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“We did not realize how deep some of the customers were into [coupons],” said Kramer.

JCPenney CEO and Apple retail God Ron Johnson weighed in on it too. “Coupons were a drug,” he said. “They really drove traffic.”

Traffic for the quarter was down 10 percent — down 6 percent Monday-Friday and down 12 percent on the weekend.

U.S. demand for home storage and organization products is expected to increase 3.6% annually to $8.6 billion in 2015, according to a study released by the Freedonia Group.

Bins, baskets and totes accounted for the largest share of home organization product sales in 2010, with 37% of the total market. Demand for modular units is expected to post the fastest annual gains among home organization products, rising 4.9% annually through 2015.

Politico, an accelerant to the news cycle like wind is to brushfire, is taking on the one realm of political news that it has not yet sped up: book publishing.

The all-things-politics Web site is teaming up with Random House to publish four e-books about the 2012 presidential campaign, the first of which is scheduled to go on sale sometime before Christmas. Each will be in the 20,000- to 30,000-word range and written by Mike Allen, right, Politico’s chief White House correspondent, and Evan Thomas, a longtime political reporter who has written for Time and Newsweek.

The iconic car battery brand that conjures images of successful ignition in Death Valley or the North Pole, is entering the alkaline field through a deal ironed out between Sears Holdings, which owns the brand, and Columbus, Ohio-based Dorcy, a longtime Sears supplier and manufacturer of batteries and flashlights.


The DieHard alkaline batteries were displayed at the National Hardware Show in Las Vegas. 


“It’s a natural,” said Dorcy president and CEO Tom Beckett, whose company was announced as a new supplier of DieHard-branded alkaline batteries. “The DieHard brand has enormous goodwill, and this launch is a natural addition to our core business.”


Immersive Labs is already using built-in cameras and facial recognition software in its outdoor billboards to determine the gender and age of passers-by so it can customise the advertisement on display to suit them and prompt sales.

So if a man strolls by on a cold morning, the display might change from an ad for women’s clothing to an advertisement suggesting a cup of coffee at a nearby cafe.

The men of Harvard and Princeton universities can soon buy their school apparel at Brooks Brothers, which for the first time in its almost 200-year history has agreed to a line of licensed college merchandise.

The agreement between Brooks Brothers, a unit of closely held Retail Brand Alliance Inc., and the college division of IMG Worldwide Inc., the sports agency owned by buyout specialist Ted Forstmann, allows for the sale of merchandise from 15 schools, including Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Princeton, in Princeton, New Jersey; Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York; and New York University in Manhattan.

In this exclusive interview, Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel shows it’s almost full-speed-ahead for the chain, in contrast to the jitters at many other retailers. He’s presiding over the company’s record number of remodeled locations this year (about 400), the opening of smaller urban stores, plans for an expansion into Canada and an overhaul of its website, which will soon operate independently of Amazon.

Consumers can look forward to more fresh food and new higher-end clothing and houseware designers — including Missoni — offered on a limited-time-only basis. But those who rely on after-Christmas sales for their holiday decorating and sweater needs may be disappointed. He’s cutting inventories to reduce the need for post-holiday markdowns.

Private-label sales across all three major retail channels reached new highs in 2010, according the Private Label Manufacturers Association.

According to PLMA’s 2011 Private Label Yearbook, which tracks private-label sales and market share trends based on Nielsen Co. data for the year ended Dec. 25, 2010, found that when looking at total outlets — which is comprised of U.S. supermarkets, drug stores and mass merchandisers, including Walmart — store-brand sales increased by nearly 2%, while dollar share advanced by almost half a point to a new record level. This brought total sales to $88.5 billion, according to the Nielsen data.

31%, are new customers (many of whom weren’t aware of the company before the deal). In addition, 27% were infrequent customers, and 4% were former customers.

“That’s at least 35% — and arguably 62% — of deal buyers who represent new business,” observes ForeSee president/CEO Larry Freed. Obviously, e-tailers will have to satisfy these consumers to a high level in order to convert them to longer-term customers, he adds.