RPW 4-15-08

Retail Paradox Weekly

Retail News Analysis by RSR Research

April 15, 2008

Six Big Challenges for Wal-Mart

By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
4/15/2008

Last week at the World Retail Congress in Barcelona , one of the last speakers was Jack Shewmaker, member of Wal-Mart’s Board of Directors, and former executive. It was shame he was last, though I suspect that the conference organizers put him near the end in order to try to hold people through to the last day. It didn’t work, unfortunately, and there were few people to hear his message.

In his very folksy way... More

First Insight: Can Retailers Expand Beyond Social Networks to Include Store Employees?

By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner
4/15/2008

Last week I got a call from old friend and colleague Greg Girard about his new venture – First Insight. The elevator pitch is straight forward enough: “Social Networks Meet Design and Merchandising.” Essentially, along with a predictive analytic engine, First Insight manages a visualization engine-driven social network that awards prizes for those consumer members who can identify the hottest trends of fast fashion retailers (who also happen to be First Insight’s customers).

During our call, I had an insight of my own... More

Why Green? You Might be Surprised

By Steve Rowen, Partner
4/15/2008

RSR is preparing to release its first ever benchmark report investigating retailers’ environmentally-sound practices, What Can Green Do for You? The results of one particular aspect of the study are quite interesting.

In the Business Challenges section of our framework, we asked our respondents why they’ve proactively invested in green technologies. The overwhelming response from winning retailers (those who already outperform their peers)... More

Myth vs. Reality: How Mid-tiered Retailers Position IT

By Brian Kilcourse, Managing Partner
4/15/2008

Before fifteen years ago, retailers with less than $1B in annual sales were challenged to do much of anything with information technology beyond basic backoffice functions. Assuming that a retailer had about 1% of sales to devote to the IT function, a $1B retailer could support a $10M P&L load from running the IT shop. To put that into perspective, an air-cooled IBM Mainframe installation would probably use up something in the area of $500,000 in maintenance and depreciation alone, or 5% of the total IT budget, and that’s not counting all the peripherals that were probably attached to it or the cost of the physical environment, with its coolers, power backup systems, etc. etc.