CEO Lee Scott
OK so everyone covered Lee Scott, CEO of Wal-Mart’s comments yesterday morning at the National Retail Federation’s BIG show in NYC.
Well, maybe not everyone but Reuters and AP did a piece each which were picked up. Here’s my take and then as promised more about new products.
There is a mindset among big boxes that the party is over. The credit was cheap so they could finance inventory, the developers could build more and more stores so these retailers could show good comp sales (growth), the consumers could buy it all because they too had easy access to credit. Even though as retailers opened all those big stores, each one ramped up slower with much less results than in the past and Wall Street looked the other way.
Those times are gone.
That said, Mr. Scott shared with us that Wal-Mart had a 25% increase last week in plasma TV sales in the US. Hardly the scrimp and save picture being fed to us on the news shows.
At NRF it became clear that retail is overbuilt; that the end of the “credit party” probably means 20% of malls and retailers will fail in 2009/10. No one wanted to speculate but there certainly wasn’t optimism in the sessions. Maybe that’s because NRF focuses primarily on the big boxes, not the smaller retailers.
Too bad because smaller retailers can operate better than the big box tankers in such a storm because they are inherently more like a speedboat. They can manuveur around the inevitable “going out of business” sales that will be a hallmark of 2009 as poorly contributing stores fold – even whole chains. These operators can see opportunity instead of doom & gloom. They aren’t thinking they can only grow by opening in Asia, Russia or India – they want to thrive only in their local community.
Also the small to medium sized retailer doesn’t have to worry as much about coverage of the store by employees since they do not have as big of a store. Smaller stores can maintain a good ratio of employees per square foot to customers which, with proper sales training like mine, can increase sales. Not so with the big boxes which will frustrate their customers even more.
I’ll talk much more about the economists that were in abundance at NRF next time. Right now I want to talk about Microsoft Tag technology.
What caught my attention was the robot Microsoft had on hand. While I soon found out the robot had nothing to do with the product, it was a great crowd generator.
The actual program is a tag that is read by a handheld device like your Iphone (App store Microsoft Tag) or Blackberry (download for products running Windows at http://gettag.mobi.)
When you take a picture, it opens your browser to a planned web page, or custom url or dials a phone number to give further information. (The tag I built on their site 
at right.)
I don’t believe customers would use this unless someone was with them at this point, especially since you have to download the app but it could be an easy way to show the product in-home or different options or actual customers using your product with clickable ratings.
You can go to the Microsoft Beta tag website and create your own tag to see how it would work.
At first it seems you would get this information from a salesperson but what if you were so slammed with customers, they couldn’t get to the customer waiting? Employees could use this as part of their greeting, explaining how all your best products have this and they could get further information easily until the salesperson returns.
What if an author put a scannable tag to information in their books as a way to interact with the reader in a new way? Or you could scan to a joinup page while you waited in a checkout line that would link to your rewards card signup. The possibilities are ripe for the creative because it is easy for the consumer.
Economic surveys presented at NRF said people had money to buy, they just didn’t want to right now. Who knows when that will change, but it will. What will not change is for customers to become more patient or have more time to shop. Tagging in the store, much like online makes sense.
Microsoft might just have something here.
Next up? Economics and lots of statistics for you to chew over.
