Data & Analytics

Sears has opened a new connected home flagship store near Silicon Valley and Ryan Ciovacco, president of consumer electronics and connected solutions, spoke with Retailing Today about the major initiative.

Online pricing intelligence provider 360pi compared Amazon.com and Walmart.com prices earlier this year in a dynamic pricing study and discovered Walmart changed its prices more often than Amazon.

The company looked at Amazon.com and Walmart.com prices comparing a basket of grocery pantry/household items spanning a number of CPG brands with a non-grocery basket (such as toys, electronics and tools) shopped on Amazon.com and Walmart.com between April 9 and June 9, 2015.

Three key finding from the report were:

The largest supermarket operator in the United States is on fire, so it makes sense that the Kroger Co. approved its first stock split in 16 years and a 13.5% dividend increase.

The company announced that its board of directors approved an increase to the company's quarterly dividend, a two-for-one split of its common shares, and a new $500 million share repurchase program.

North Plainfield, N. J. -- Nearly one-third (31.1% ) of retailers report that their companies have opened or will open new stores this year, according to a survey by retail real estate management firm Levin Management. It is the highest mid-year percentage in the four years for which comparative Levin survey data is available.

San Jose, Calif. – Digital technology stands ready to significantly disrupt retail and many other industries, yet many companies are not showing concern.  

New York -- Walmart’s Neighborhood Markets format offers a compelling source of new sales growth for the nation’s largest retailer, according to a report by Moody’s.

Despite strategic shifts to compete more successfully with the company, traditional supermarkets will feel the pressure as Walmart moves to increase its already dominant share of the US grocery segment.

New York -- An investigation of Whole Foods Market stores in New York City has found systemic overcharging of its customers for prepackaged food.

The city's Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) said some Whole Foods stores routinely overstated the weights of its pre-packaged products – including meats, dairy and baked goods – resulting in customers being overcharged. DCA tested packages of 80 different types of pre-packaged products and found all of the products had packages with mislabeled weights.

Armonk, N.Y. – IBM and Box are launching a global, cloud-based partnership that will integrate their existing products and services and develop new solutions targeted across industries including retail. The strategic alliance brings together Box’s cloud content collaboration platform with IBM Analytics and social solutions, IBM security technologies and the global IBM cloud.

At the recent MIT CIO Symposium, Bryan Kirschner, director of the research/strategy organization Apigee Institute, and Jerry Wolfe, CEO and founder of food industry platform services provider Vivanda, participated in a panel discussion on consumer connectivity and engagement. Chain Store Age followed up with the two experts to ask a few more questions about engaging today’s connected customer.

How can retailers use APIs (application program interfaces) to provide a more personalized customer experience?

New York – Retail real estate giant Simon has announced the winners of its inaugural 'Simon Launch,” a retail startup competition aimed at uncovering, investing in, and accelerating top startups in the retail industry. 

The winning startups, which were selected from more than 300 applications, are: