, 12:31
In a typical RSR “Selling Technology Value to Retailers” (STV) session, we can have 25 technology sales representatives in a room, ready to get an infusion of inside information that will help them to understand “what makes retailers tick”. We’ll start the session with round-the-table introductions, and two questions we ask the participants are, “have [...]
With Fuel Prices Rising, Will Green ‘Reemerge’?
8 May 2012, 12:24
When fuel prices skyrocketed back in 2008, “green” was everywhere . Advertisements, television shows, consumer goods – all were being presented through a lens that used a greener filter than anything we’d seen before. For RSR, it became the perfect opportunity to benchmark the retail industry’s overall feelings and actions about environmentally sustainable practices, a [...]