With jobless claims spiking to 3.3 M last week and more states moving to “Stay at Home”, Covid-19 continues to wreak havoc across the U.S. Many retailers have displayed agility and innovation to quickly implement new tactics to keep business going as well as contribute
What a week! Covid-19 reaction hit the tipping point in the United States. As of Sunday, March 22, one in four Americans is required to stay at home unless seeking or providing an essential service. Most consumers in the rest of the country are voluntarily
Unprecedented. In my over three decades of covering and working in the retail industry, we have never seen anything like the impact of Coronavirus on the global retail scene. 9/11 temporarily ground business in the United States to a halt as fear and uncertainty gripped the
There have been two major developments with Amazon Go in the past few weeks. First, they opened a “jumbo” sized store (at least for a Go) in Seattle. And, they just announced that they would make the technology available to other retailers and just named
Less than three years ago, I was part of a consulting team that participated in a strategic planning retreat for Art Van Furniture’s senior management. At the time (mid 2017), the company was riding high: it was immensely profitable, growing fast, entering new markets and
News reports today indicate that Brandless, the SoftBank Vision Fund backed start-up, will shut down permanently. This news follows a tumultuous few years for the once promising start-up that offered high quality, “brandless” goods for a single fixed price point of $3. Brandless was an e-commerce
Greg Foran, the former CEO of Walmart U.S. said that “Retail Will Change More in the Next Five Years Than It Has in the Past 50 Years”. If he is even remotely correct, expect to see a rapidly shifting retail landscape as we enter a
As the Holiday season of 2019 winds to an end, I am going to use this time to look back and to look ahead. The 2010’s were a transformative decade for retail. While Retailmageddon didn’t exactly come to pass, we saw a significant slowdown in
A long wait is not the typical experience at Starbucks. But waiting is part of the journey at Starbucks’ newest Roastery on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. On a recent Friday – nearly three weeks after the Roastery opened - lattes were delivered six minutes after they
“Change (in China) is so dynamic” Walmart’s SVP of Cross Border Trade, Ben Hassing set the tone for the sixth annual Global E-Commerce Leaders Forum (GELF) NYC program. Hassing’s keynote presentation, “The Local of Global Ecommerce” shared his experience as the head of Ecommerce and Technology
