Data & Analytics

New York — RKF has been selected as the exclusive retail leasing agent for The Factory, a one-million-square-foot, multi-tenant commercial building located in Long Island City, Queens. Situated in the Hunter’s Point section of Long Island City, the retail space at The Factory consists of 23,564-sq.-ft. on the ground floor and 21,854-sq.-ft. on the building’s lower level.

RKF executive VP Barry Fishbach and director Young Kim are bringing the opportunity to market for Atlas Capital Group, who recently acquired the property.

New York — Chico’s FAS Inc. has partnered with Borderfree to expand its e-commerce capabilities globally. Through this partnership, Chico’s FAS will now be able to transact with shoppers in more than 100 countries and territories worldwide in more than 60 global currencies.

Carle Place, N.Y. — 1-800-Flowers.com net income jumped to $3.1 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014 compared to $538,000 in the previous year period. Continued focus on leveraging its operating platform helped boost net income.

San Diego – For the month of August 2014, net sales at PriceSmart Inc. increased 7.3% to $206.7 million, from $192.6 million in August a year earlier. Same-store sales for the month increased 2.3%.

PriceSmart also announced the planned opening dates for the three warehouse clubs currently under construction in Colombia. The Bogota warehouse club is planned to open on Oct. 29; the Pereira warehouse club is planned to open on Nov. 13; and the Medellin warehouse club is planned to open on Nov. 26.

San Jose, Calif. – Retail performance has continued to improve throughout 2014. According to the RetailNext Composite Index analyzing more than 15 million shopping trips across specialty and larger format retail stores within the U.S., the Consumer Confidence Index (CCI) rising for the fourth month is a positive sign for retailers going into fall season, and is reflected in uptick in conversion and sales per store of .4% and 4.2%, respectively.

By John Gessau, ACI Worldwide

With the news of the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch debuting with mobile wallet capabilities in the marketplace, Apple’s announcement has given the (mobile) payments industry a boost, no doubt about it. But in what direction, and what are the implications for retailers?

North Palm Beach, Fla. – Despite prevailing expert opinion that mobile payments are popular with modern consumers, this may not actually be the case. A new survey of U.S. consumers conducted by Princeton Research Associates for Creditcards.com shows that only 4% of Americans say they would always use their mobile phone to make a purchase and only 9% said “most of the time.”

Nashville, Tenn. – Cognitive computing provider Digital Reasoning has released Synthesys 3.9, the latest release of its machine learning platform for analyzing human language data at scale. Synthesys 3.9 provides capabilities to detect key risk and performance indicators in human communication and automatically connect and aggregate information based on those indicators.