Nordstrom: full-line store sales down 1.2%, but Nordstrom.com up 22%. A new trend?

Cool article on Forbes about Nordstrom’s evolving strategy in retail; consider this paragraph especially: It is very important to understand the customer’s need to find time to shop.  Nordstrom gets this.  Consumers, especially young working people, are less and less interested in… Continue Reading

Home Depot just taught you something about the housing market

That video above is from a year ago, but the current Home Depot fiscal situation is seemingly a lot better — their second-quarter profit just climbed 14 percent and they’re trading at around $88/share now (that’s up!). Check out this chart… Continue Reading

Ron Johnson, retail semi-legend, just gave an open palm slap to Big Data

The American business culture is often very “What have you done for me lately?” In that sense, you can argue Ron Johnson is a flop. He had big successes in the retail space, most notably with helping Target get into… Continue Reading

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Ignore Pinterest as a force at your own peril: women, the 85 percent figure, great photos, and major life events. Cha-ching.

When people talk about social media marketing, they tend to discuss Facebook and Twitter first, and might even get to Google+ (SEO, y’all!) and YouTube and Instagram in front of discussing Pinterest, but … that might be a fool’s errand.… Continue Reading

What is Alibaba? It’s kind of like if you combined Amazon, Hulu, JCPenney, PayPal, Google Maps, Twitter, Spotify, Orbitz…

Lot of news recently about Alibaba, since it’s going public in the United States. A common refrain is: what is it? There are many ways to answer that — do your own Google search — but this one might be the… Continue Reading

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Let’s compare the 10 largest occupations in America in 1999 and 2013, shall we? (Pause for sigh.)

Before, we’ve talked about where jobs might be come 2022 — so eight years or so from now. But what’s happened to jobs in the past decade or so? Well, check out this chart, courtesy of Pew: Here’s the original… Continue Reading

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The shipping industry appears to be in trouble, environmentally and financially

I’ve seen Season 2 of The Wire — “dead girls in a can!” — which is about the extent of my knowledge on international shipping topics, but I do find it broadly interesting. You could argue (and many have) that shipping is… Continue Reading

Is UberRush going to change the world, or ultimately make it more depressing?

Uber — which may have been on a path towards world domination anyway — just launched this thing called UberRush (trial version is in Manhattan), which essentially works like this: You want to send your air mattress to your friend… Continue Reading