Walmart: Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came?
By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner

Lately there has been talk in the media of Walmart’s “roll-back” pricing setting off a grocery price war. Since April, we have read reports of roll-backs on more than 10,000 grocery skus, and the Associated Press reports Target is rushing to match those cuts. What happened to “Save Money…Live Better”? And, even more importantly “Will the supermarket industry follow?” and “Haven’t we seen this movie before?”

Everyone, including RSR assumed 2009 was...  Read more

Preliminary Findings from the New 'Omni-Channel' Shopper Study
By Brian Kilcourse, Managing Partner

IBM offers a useful model to explain how consumers shop: they investigate products and services, then select the solution that most fits their needs, then pay for the selected goods and services, and ultimately take possession of the chosen solution. Prior to the widespread consumer adoption of the Internet as an information resource (let’s put that date at 1995, when browser pioneer Netscape IPO’ed), all of those activities usually happened in the store, and usually in one trip. Shoppers would typically walk into a store, take a look around to see what was being promoted or featured, compare the features and prices of what was being offered, make their selections, go through the checkout process, and walk out the door with our new purchases – very simple!

In 1995, all of that began to change...  Read more

Store Meets Information Theory
By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner

The worlds of my life converge in odd ways. A couple of weeks ago, I was in Chicago with Motorola, doing prep work on a webinar that we'll broadcast at the end of June via Chain Store Age. It was all about integrated voice in retail, with particular emphasis on voice-enabling the store employee. Just the week before, I purchased a fascinating - I mean, amateur ultra-geek level fascinating - book, Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos.

What do these two completely random things have in common?...  Read more