Best Buy began taking pre-orders for an exclusive line of Cole Haan smartphone accessories due to arrive in stores May 31. The Best Buy Collection of exclusive tech accessories also includes Nanette Lepore, Cynthia Vincent, kate spade new york, Isaac Mizrahi New York and Anna Sui. The Cole Haan line is the first created “especially for men,” said Best Buy, with smartphone cases in traditional and wallet styles for select iPhone and Samsung Galaxy models. Pre-order prices Tuesday were $59-$69, we found.
Sprint is expanding its "Direct 2 You" service, offering hand-delivery of devices to customers in the Kansas City market, Miami and Chicago starting June 1, Sprint said Monday in a news release. Sprint has been sending out technicians in bright black and yellow cars to customers who upgrade their service in the three cities and is expanding the service to customers who want to switch to the nation’s third largest wireless carrier. “Customers have told us that they want to be served in the comfort of their own homes or at a location convenient for them,” said Sprint Vice President Rod Millar. “Sprint Direct 2 You Xperts have a passion for people and technology, and our customers appreciate the extra attention.” A subscriber or potential subscriber need only call an 800 number, the carrier said. “At the appointed time, an Xpert meets the customer at his or her convenience, sets up the new phone and transfers all content, including contacts, pictures, games and apps,” Sprint said. Sprint has been fighting to remain the largest carrier behind Verizon and AT&T, as rival T-Mobile continues its aggressive growth. The service will roll out in more cities as well, starting with New York City, San Francisco and Denver in early June, Sprint said.
Following “challenging” fiscal Q4 results in which it posted lower comparable store sales in all categories, h.h. gregg is shifting advertising from print to digital, cutting operating expenses and working with an outside consultant to undertake a “complete and thorough review of our supply chain,” CEO Dennis May said on a Friday earnings call. May called out a supply chain hit due to last winter’s port strike. H.h. gregg’s net loss widened in Q4 to $25.2 million, versus $7.2 million for the prior-year period, with comparable store sales down 10 percent over the year-ago quarter. Revenue dropped to $486 million for the quarter, from $538 million a year ago. The retailer plans to apply more ad dollars to “appliance messaging,” including TV commercials fully centered on appliances, May said. In video, 4K Ultra HD represents 30 percent of h.h. gregg’s video mix, May said, and he expects the stake to increase to 50 percent by the holiday season. May cited “better trends” in TVs for this calendar year, with unit sales jumping from 1 million to 4 million units. CE sales were down 10.9 percent while furniture and mattress sales -- one of the retailer’s attempts to diversify from CE -- were down 4.7 percent, it said. Tablet sales plummeted 30 percent, a category Janney Capital Markets analyst David Strasser characterized as having a “tough innovation cycle.” May discussed an expansion into laptops as the company looks to “reset” departments and “right-size” inventory. “We have continued to underperform the industry in this category,” he said, “largely due to how we over-index the market in our mix of tablets versus laptops." In a research note, Strasser expressed doubt about the strategy since Apple has nine of the top 12 selling SKUs in the laptop market, and h.h. gregg isn’t an Apple dealer. The retailer closed two stores at the end of their leases in the quarter, and May indicated more could be on the way. "Any good retailer is looking at their portfolio of real estate and trying to understand dot-com growth and the number of locations that make the most sense to have in a market," he said. May said he didn't expect "significant" store closings across the chain.
Bluetooth Low Energy beacons are key building blocks for indoor location, a market that’s expected to reach 1 million retail deployments by 2020, ABI Research said in a report. Beacons are spreading into all 11 retail/venue verticals in the ABI database with the fastest growth occurring in QSR (quick-service restaurant) and convenience stores at 84 percent and 47 percent clips, said ABI. Total beacon shipments, said ABR, are expected to approach 200 million by 2020 as categories including connected home, personal tracking and enterprise take hold. Google's UriBeacon technology is expected to have a big impact on those verticals, it said. Other indoor location technologies such as Wi-Fi, audio/ultrasound and small cells/LTE are also viable, said ABI.
One Firefly joined ProSource as a manufacturer partner, the buying group said Thursday. ProSource members will have access to One Firefly’s design and engineering services and will be able to outsource contractor services including programming, design, marketing and consulting “at a much more favorable rate than if they were to hire contractors from outside the group,” said ProSource. One Firefly doesn’t sell products as other manufacturer partners do, but it “offers services that every integrator needs at one point or another,” said Andy Orozco, director-business development, ProSource.
Nomi Technologies agreed to settle FTC charges that it misled consumers about their ability to opt out of in-store tracking and that consumers would be informed when locations used Nomi’s tracking services, an FTC news release said Thursday. In late 2012, Nomi Technologies promised in its privacy policy to “provide an opt-out mechanism at stores using its services,” the release said. “This promise implied that consumers would be informed when stores were using Nomi’s tracking technology” to track the MAC address, device type, data and time the device was observed and signal strength of the device, the FTC said. But these promises weren't kept, the FTC alleged in its first-ever complaint against a retail tracking company, because “no in-store opt-out mechanism was available, and consumers were not informed when the tracking was taking place,” the FTC said. “Nomi collected information on about nine million mobile devices within the first nine months of 2013,” the FTC said. “It’s vital that companies keep their privacy promises to consumers when working with emerging technologies, just as it is in any other context,” said Director of the FTC’s Consumer Protection Bureau Jessica Rich. “If you tell a consumer that they will have choices about their privacy, you should make sure all of those choices are actually available to them,” Rich said. With its tracking technology, Nomi provided aggregated information on how many consumers passed by a store instead of going in, how long consumers stayed in the store, the types of devices used by consumers, how many repeat consumers a store had and whether the consumer had visited that store at another location, the FTC said. While the company provided an opt-out on its website, “consumers were not informed of the tracking taking place in the stores at all,” the FTC said. Under the settlement, Nomi “will be prohibited from misrepresenting consumers’ options for controlling whether information is collected, used, disclosed or shared about them or their computers or other devices, as well as the extent to which consumers will be notified about information practices,” the FTC said. The Commission voted 3-2 to issue the complaint and accept the proposed consent order, with Commissioners Maureen Ohlhausen and Joshua Wright dissenting, the FTC said. Chairwoman Edith Ramirez and Commissioners Julie Brill and Terrell McSweeny issued a joint statement in favor of the order, Ohlhausen and Wright issued separate dissenting statements. Comments on the consent agreement will be accepted through May 25, after which the Commission will vote whether to make the order final. “We continually review our privacy policies to ensure that they follow best practices and had already made the recommended changes in pursuit of that goal by updating our privacy policy over a year and a half ago, while we were still an early-stage startup that was less than a year old,” a Nomi spokesman said in a statement emailed to us. “Our mission has always been to help clients deliver the best possible customer experience, and a key part of achieving that goal is empowering consumers with choice,” the spokesman said. Ohlhausen noted in her dissent that Nomi is a “young company that attempted to go above and beyond its legal obligation to protect consumers but, in doing so, erred without benefitting itself,” he said. “Commissioner Wright believes that Nomi did not violate the FTC Act,” the spokesman said.
Just over two months since RadioShack’s Feb. 5 bankruptcy filing triggered Sprint’s store acquisition deal with RadioShack's largest shareholder Standard General and its General Wireless subsidiary (see 1502060023), Sprint set Friday as the grand opening of 1,435 “Sprint-RadioShack” stores within RadioShack stores, Sprint said in a Thursday announcement. The openings will more than double Sprint’s company-owned “retail footprint” from its current 1,100-store base, it said. The openings follow recent statements by Sprint senior management that the company was in crying need of more retail storefronts to raise its brand's public profile. Besides having a “great network” and a “compelling offer,” giving consumers more places to shop is one of the “basic fundamental principles” guiding a carrier like Sprint, CEO Marcelo Claure said on a recent earnings call. Before Sprint’s RadioShack store acquisitions, the company had 500-600 fewer retail locations than T-Mobile and 3,000 fewer than Verizon, he said. Sprint has said its ambitions are to “effectively operate a store within a RadioShack store” at the 1,750 RadioShack locations it’s acquiring. Sprint will occupy about a third of the retail floor space in each location, it has said. The stores will be co-branded, with Sprint being the primary brand on storefronts and in marketing materials, it has said. With Friday’s opening, Sprint hopes to begin to “transform the customer store experience” as it works to finish converting the remaining 315 RadioShack stores “over the next several months,” Sprint said.
AT&T Wireless is part of a new loyalty program called Plenti, said American Express Wednesday. Plenti bills itself as the first U.S.-based coalition loyalty program, and comprises brands including American Express, AT&T Wireless, DirectEnergy, ExxonMobile, Hulu, Macy’s, Nationwide and Rite Aid. Shoppers can earn and use Plenti points for buying a variety of products, regardless of payment method, said the companies. Plenti customers can earn points and discounts using any form of payment accepted by the participating partners including cash, prepaid and debit or credit cards with every 1,000 accrued points translating to at least $10 in savings, said Plenti. Consumers can accumulate Plenti points when signing up for qualifying wireless services at AT&T, or for eligible charges on AT&T wireless bills. The free program launches this spring.
The National Retail Federation (NRF) asked senators to reject legislation that would “impose data security rules designed for the banking industry on retailers and other nonbank businesses.” The letter was sent Monday to members of the Senate Commerce Committee, said an NRF news release. The group cited a new NRF-commissioned white paper by former FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection officials Joel Winston and Anne Fortney saying the “broad expansion of data security standards similar to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) guidelines to virtually every unregulated business in the U.S. economy would be a serious error,” said the letter to Sens. John Thune, R-S.D., Bill Nelson, D-Fla., Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. Section 501(b) of the GLBA “required each of the federal bank regulatory agencies and the FTC to establish standards for the financial institutions subject to their respective jurisdictions with respect to safeguarding consumers’ nonpublic, personal financial information,” Winston and Fortney said. The GLBA guidelines shouldn't apply to nonfinancial businesses because the FTC is a regulatory agency, not a law enforcement agency; nonbank businesses would have little to no authority to implement changes to payment cards; and the FTC historically has objected to expanding GLBA requirements to retailers as doing so would not enhance the agency’s ability to protect consumers, Winston and Fortney said. “The FTC lacks supervisory examination authority and lacks the resources to provide the specific guidance and ongoing oversight that would be necessary to effectuate guidelines-type rules covering the huge diversity of nonbank entities,” Winston and Fortney said in their white paper. “While many merchants would like to see new credit cards being issued incorporate both a computer microchip and a personal identification number (PIN) to reduce fraud, banks and card issuers plan to issue chip-only cards, and merchants have no power to mandate the extra security that would be provided by a PIN,” said an NRF news release. While the NRF opposes expanding GLBA requirements to nonbanks, the association has supported a “uniform national data breach law,” its news release said.
Vizio is exploring ways to useGrowth, the 4K video documentary that will debut this week (see 1503100042) at South by Southwest, in retail stores “as an example of beautiful 4K picture quality” to support its P-Series of Ultra HD TVs, Lily Knowles, vice president-product marketing, told us. Growth, a collaboration between Vizio and Culver City, California, digital content studio Everdream, is a 14-minute documentary that tells the story of 75 individuals as they journey through various chapters in life, Vizio said. Growth helped “bring our vision to life in terms of what branded content can look like,” and Vizio is looking to do more collaborations in the future, she said.