Research Topic

MINNEAPOLIS — During the Super Bowl, football fans look forward to guilt-free snacking and will fumble on healthy eating goals for the day, according to the 2011 Supervalu Snack Down Survey by Harris Interactive.

Mountain View, Calif. -- Survey results released Tuesday by CyberSource, a Visa Co., showed that the online fraud rate has remained flat in the United States and Canada; however, U.K. merchants are seeing a rise in e-commerce fraud.

According to the annual surveys of e-commerce fraud in North America and the United Kingdom, the 2010 fraud rate (the percent of accepted orders which later turn out to be fraudulent) remained at 0.9% for the second straight year.

By George F. Brown, Jr., [email protected]

The increased pace of merger and acquisition activity late in 2010, including some huge deals, suggests that 2011 will be an active year. Low interest rates, significant cash on many firms’ balance sheets, and stock prices that are low enough to attract buyers but high enough to move sellers off the sidelines all reinforce that possibility.

New York City -- Consumer spending will rise 3% this year, according to retail analysts at S&P Equity Research. While the majority of publicly traded retailers were able to capture share in 2010 from smaller competitors or those that were forced to declare bankruptcy, and also increase profit margins, the S&P retail analysts see 2011 as another good year.

Washington, D.C. -- Import cargo volume at the nation’s major retail container ports is expected to be up 8% in January over the same month last year, according to the monthly Global Port Tracker report released by NRF and Hackett Associates.

Boston -- Retailers identified mobile POS technologies as a quickly emerging trend, with more than half planning to launch mobile solutions within the next two years, according to Boston Retail Partner’s 12th Annual POS Survey.

Washington, D.C. -- Retail sales rose for a sixth consecutive month in December, with big gains in sales of autos and furniture. The increases lifted sales activity for the year by the largest amount in more than a decade.

Sales rose 0.6% last month to a level of $381 billion, the Commerce Department said Friday, less than the 0.8% economists had expected. However, the increase pushed sales for all of 2010 up 6.7%, the largest annual increase since 1999. Excluding autos, retail sales rose 0.5% last month.

The Dec. 23 edition of SiteTalk referenced a recent survey, which found that driving responsible growth, in addition to protecting and building the brand, is a chief priority for retailers in 2011. We asked you, our readers, if that priority was consistent with your 2011 objectives. Here is what one reader had to say.