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Retail Paradox Weekly
Retail News Analysis by RSR Research
September 19, 2007
The Customer is King, but the Shareholder is God
By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner
9/19/2007
This survey brought yet another 21st century retail paradox into sharp relief…the need to satisfy the customer by reducing out-of-stocks vs. the need to satisfy shareholders through making better use of working capital by reducing inventory and improving turn. More...
What Future for Pricing Solutions?
By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
9/19/2007
DemandTec went public last month, debuting at $11 per share and closing the day at $9.09. The stock has hovered around $10 per share ever since. Is this it for pricing solutions? Have they reached their peak – is the DemandTec IPO the sound of pricing solutions jumping the shark?
I don’t think so. First, there are a lot of reasons why DemandTec’s share price has languished, starting with the fact that the company has yet to turn a profit. Tech companies are also only just starting to jump back into the IPO waters after a long dry spell, so it’s unsurprising that investors are a little gun-shy. More...
Consumer Product Safety: It's an Ecosystm Issue
By Brian Kilcourse, Managing Partner
9/19/2007
This week, Mattel’s Robert Eckert apologized for problems that have resulted in the recall of 21 million lead-tainted toys. While denying that Mattel responded too slowly to the crisis, Eckert said the company supports strengthening the U.S. Government’s Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). Jerry Storch, CEO of Toys’R’Us, echoed that sentiment to a U.S. Senate Appropriations subcommittee on 9/12.
Once again, the finger of accountability seems to be pointing toward lax regulatory protections as one of the big culprits in this most recent failure to protect consumers. The news media has picked up on this thread, recently reporting that budget cuts in the past several years have reduced the CPSC to less than 500 employees to monitor product safety on behalf of consumers. The U.S. Administration’s overall attitude towards regulatory safety nets is that it is more cost effective for industries to regulate themselves than it is for government to regulate industries. More...
About this Newsletter: Why Retail Paradox
By Brian, Nikki, Paula and Steve
Welcome to another brand new edition of Retail Paradox, where we’ll explore the difficult choices faced by retailers and their partners in the 21st century. This weekly newsletter is brought to you by RSR Research, the only research firm run by retailers for the retail industry. We hope you’ll find our articles relevant, informative, edgy, and provocative. Our goal is simple, but ambitious: we want to identify and articulate processes and technologies retailers need to improve their business and give clear and concise examples of how retail winners do just that.
On the surface, this seems quite straightforward…and it’s easy to pontificate on what retailers should do. Experience shows us otherwise: retailers live in a world of paradox, and breaking this paradox has become the vision quest for retailers both extraordinarily large, and microscopically small. More....
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Copyright © 2007 RSR Research LLC. RSR is a tradename of Retail Systems Research LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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