Tag Archives: retail

High Street is dead and it’s all your fault

Within a week three big and well established UK retail chains will more than likely disappear for good. For Jessops that’s already happened, for HMV and now Blockbuster it’s about to. It continues the trend from the last couple of years that the High Street is dying and dying fast, for goods that can be […]

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The Mayans were only partially wrong

So we’ve survived the Mayan Apocalypse and a passion-filled election here in the U.S. only to face the “Fiscal Cliff”…will our troubles never end? New years are a chance for new starts so it would be great to start the year looking forward to something other than disaster. For us, there are many reasons to […]

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Facebook will do just fine

The naysayers became a deafening roar from the moment Facebook’s IPO failed to skyrocket in May of this year. It was stunning how quickly the darling of Wall Street became trailer trash. But look no further than yesterday, when the lockup period ended and insiders could sell 850 million shares. Some did but the stock […]

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Don’t trade convenience for connection

Ben Zoldan wrote an interesting viewpoint on the effect of the mobility trend, in that becoming social and mobile is eroding the art of connection and communication. On the flipside, Brian Solis, a recognised marketing expert called the latest generation of consumers Gen C in a recent article, C standing for Connected. The truth is […]

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When process goes wrong

I recently wrote about a great customer service experience. It isn’t always quite that good… It seems every year I get to experience at least one business process that goes horribly wrong. Here’s the latest, with names removed to protect the guilty. I purchased a new laptop back in June. At the same time, I […]

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When Process Goes Right

I’m sitting at the Denver International Airport with a big smile on my face. I flew into a large, unfamiliar airport and could have had a tough time. Keep in mind my airport of choice is John Wayne in Orange County with just 12 gates and in and out in 20 minutes. I’m spoiled. My […]

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You can increase efficiency even when nothing else works

The bigger the enterprise, the more the division of labor between various departments. These divisions end up being enormous barriers to efficient exchange of information and ideas for ways to improve the way is business done. What happens instead is smaller, less-effective changes at low levels of process or information flow. This is a timeless […]

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Cash has become so Square

Unless you’re turned off to the media world, you know that Square received $25M investment from Starbucks yesterday and very soon will be processing your credit or debit card at over half the Starbucks in the US. If Forbes has it right, Square and Starbucks will let you mention your name to the cashier and by knowing […]

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The new detail of retail

Retail has gone through enormous stresses in the past decade, with more to come. Just the normal ups and downs of local and global economies, supply chains and personal taste are a huge challenge. Add to that mix the increasing maturation of concepts like e-Commerce, Big Data, RFID and mobile. Each of these would be […]

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Big Data isn’t nearly enough

The simple act of making an offer to a prospective buyer is as old as commerce itself, but with the help of information technology, is taking an enormous turn. The disruption will be enormous. My wife and I go to the grocery store quite a bit. Sure, we need to eat, but also love to […]

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