News

Do we come to bury Jeff Bezos, or to praise him?

When I was a boy, my Cioci Mary (cioci is Polish for aunt) would occasionally treat me to a trip downtown in the small city where I grew up. We’d get a burger at Pappas’ diner and then head to W.T. Grant’s and she’d buy me candy, a comic book and a small toy. I mist up a little just thinking about it now, more than 50 years later.

You think a child of today, decades hence, will recall his aunt buying him a pair of sneakers on her laptop as fondly?

With the physical store now widely acknowledged as a critical touchpoint in a customer’s omnichannel shopping journey, many retailers spent the summer opening new prototypes and formats.

Here are three that are still generating buzz:

Sephora

Sephora’s new outpost on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue makes buying makeup and other beauty products an interactive experience.

Founded by Don and Barbara Brinkerhoff nearly a half century ago, Lifescapes International made its bones as an architectural landscaping firm on the Vegas Strip, where it created the fire show at The Mirage and the water show at the Bellagio. What the founding couple learned in Vegas, their daughter, Julie Brinkerhoff-Jacobs, now applies to retail and lifestyle centers like Triple Five’s American Dream and Rockefeller Center’s Channel Gardens.

IoT is making it easier for retailers to interact with consumers via connected home-based devices that allow consumers to interact with brands without launching a website or mobile app.

The best known is Amazon Echo, a voice activated device designed with an artificial intelligence assistant app called Alexa. Dedicated sensors in the device connect the consumer’s home to their retailers of choice, allowing, via voice commands, consumers to add items to virtual shopping lists or make online purchases.

Planning is well under way for the 53rd annual SPECS conference, which will be held at the Gaylord Palms in Kissimmee, Fla., March 12–14, 2017. The event is produced by Chain Store Age and is attended by retail and foodservice executives involved in the planning, design, construction and maintenance of stores and restaurants nationwide.

Mid-America Real Estate reported it has arranged the sale of the Fairlane Meadows Shopping Center in Dearborn, Michigan, to Time Equities for $20.6 million. The seller was Ramco-Gershenson Property Trust.   The 157,225-sq.-ft. center is situated within a residential development of the same name. The store roster includes Best Buy, Citi Trends, David’s Bridal, Five Below, and Dollar Tree. It is shadow-anchored by Target and Burlington Coat Factory.  

Whole Foods Market is saving money and time — and benefiting the environment—by taking an innovative approach to going solar.

That’s according to an analysis by the Retail Industry Leaders Association and The Solar Foundation that found Whole Foods’ strategy of taking a standardized approach to rapid rollout of solar rooftop installations across multiple locations could be a valuable model for other retailers to consider.

Updated regulations take effect Dec. 1 — are you ready?

In response to concern that wages at the low end of the pay scale were slow to rise, particularly for store managers and assistant store managers, the United States Department of Labor updated the Fair Labor Standards Act regulations defining which white collar workers must be paid overtime pay.