Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Wal-Mart? Yep, the number of Americans who watched the events on Wal-Mart TV was almost half as many who saw it on MSNBC and almost a third of those who watched Fox. Those numbers nicely illustrated the massive reach that in-store retailers are finding with video, especially POS-situated videos for captive consumer audiences. And online is even stronger.Read more...

This tactic is hardly new, as many chains—including Price Chopper and Wegmans—have been doing this for at least a year and several very large retailers are exploring it. But Costco is the largest retailer to have launched it on such a large scale.Read more...

Following a lawsuit, Expedia and Hotels.com have agreed to augment their sites' search capabilities so people with disabilities can find and book hotel rooms that accommodate their special needs. The hotel-booking sites were sued in California Superior Court on the grounds that they did not provide ways for people with disabilities to determine whether hotels offered special accommodations.Read more...

The Kroger grocery chain apparently saw good results from a 219-store digital coupon last summer, as it announced on Tuesday (Jan. 27) that it was expanding digital coupons to virtually all of its 2,400 stores in 31 states.

Kroger, which used Cellfire for its initial trial, will be varying coupon price discounts regionally. The Kroger brands involved include Ralph’s, Bakers, City Markets, Dillon, Gerbes, Gilander, Jay-C, King Scoopers, Owens, Payless, QFC, Smiths, Scott’s, Fry’s, Cala Foods and Bell Markets.…

"Why would you want to invest in technology, training, software and people when Wal-Mart can do it for you for 12 cents?" asked Louis Bianchin, senior RFID analyst and program manager at VDC Research. "The risk there is that they (Sam's Club) could have sent the wrong message to the supplier community. That is not the message the supplier community needs to get."Read more...

The adoption of contactless by a retailer of Carrefour's size "is one of the largest victories so far" and a "very positive win" for contactless technology, said Forrester Research Analyst Ed Kountz. "It's looking like we are going to see more deployments in Europe. It's also being done well in Turkey, of all places, and Asia really remains the number one market for contactless payments."Read more...

But within days of the Canadian Tire (CT) statement, Circuit City shut down its Web site entirely (months before closing its physical stores) and Sears added a drive-through for its buy-online-pick-up-in-store program. Is this the next growth phase for E-Commerce, or is it more of a "We can't afford anymore to subsidize this bits-and-byte annoying albatross"?Read more...

Beyond the advantage of being able to physically shop without having to take a shower, there are some tactical reasons for Sears' plan to convert one of its Illinois stores into what it is calling a "MyGofer Store." Read more...

Among the changes are a centralized search box, new categories and comments that are much more easily accessible.Read more...

When we recently heard of one such startup, an Atlanta company called Transaction Tree, whose products allow retailers to offer E-mailed receipts instead of receipts printed on paper, we wondered how that would work. Who hasn't been the victim of lost, sent-to-the-wrong-address or spam-bucket-swallowed E-mails? Read more...

Sears and OfficeMax join TJX and McDonald's as having settled—or agreed to settle—their roles by agreeing to license the technology from Card Activation Technologies.Read more...

In response to a contest—OK, a very weird contest, even by the relatively loose digital signage standards—one industry CFO chose to try and explain the difference in poetic verse. The result was decidedly less Shakespeare, Byron, Keats or Poe and much more Dr. Seuss and Burma-Shave. Even so, his poem is worth reading, if for no other reason than to make yourself feel better about your poem-crafting skill. (A free gift of decidedly little value to the first five readers who can correctly identify the Burma-Shave reference. Extra credit if you can cite an example.) Read more...

B&N, with almost 800 bookshops in all 50 states, on Monday (Oct. 27) introduced what it dubbed "My B&N," a program designed to create personal profiles for all customers so that they can more easily interact with other customers. Read more...

Are they ignoring the product or are they picking it up, reading the label and then quickly putting it back? Does the timing and eye movement indicate they were repulsed by the sugar content (near the bottom) or the low fiber count?Read more...

The issue is real, in that many consumers do object to the pricing differences as they see it being a scam. The Circuit City "one price promise" move could ultimately prove to be quite a clever piece of marketing. First, it will be trumpeted as a consumer advantage, even if it means that the price equality will be achieved by sometimes (all the time?) online pricing being raised to match the in-store price.Read more...

The non-traditional Home Depot kiosk trial is based more on the units themselves—small mobile units, some as tiny as 5-inches tall—and the size of the chain's planned kiosk commitment: Well north of $100 million for full deployment, according to the technology consultant handling one of the trials.Read more...

The implication in the customer service comment is that shoppers can get checked out more quickly with a self-service unit. That's actually not often the case. Read more...

If you’re going to be in New York City on Wednesday (Oct. 15), you might want to drop by the StorefrontBacktalk panel on strategic kiosk use (yes, there is such a thing) at the Javits Center during the KioskCom/Self-Service Expo show.

We’re going to start things off by examining Home Depot’s kiosk approaches and concerns (one of our panelists has been working on it for months) and then debate the security risks of kiosks, the difficulties of POS (and back-office) integration and—for laughs—talk about some of the more futuristic robotic kiosks in the wings. It’s from 3:15 to 4:15 PM and we’d love to have you join us. Someone needs to ask probing questions. If you don’t, I’ll have to, and what fun would that be?…

It happened five or six years ago when printers, faxes and scanners started getting direct access to IP—so a worker in Chicago could scan a document in and have it print out in the company's Los Angeles and New York offices. These devices were getting smart (more CPU, RAM, hard disk) and connected. But few IT departments initially thought about the security such devices, and they became an ultra-easy way to sneak into the LAN and get access to something more valuable. Today, that identical scenario is starting to play out with kiosks.Read more...

The trial is apparently focused solely on evaluating the units' selling capabilities—and Best Buy's ability to handle and protect payment—and will not be integrated with any of the company's other systems, at least for this trial. That would mean no interactions with CRM, inventory or supply chain, and even payment systems handled outside of Best Buy's network. Read more...

Still, those technological trendsetters are found in pockets throughout Europe, Asia and Australia, with most overseas retailers still slow to embrace self-checkout, according to a new report from European retail tech analyst firm Planet Retail. That said, for those merchants who have deployed, they are often exceeding their U.S. counterpart. Read more...

So when she places the barcode-less fruit on the scale, the first fruit it displays in its list is kiwi, followed by the four fruits and vegetables that Jane typically buys. Other fruits and vegetables follow alphabetically after Jane's favorites have been displayed. Given how many fruits Jane buys each time, this shaves a precious 108 seconds off of her checkout. Read more...

Tesco’s experiment with an all-self-checkout store in the U.S. is delivering surprisingly favorable customer satisfaction stats. Internal Tesco customer surveys for its Fresh & Easy stores are finding some 90 percent of its customers saying they were either “satisfied or very satisfied” with the checkout experience while another 27 percent say that “it doesn’t matter” what format the checkouts take, according to this story in The Retail Bulletin. The story said Tesco’s survey showed that only 13 percent of respondents prefer a conventional staffed checkout.

“Helping the Fresh & Easy situation is the fact that bananas are the only product available loose (because they are too variable in size and react badly to shrink-wrapping) whereas everything else is packaged and barcoded, thereby reducing the potential for problems at checkout and for the intervention of staff,” the story said. “This reduction in the need for staff assistance has been achieved through the ongoing development of self-service technology with (Tesco) citing the introduction of more advanced barcode look-up tables that are indexed on the most popular products sold in each store and improved standard deviation on the weight measured versus the weight expected of items.”…