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Volume 4 - Issue 25
7/13/2010
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Irrational Sku Rationalization: Why it Fails
By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner
SKU rationalization is all the rage these days. We all know that Walmart over-rationalized, and was forced to backtrack, but as recently as Friday, Jewel-Osco reported a successful SKU reduction of 15-25% in a Chicago test market. Parent company Supervalu touts the “process driven” nature of this round of rationalization, and is convinced that in the end, it will be easier for consumers to find what they want and market basket size will actually increase. We think there’s more than a grain of truth in this statement, but also more than a few pebbles of caveats. Some of these pebbles are rising to the surface in our soon-to-be-published merchandising benchmark report.
First off – our view of SKU rationalization... Read more
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Connecting the Store to the Omni-Channel: A Cautionary Tale
By Brian Kilcourse, Managing Partner
There’s been a certain amount of buzz about e-mailed receipts from the store as one of the “next big things”. Since the Apple Store started it early in the 2000’s, the idea has been touted as fundamentally “green”, “customer-centric”, and “cross channel”. All of that is good, and based on my personal experiences at the Apple Store, pretty cool.
That being said, implementation of store-level e-receipts delivered as e-mail... Read more
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Stores Say They Need an Employee That Isn’t Quite ‘Yet’ - Yet
By Steve Rowen, Managing Partner
Last week we released our annual report on in-store technologies, The Customer-Centric Store 2010: How Retailers Engage Tech-enabled Customers. We wanted to know how stores plan to contend with a smart phone-armed customer who has more power in her hand than does any employee in the store. What we found was actually quite surprising. First, retailers clearly recognize the in-store customer experience is in dire need of refinement – and soon.
However, while 73% of respondents tell us this is the most important opportunity they face this year, it is their united view of the means to that end that is so fascinating...
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