Research Topic

Consumers who love chocolate may have been waiting for the day someone unveiled a chocolate 3-D printer. Well, thanks to Hershey Co., that day has come.

The company has announced the debut of its 3-D Chocolate Candy Printing exhibit at Hershey’s Chocolate World in Hershey, Pa. Consumers who visit the store will have the opportunity to interact with Hershey scientists and the breakthrough technology.

Seattle - Starbucks Corp. anticipates record purchases of Starbucks gift cards on Dec. 24, citing the trend for customers to push their gift card purchases later and later. In 2013, more than 2 million Starbucks Cards were purchased in the U.S. and Canada on Christmas Eve, representing nearly 1,500 cards purchased per minute.  

BOSTON - Payments made via near field communications (NFC)-enabled mobile handsets will account for $130 billion in worldwide consumer retail spend by 2020, according to a study by Strategy Analytics. This equates to 254 million mobile users making five payments per month at an average of just below $9 per transaction.   

London, U.K. – Phone calls may seem obsolete in this text- and online-based age, but U.S. consumers are still making the call when they purchase items. According to a new study from call-based marketing automation company ResponseTap, consumers in the U.S. are more than twice as likely to make a phone call when making a purchase, as opposed to purely transacting online.   

Gift cards and clothing top the lists of holiday shoppers this year, according to a new Harris Poll conducted for Macy's.

Seattle – Top executives of Starbucks Corp., including chairman, president and CEO Howard Schultz, reportedly sold a combined total of 448,320 company shares for about $37.54 million, an average of $83.74 each, on Dec. 9 and 10, 2014. According to Barrons.com, Schultz exercised options and sold shares for a total of $28.95 million, and also gifted 175,000 shares, leaving him holding about 16.78 million shares.  

New York – The top holiday purchase items this year range from the less personal to the very personal. According to a recent online survey conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of Macy’s among nearly 1,700 U.S. adults 18 and older who are holiday shoppers, gift cards (61%) and clothing (52%) top the list when it comes to the types of gifts that holiday shoppers plan to buy this season.    Other popular holiday items include:  

Los Angeles – Three out of four (76%) online buyers are dissatisfied with the strength of credit card and personal information security among retailers. According to a new survey of 6,200 online consumers aross all generations and both genders from Bizrate Insights, a shopper’s own bank is trusted the most with credit card data and personally identifiable information (72%).