Insights

If you’re going to create an agenda, it may as well be an ambitious one. And the “Greatness Agenda” being pursued by Kohl’s Corp. is certainly ambitious.

“Our strategy is to be the most engaging retailer in the U.S.,” Janet Schalk, executive VP and CIO og Kohl’s, explained during an exclusive interview with Chain Store Age at the recent NRF 2015 Annual Convention & Expo in New York. “The Greatness Agenda involves initiatives across the spectrum – some front-end and some enabling.”

By Jim Walsh, Alliance Data Retail Services

Consumers continue to engage more deeply with their smartphone… because they value what apps can do for them. They have downloaded more than 75 billion in the seven short years since the first app made its appearance on a smartphone.

By Jim Singer, A.T. Kearney, and Ryan Mathews, Black Monk Consulting

By Dave Weinberger, CBX

Have you read any 2015 retail trend forecasts lately? Let’s face it, many so-called trends for the year ahead — the need to focus on things like mobile payment, customization, foodservice, smaller formats or millennial shoppers, to name a few — are at this point just the cost of doing business.

By Ulf Mattsson, Protegrity

By Greg Van den Heuvel, Pitney Bowes Software

Black Friday traditionally marks the first day of the holiday shopping season. During the most recent holiday season, millions of Americans have participated in the shopping frenzy, which according to CMO.com, accounts for nearly 40% of all annual sales. Black Friday weekend alone accounted for 133 million American shoppers, diving deep into discounts, hoping to land the best deal and get a head start on their holiday shopping.

By Joe Majka, Verifone   President Obama’s BuySecure Initiative sets the U.S. Government on track to adopt chip and PIN payment security, parallels - and seeks to encourage - a commercial industry shift toward EMV card technology.    

By Patrick Bannon, Rebecca DeGroff,  Noah Finkel, Richard Alfred (Seyfarth Shaw LLP)    The Supreme Court has unanimously that the Fair Labor Standards Act does not require employers to pay employees for time spent passing through post-shift security screening.