News

Takin’ It to the Street
People and corporations are streaming back into America’s downtowns. Are they chain retailers’ best hope for growth?
“City of stars, are you shining just for me?” sings Ryan Gosling in this year’s hit movie musical “La La Land.” “City of stars, there’s so much that I can’t see.”
Designing Safe Stores for Shoppers
Retailers continue their efforts to step up design investments to improve the customer experience, but they should also focus on investing in customer safety.
That message was driven home during the SPECS session, “Safe Stores: Design Ideas to Help Customers Feel Safer” Speaker Andrew McQuilkin, retail leader at BHDP Architecture, explained that recent “active” shootings — when individuals actively attempt to harm people in confined, populated areas — have targeted formerly “safe areas,” including malls.

REIMAGINING STORES

As digital commerce forces brick-and-mortar stores to innovate, industry experts share their views on the future of physical retail.
From department stores to discounters to home improvement chains, nearly all retailers are engaged in the same game: trying to imagine what stores of the future will look like in an increasingly digitized world.
What Happened to Manhattan’s Supermarkets?

Broker Faith Hope Consolo, who’s placed countless retail businesses in some of Manhattan’s best neighborhoods, has lately turned her attention to Harlem. She’s happy to note that restaurants and national retail brands are blossoming uptown, but that – outside of a Whole Foods opening on 125th Street – full-size supermarkets are nonexistent since the Pathmark closed there last year. And it’s not just a Harlem phenomenon.
Finding Inspiration in a Tech Lab

Want to stay ahead of the competition — or at least keep pace with it? Invest in a tech lab — or an accelerator.
With the pressure to innovate greater than ever, savvy retailers understand they can no longer wait for new solutions and technologies to be proven in the field. That’s why so many of them have invested in tech labs (aka “retail innovation labs”).
Amazon to build homeless facility — at its new headquarters
Thomas Pink Deploys Real-Time Solutions

Menswear retailer bullish on Internet of Things, RFID
While most retailers continue to dip their toes in the Internet of Things waters, Thomas Pink has jumped in with both feet — and is seeing results.
The luxury menswear brand is involved in an IoT proof-of-concept test at its store on Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. Using a cloud-based IoT platform from Acuitas Digital, the retailer has the backbone it needs to seamlessly integrate networking, hardware, software and analytics solutions — all necessary pieces to digitize the physical store.
Big shakeup at Whole Foods Market

There’s been a reorganization at Whole Foods Market. On Wednesday, the natural-foods retailer named a new chairwoman and five new independent directors, effective immediately. It also appointed a former Kohl’s executive as CFO. The changes come as activist investors and restless shareholders have been demanding Whole Foods accelerate the turnaround its business. The board shakeup came on the same day as the retailer released second quarter earnings that met analysts’ expectations.
Rent-A-Center veteran exec returns

The nation's largest rent-to-own operator has a new chief operating officer. Rent-A-Center appointed Joel M. Mussat as executive VP, COO, effective May 5, 2017. He brings more than 20 years of experience in operations, retail strategy and the rent-to-own industry.
Amazon: Breaking Down the Myths

There’s no denying that Amazon has changed the face of retail, but there are many misconceptions about how the company actually operates. Unfortunately, these fallacies are leading many retail companies into making bad strategic business decisions as they try to duplicate Amazon’s success.
The following is a breakdown of some myths — along with a few takeaways: