New Retail Blog | Insights and inspiration for the New Retail world

A Grocery Experience That’s Better than Sex?

Posted on 28. Apr, 2014 by Jon Bird.

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Tweet Ever since Piggly Wiggly (true name) launched the world’s first “self-service grocery store” in Memphis in 1916, the game for supermarkets has been about increasing speed and efficiency. The hermetically sealed outcome, however, has been that a trip to the supermarket for many shoppers is not a want-to, but a have-to…not something to look [...]

Retail Reinvention: From Lion Hunters to Cool Hunters

Posted on 22. Apr, 2014 by ideaworks.

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Tweet For over eight decades at the corner of 82nd and Lexington on the Upper East Side of New York City stood a local institution by the name of Lascoff Drugs. The founder, J.L. Lascoff, a Russian-Polish immigrant to the US, opened the very first pharmacy in New York State in 1899. J.L’s son Frederick [...]

Will Aussie Retail be “Rooned”?

Posted on 24. Feb, 2014 by ideaworks.

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Tweet “We’ll all be rooned”, said Hanrahan, “Before the year is out.” That line is from a famous 1921 Australian bush poem. Hanrahan’s view was that ruin was a certainty, no matter the conditions. No rain meant drought; too much rain signaled either flood, or worse – grass growth and bushfire. Fast-forward to 2014, and [...]

Retail Rocked the Super Bowl

Posted on 04. Feb, 2014 by ideaworks.

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Tweet One of the highlights of yesterday’s Super Bowl was off the field – the advertisers who paid an average of US$4 million for a 30 second spot to showcase their messages in front of over 100 million US viewers. And out of all the ads, two that stood out were for retailers. As part [...]

Removing the Seams from Retail

Posted on 28. Jan, 2014 by ideaworks.

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Tweet “Great technology…allows the mechanical parts of what we do everyday to disappear.” So said Jack Dorsey, Chairman of Twitter and CEO of Square at the National Retail Federation annual conference in New York last week. What they call the “NRF Big Show” really is big – 30,000 delegates, and a multitude of speakers including [...]

What’s Next: Retail Five Years in the Future

Posted on 07. Jan, 2014 by ideaworks.

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Tweet “My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare, I had to cram so many things, to store everything in there.” The lyrics in David Bowie’s song “Five Years” capture what life is like for many consumers in the fading light of the year 2013. This is the age of overload [...]

“The Death of Discounting” and Other Dumb Predictions

Posted on 10. Dec, 2013 by ideaworks.

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Tweet “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.” So wrote Bill Gates in his 1996 book “The Road Ahead”. Looking back over the last (almost) six years of columns that I [...]

Christmas Balls? Or A Balls Up?

Posted on 05. Dec, 2013 by ideaworks.

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Tweet The annual transatlantic Christmas commercial challenge is on again. And for me it’s no contest. The Poms may have lost the First Test, but they smash it against the Yanks in the UK versus US holiday ad stakes. The difference is really “Crass-mas” versus “Christmas”. Kmart US corners the market in questionable taste with [...]

Shift Gear with Sharp Ideas

Posted on 26. Nov, 2013 by ideaworks.

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Tweet Round about the time of the Global Financial Crisis, “stores ran out of ideas just as consumers ran out of money”, according to David Roth from WPP The Store in London. The effect? Growth came to a grinding halt. Roth was speaking at the final Westfield Breakfast Seminar in Auckland this week (sponsored by [...]

Connecting the Data Dots

Posted on 19. Nov, 2013 by ideaworks.

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Tweet I’ve spent my last week with a Retail Futurist, a Retail Historian, and a Retail Anthropologist; listening, learning and debating about where retail is going, where it’s been and how we need to relate to different generations of customers now and tomorrow. The occasion was the annual Westfield Breakfast Seminar Series across Australia and [...]