Walmart Tests Giant Self-serve Vending Machines
Some Walmart SuperCenters in Oklahoma have been testing giant “vending machines” for customers who want an easier method of picking up online grocery orders. In what have been described as “giant self-serve vending machines” Walmart is letting customers get their orders without ever having to leave their cars. According to SimpleMost.com, “Similar to how you’d use their online grocery pick-up service, you shop and pay online. But instead of having an employee load your car, you step up to the giant self-serve kiosk.” The company is also testing smaller pick-up kiosks, called Pickup Towers, at a store in Bentonville near the company’s headquarters in Arkansas. Pickup Towers allow “you to pick up items in less than a minute by scanning a barcode sent to your smartphone,” blogged Mark Ibbotson, executive VP of central operations, Walmart U.S.
Advice from the Trenches: As Things Change, Prepare to Re-invent Yourself
There are lessons to be learned from the successful and those who have failed. Sometimes they are the same people. One such person was profiled on a recent edition of Fortune magazine. It’s a first-person perspective of Max James, the founder of American Kiosk Management, which owns and operates carts in shopping malls. Reinvention, James said, is key. With the retail industry at a crossroads, his company had to change, and change it did. “Because of our reputation, five or six companies a week now ask us to test their products in a mall or handle their human resources or marketing departments. We’ve done kiosk testing for SolarCity, Revlon, and others.” All of this – success, failure, reinvention – doesn’t happen without charity being part of the mix. James’ wife, Linda, the CEO of AKM, is active with Camp Soaring Eagle, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and started the Salt Lake (Utah) Chapter of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.
CBL CEO: Majority of Americans Make Purchases In-Store
This is certainly a product of your humble newsletter editor’s TV-watching childhood, but every time he sees the word “Chattanooga” he immediately hears Yosemite Sam’s voice scream, “Chatta-NOOGIE?!?” As it turns out, there a lot more going in that city just south of the Mason-Dixon line. It is there that retail developer CBL & Associate Properties Inc. is based and in a recent Time Free Press article said that malls aren’t going extinct — “they’re merely changing to capitalize on new trends, technologies and opportunities.” For all the fire and brimstone articles you read about the death of malls, CEO Stephen Lebovitz, reminded TFP readers that the stat you don’t often hear is that “more than 90 percent of what Americans buy is still in brick-and-mortar stores.” Let that sink in for a moment, then read the full article here.
Metachat: Geocoding the DMM file
“Location, Location, Location” is the basic mantra of any professional involved in the commercial and retail real estate industries. As providers of comprehensive contact and retail trend information, DMM knows how critical it is to have a visual roadmap of the physical mall location and its surrounding area. We’ve developed a method of capturing geographic and demographic details in order to produce high quality datapoint location and trend demographic dataset products. For more, click here.
