Hospitality

Lighting plays a critical role in retail, and is rapidly evolving to meet changing regulations and customer needs. Dr. Laura Prestwood Thompson, director of the TCU Center for Lighting Education, Texas Christian University, discussed how stores and restaurants in 2025 will light their interiors and looked at the technologies and trends that will impact retail lighting during the SPECS workshop session, “Lighting 2025.”

“The quality of light is key,” Thompson said. “You create an aesthetic for your brand that impacts the customer experience.”

New York -- Online streaming video service Hulu will display interactive ads from Pizza Hut that will allow viewers to place orders on their computers or other devices right in the middle of the commercial.

Consumers will be able to place an order for pickup or delivery during the commercial, and then resume watching wherever they left off, according to the Washington Post. The ads will be shown on all platforms: desktop, mobile and internet-connected TV.

The Pizza Hut ads will debut this summer.

Pleasanton, Calif. - Prepaid payment network Blackhawk Network (Canada) Ltd. has launched its digital platform in the Canadian market, by offering Blackhawk's gift card products to Rogers' customers in the new Suretap wallet application. The application allows customers to safely store eligible payment and gift cards on their smartphones and make purchases directly from the phone by holding it up to contactless payment terminals. 

Retailers are taking advantage of the mobile channel for an increasing number of activities, including personalized marketing, in-store traffic monitoring and customer recognition. However, while using the mobile channel to create temporary POS stations might be less flashy than some of these other applications, letting customers “surf” between fixed and mobile POS terminals can be an effective means of improving both the customer experience and store profitability.

A Night at the Opera

Columbus, Ohio — State Street Capital Realty, an independent brokerage of Casto, has announced its recent listing for the retail portion of The View on Fifth in the Grandview area of Columbus, Ohio.

Under development by JSDI Celmark, Ltd., The View on Fifth is a mixed-use six-story project that will include 25,000 sq. ft. of retail shops and restaurants, a freestanding six-story parking garage and 285 luxury apartment residences — with one-to-four bedrooms.

Sydney, Australia - Quick Service Restaurant Holdings (QSRH) has selected Micros Simphony for its three Australian brands, Red Rooster, Oporto, and Chicken Treat. The cloud-based Micros Simphony Enterprise solution, to be self-hosted and systematically implemented across 550-plus stores, will include point of sale, labor and the Micros Kitchen Display System (KDS).

New York — Vanguard Wine Bar has signed a 12-year lease for a 1,000-sq.-ft. ground-floor space at 189 Amsterdam Avenue between 68th and 69th Streets in New York City’s Upper West Side. It will be Vanguard’s second Manhattan location.

RKF represented both the tenant and the landlord, Ogden CAP Properties, in the transaction.

San Francisco - Revel Systems, has introduced a new hardware and software product bundle aimed at providing technology features for the visually impaired. The inherent touch-screen nature of iPad POS terminals are without tactile qualities, making them not fully accessible and independently usable by the visually impaired.