Amazon Prime Pantry virtually boxes its way into the supermarket ring...

The new service allows Prime loyalty club members fill up to a 45-pound virtual box with four cubic feet of groceries and get it shipped for a flat rate of $5.99, offering users an expanded selection of items that they usually pick up in grocery stores.

To help you stay within that weight limit, a virtual Amazon cardboard box will show you how much room is left, filling the box as you order. While you could easily fill a Prime Pantry box with your favourite treats, the programme is especially attractive for customers who want to stock up on heavier and bulkier items that don't usually ship free of charge.

Prime Pantry seems designed to help Amazon solve the problem of customers who need smaller items that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to ship. It would potentially eliminate a need to go to the local grocery store, though a spokeswoman said delivery is only guaranteed within four days.

Although the new US service obviously poses a threat to traditional grocers and will no doubt be fast-forwarded in terms of delivery times and roll-out, the real innovation appears to be the virtual box that fills as you shop, and measures purchases by weight & volume, rather than price....

Another breakthrough for Amazing Amazon, or at least a worthwhile watch?

Waitrose window displays - a test of pulling-power?

                                                                                                                    190 Acton Lane 1914
From their beginnings in 1904, Wallace Wyndham Waite and Arthur Rose took every opportunity to promote their business.  Waite thought window display was a key way to attract customers into the shops and spent a great deal of time creating innovative window displays.

                                                                                                                         Gloucester Road 1928
Often used to promote merchandise from across the British Empire, for which he was awarded the MBE, his window displays were eye catching and changed on a regular basis.

                                                                                Western Rd Brighton 2014

A century later, Waitrose have now obviously reached a point where even a hint of inner delights is sufficient for the UK shopper…

…and who can argue with the results?

Ocado - the real 'backstory' to a home delivery service

According to Graeme Burton of Computing, in discarding the idea of off-the-shelf software from the start, the development of bespoke software has taken Ocado into cutting-edge research into robotics, artificial systems, machine learning, simulation and more, as it bids to perfect its systems – and, potentially, to turn the fruits of this research into a platform that it can use to expand or offer as products or services in their own right.

“We are building an end-to-end platform that starts with the customer placing their order on a web shop or mobile and ends in their order arriving in a one-hour delivery slot at the kitchen table,” says Ocado’s technology director, Paul Clarke.

In other words, there’s much more to Ocado than just vans and warehouses, and it isn’t just implementing technology – it’s inventing it.

The deal they signed with Morrisons [in July 2013] was intended as the first of many. There won’t be other grocery ones in the UK because it’s exclusive, but in other territories and in non-food they say they can and will do others. In fact, work is also under way to “re-platform” Ocado’s non-warehouse technology for the cloud so that it can be rolled out to others, either elsewhere in the world or in the UK for non-supermarket applications.

In addition the vision systems that Ocado has been developing will enable its robots to be able to identify different goods, classify them and deal with them appropriately, all along the supply chain.

See more detail here

Given the above rate of innovation, it may be worthwhile for suppliers to embark on a deeper level of partnership with Ocado, not only to optimise current use of home delivery, but in order to anticipate the potential of the technology and its application both home and abroad…

In other words, an opportunity to help your colleagues in other countries share in Ocado’s leading edge applications, at all levels…

Gibraltar fire hits online gambling...

According to the BBC, an explosion and fire on Gibraltar disrupted a number of online betting operations on Sunday.

Online gambling is an important part of Gibraltar's economy with international companies choosing to base themselves there because of the territory's low taxes. The outage meant many people were unable to play bets online on a busy Easter Sunday of sport.

Given these unprecedented times it is perhaps understandable that even betting organisations were unable to calculate the odds of it happening this weekend....

i.e. according to William Hill, "It's just one of those freak events nobody could have predicted".

Temporary relief to find a windscreen-note on your damaged car?

                                                                                                            Source: HPM

Which? investigates supermarket tactics to make/help you buy more (or Why? this report may be holding the wrong end of the 'supermarket-bashing' stick...)

Given that 60-70% of purchasing decisions are made instore, by making it easier to buy, supermarkets are perhaps meeting a fundamental need for reminding, in shoppers...

Taking the three key points as reported in the Which? report, it may be useful for suppliers and retailers to consider some 'helping buy' options...

1. 'You read shelves from left to right and top to bottom so supermarkets put more profitable products, such as own-brand products, to the right or under the leading brand'  Product-siting can be helpful, especially to the time-poor shopper and placing similar products side-by-side makes for easier comparison. Where retailers miss a trick is in not facilitating true like-with-like comparison, ideally via unit pricing. Retailers that mislead or confuse at this point are eventually 'punished' via loss of custom...

2. 'You may find that products that are associated together can be located next to each other to encourage you to buy all of them'  Sharp-eyed NAMs may recognise this as category management, the purpose of which is to help the shopper to make complementary purchases. Retailers might make this more explicit to researchers and naïve shoppers via appropriate signage and possibly linked promotion, providing the product-set is truly complementary, and not simply an inducement to over-buy, as in a bogof..

3. 'Your peripheral vision notices movement - 'wobbly signs' - but not necessarily fixed signs'. In an increasingly cost-conscious and clutter-free store environment, wobblies would not have survived for thirty years if they were not effective....  Given the increasing difficulty in attracting and retaining shopper attention in a multimedia-saturated world, perhaps suppliers and retailers should reassess their optimisation of the one 'grabber' that seems to work - the humble 'wobblie'...

Above all, when the consumer-shopper takes the trouble to pay attention, it represents a major break-through...

We call it "paying attention" for a reason. It's worth quite a bit, and ought to be cherished...
Seth Godin

Amazon offers $5,000 for employees to quit

Contrarian king Jeff Bezos turns the old training cliché (CEO: ‘What if we train the team and they leave…?’         SD: ‘What if we don’t train them and they stay?’) on its head and deflects a little potential ‘staff-abuse’ criticism in the process….

In his latest annual letter to Amazon shareholders, Bezos outlines a number of ‘inward innovations’ around people management. These include training staff for in-demand non-Amazon jobs such as nursing and paying employees up to $5,000 if they quit.

Outsiders may feel that Bezos is simply heading off criticism that Amazon work their warehouse staff too hard – ‘walking 11 miles per shift’, etc. – but in fact he is taking a very innovative approach to reducing attitude issues at work.

Given that the right attitude makes development of a team’s knowledge and skills easier and takes half the time, coupled with the fact that ‘festering discontent’ can be highly infectious, Bezos approach has to make sense..

If still in doubt, think of the resource cost and complicated legal process involved in applying the traditional approach to ‘attitude’ elimination… 

Walgreens urged to leave US to gain tax benefit - a step too far for the US authorities?

According to the Financial Times, Walgreens has come under pressure from an influential group of its shareholders who want the US pharmacy chain to consider relocating to Europe, in what would be one of the largest tax inversions ever attempted.

At a private meeting in Paris on Friday, investors owning close to 5 per cent of Walgreens’ shares lobbied the company’s management to use its $16bn takeover of Swiss-based Alliance Boots to re-domicile its tax base.

Whilst such a move would be attractive to shareholders, coupled with similar cases and especially the focus on taxation of Google, Amazon and Apple, given the state of the US economy, it seems likely that the US government will try to block the move.

In doing so, it not only means major distraction for Walgreens-Boots management in the short term, with inevitable impact on supplier-retailer implications at street level, it also provides a way to make the question of merger company taxation a centre-stage issue globally…

In other words, the US government could bring forward the issue of taxing US companies on their global earnings, challenge the viability of corporation tax vehicles such as the so-called double-Irish tax arrangements in Ireland, and intensify the pressure by the French/EU governments to eliminate low taxation rates in member countries…

However, for suppliers to Walgreens-Boots, the real tail-sting was another agenda-item tabled at the same meeting whereby the investor group told Messrs Wasson and Pessina that they wanted to see a greater role for Boots’ management team in running the merged business….

The real Boots agenda emerges?
…and given that Boots management have more global experience than their Walgreens colleagues, this has to mean W-B flexing their international muscles in term of optimising prices and terms disharmonies, at least…

Watch this space...