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Retail Paradox Weekly
Retail News Analysis by RSR Research
January 6, 2009
How Do You Talk About Winners When Almost No One Is?
By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner
1/6/2009
To almost no one’s surprise, retailers did not have a very happy holiday season. Though the final tally won’t be in for a few more days, it’s clear the top line was weak. Even the eChannel under-performed and experienced the second quarterly decline in the history of the web selling. In the darkness, initial major points of light appear to be Walmart and Amazon.com.
Of course, we have yet to hear the bottom lines or the full story of sell-through and... More
Collaboration: Now More Than Ever
By Brian Kilcourse, Managing Partner
1/6/2009
“Supply chain collaboration” is a true retail paradox. Retailers and manufacturers have held starkly different views of each other’s value in the extended retail ecosystem. But the idea that retailers and their partners in the retail ecosystem should work more closely together isn’t a new concept. For example, VICS (“Voluntary Inter-industry Commerce Solutions Association”) was constituted in 1986 to begin the development of cross-industry standards to enable technology-assisted collaboration. And although technology-aided collaboration really began to take form in the 1990’s with the ECR (“efficient consumer response”) movement in grocery, business ideas such as 3rd party consolidators (a model which inherently implies “collaboration,” particularly among manufacturers serving one or more retailers) have been around a lot longer – ever since global supply chains started to become SOP.
There have been many inhibitors... More
Pre NRF: The Calm Before The Storm?
By Steve Rowen, Managing Partner
1/6/2009
Happy New Year! Like many of you, we at RSR are taking care of last minute preparations for retail’s big show next week, the NRF Conference in New York. But that also means it’s been a fairly slow news week. Not much (and certainly not much good) retail-related news is released during the holiday season itself, and for those who do have stories to tell, they’re staying tight-lipped and holding them back to be released among the flurry of announcements from the show floor.
But the whole world... More
Happy New Year!
Your Friends at RSR Research
Copyright © 2009 RSR Research LLC. RSR is a tradename of Retail Systems Research LLC. All Rights Reserved
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