RICHFIELD, Minn. (TheStreet) -- Best Buy (BBY) plans to open hundreds more of its new small mobile stores as it looks to gain a significant market share of the increasing demand for smartphones and other handheld devices, the Financial Times reports.
The retailer expects to have a "number somewhere between here and 1,000" of Best Buy Mobile stores in shopping malls across the U.S., in addition to the 77 it has already opened, CEO Brian Dunn told the newspaper.
To lure value-conscious shoppers away from competitors' outlet stores, upscale department store Bloomingdale's plans to launch four outlet stores this summer and fall.
At a movie theater concession stand you'll hear, "Want to make that a jumbo for just a quarter more?" In an airport bar, you can get a bigger beer for just a dollar extra. Car rental companies will upgrade you to a nicer ride for just $7 more per day. You can add 32 gig of extra storage to your iPod for just $80. All these merchants know that getting you to spend just a little bit more will supersize their profits. The same is true on your website.
March couldn't come quick enough for retailers, especially those in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the country, who watched record-setting snowfalls in February do a number on their bottom lines. According to a recent report from Planalytics, a provider of business weather intelligence, February snowstorms resulted in a $36 billion loss for the U.S. economy.
A 2009 year-end survey of store traffic conducted by ShopperTrak, a provider of shopper traffic counting technology, showed a reasonably encouraging year-over-year increase of 3.5 percent. But store traffic has been so light over the past couple years that retailers, and their software vendors, are seeking ways to not only get consumers into stores, but also take them by the hand and guide them right to the cashiers. Case in point, take two recent retail technological innovations from Escalate Retail and NCR.
