Yes, there must have been a conference I missed, because out of the blue I've been deluged with official letters from customers, large and small, that align nearly perfectly into two categories.  The first is a desire to change payment terms from Net 30 to Net 60, and generally includes colorful an...

A propensity to rely on outdated technology developed in-house has caught up with many retailers that, struggling to eke out profits during a recession, now want to adopt complex price localization campaigns, according to a study of 85 retailers by Retail Systems Research (RSR). The researchers foun...

Image-conscious food retailers might be squeamish about using loyalty card information to telephone customers who bought recalled products, but a consumer advocacy lawyer argues that public safety should trump brand protection. Retailers have an obligation to follow the lead of Costco and use loyalt...

Amazon.com is quite familiar with federal investigations, but the world’s largest E-tailer is not used to being the target. In a January 30 SEC 10-K filing, Amazon’s government filing casually mentioned: “In January 2009, we learned that the United States Postal Service, including the ...

Times are particularly tough for newspaper publishers, distributors and agents. Even august members of the industry, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, are feeling the pain and being forced to take some extraordinary measures to assure their sustainability while trying to adapt to a rad...

How does a retailer morph the inadvertent selling of dangerous products and its dusty CRM program into a public relations victory? The answer is as old as the telephone. In fact, the answer is the telephone. The $73 billion Costco is using automated systems that dial the numbers of customers to aler...

Sam’s Club, which wants suppliers to apply EPC/RFID tags on all pallets they ship to its stores and warehouses by next year, is significantly reducing the fee it will charge those who don’t comply, from about $3 per tag to 12 cents per tag. Some suppliers will simply opt to pay the fee, ...

It's always fun to predict what's going to happen. The risk of being spectacularly wrong is very high, but that's what makes the exercise so entertaining. 'Tis the season for dwelling, quickly, on what we learned last year -- de-leveraging is really painful and when gas prices are high, people want ...

As you read this, someone close to you may be cleaning, stuffing, or slicing a turkey. Over 45 million turkeys were purchased for Thanksgiving out of the 265 million raised this year alone. The vast majority of these birds were grown on industrial farms. Perhaps your bird is organic, free range, or ...

You might think that the powerful green wave changing business will subside in a recession. True, some investments might wait a bit, but most companies I talk to are pushing ahead with the sustainability agenda. One important example is Wal-Mart, which doesn't seem to be slowing down. I recently att...