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Volume 4 - Issue 19
5/18/2010
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Death to Payroll as Percent of Sales
By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
When I proposed my title for is week's article, my esteemed colleagues laughed at me. It was not mean laughter. It was not even condescending. Rather, it was the kind of laughter you reserve for the earnestly insane. "Yes, dear, you go right ahead and charge that windmill."
Well, hopefully by the time you reach the end of this... Read more
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Say Hello to the Age of Assisted Service
By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner
Old friend Alan Lipson, now with Cisco Systems, recommended I watch a show on the History Channel. The title? “Supermarket.” I may be a Schmatta Girl at heart, but everyone loves supermarkets, and the history lesson was really fascinating. But the theme was an inexorable march towards self-service. We were led from the original concept of all food given to the customer by clerks behind the counter, to a future where food would go from shelf to cart to consumers’ cars virtually untouched by any in-store employee. The show was produced in 2005, so of course the driving technology behind this pure self-service world was item-level RFID, helped along by cart-mounted store maps to guide the customer around the store.
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IBM IMPACT: Clouds on the Horizon
By Brian Kilcourse, Managing Partner
In the Weather section of the morning paper, a forecast of “cloudy” usually means “prepare for a lousy day.” But in the context of today’s technology-enabled world, “clouds” are good things, and a way of easily explaining how technology works, as in, “it’s in the cloud.” In fact, the buzz-term “cloud” is now so overused as to have become, well… cloudy.
I remember a discussion with my retail CEO boss... Read more
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