Informed Retail

I went to Target yesterday to buy some dishwasher detergent and figured I would peruse their food section while I was at it.

Unfortunately, the entire frozen food and dairy section was out of commission thanks to the crazy power outages throughout the metropolitan DC area, but I shopped the cereal and snack aisles.

I was so pleasantly surprised to find organic corn chips and organic salsa!! At great prices nonetheless, and I ate a bunch last night and they were delicious!

I'd previously looked through Target to try and find organic products without much luck, inspired by the film Food, Inc. which depicted WalMart embracing the organic food movement. I figured: "If WalMart is embracing organic products, Target must be as well." During that shopping trek, I was only able to find a few brand name organic items - and only one Stony Field Farm (the organic product Film, Inc.highlighted that WalMart was selling) product - baby yogurt.

This time, I again tried looking for brand name organic products, but didn't find much. I think I saw some Cascadian Farms products, but not many. I gave up on that and started checking out the Target brand items - believe me, I was surprised, and impressed.

Way to go Target! Keep it up and I'll keep shopping with you.

I've always respected the REI brand - they have a great selection of products, and seem to comprehend the concept of social responsibility.

Not sure how, but I ended up on the REI catalog mailing list. Perhaps because I'm a member of the Appalachian Mountain Club? Who knows. Anyway, I do not like catalog mailings.

Thankfully, REI makes it easy to discontinue their catalog mailings by visiting this page:

Unsubscribing from REI Catalog Mailings

I had this to say in the comments section:

"Thanks for making it easy to unsubscribe. In my humble opinion, catalogs are a waste of paper."

The sentiments I expressed in my last post about Pearl Arts and Crafts turned out to be correct - the store is now closed.

While going to Sears to pickup some vacuum cleaner bags, I went to the Montgomery Mall. Its a nice mall, as far as malls go.

I went to Sears yesterday to pickup an order I placed online. I arrived at the kiosk ready to scan my bar code only to find the system was down. It runs Windows so personally I was not surprised that it had crashed.

I've meant to got to the local Pearl store here for awhile, and today I went in, only to find they were having a 75% off everything in the store sale. I didn't see any signs about the store closing, but with a sale like that, and the way the interior looked, I wouldn't be surprise is that store is closing for good.

I saw this Urban Outfitters storefront when I traveled to Charlottesville, VA last month.

It looks nice and is a lot like most Urban Outfitters I've seen, but in some ways it almost blended into the neighborhood too much.

Apple has done well with their retail stores, are there other technology companies that could do the same?

Its possible, but I don't think its too probable. I heard awhile back that Microsoft was going to open up some stores, and that made sense to me from a marketing perspective, but not from a sales perspective - they just make so much money from their deals with OEMs like Dell, I doubt it would make any substantial business. Besides, if I recall correctly, they own a decent chuck of BestBuy, so in a sense they already have their hands in retail.

Today I read some rumors about Amazon.com opening up brick and mortar stores. If anything, I'd guess that they would go keep going in the opposite direction - towards eBay's business model - allowing individuals and small businesses to build stores on top of their technological infrastructure. That brings up a good point too - Amazon's technological infrastructure includes their "Amazon Web Services", about as far as a business model can get from retail!