Dr. Roch Parayre August 13, 2014, CSNews With 151,000-plus convenience stores competing for nearly $700 billion in sales annually in the United States, today’s competitive landscape is more intense than it ever has been. While c-store leaders are no strangers to competitive pressures, the current volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment makes it even more important for organizations to seriously reevaluate their strategies and strengths relative to the competition, or risk becoming obsolete due to industry disruption. To truly anticipate change and be prepared for what happens next, leaders must look beyond their own industry to scan wider for both emerging and unconventional competitors as industry boundaries and geographic limitations continue to erode. A new, nimble player with a progressive approach to the traditional c-store business model has the potential to change the industry landscape overnight. Traditional competitors are also evolving as they embrace business model innovations to better…

Shane Scacco 13 August, 2014 Nielsen Australia’s grocery retail sector is evolving rapidly. Over the next three years major trends such as retail convergence, the influence of digital and social media, shifting consumer demographics and ethnicities and media fragmentation will collide to create an Australian retail landscape in 2017 which is vastly different to the current environment. Nowhere are these trends more evident than the online retail space. With internet penetration in Australia quickly approaching saturation point, connected device ownership growing significantly, and consumers’ attitudes toward online purchasing evolving, traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ retailers are making a play to secure their digital footprint and make the challenging transition from offline to online to omni-channel. And while the digital transition for many other industries has been relatively straight-forward, the complexities of the grocery retailing sector has delivered an altogether different experience for grocery retailers. Customer loyalty is one of the biggest…

Rebecca Robbins August 14 The Washington Post Wal-Mart ascended to its place atop the totem pole of U.S. retail by focusing on big supercenters in rural and suburban markets. But today, it is counting on something entirely different — growth in its small but surging small-scale grocery store and e-commerce businesses — to compensate for poor performance in its traditional storefronts. The signs are not good for Wal-Mart’s U.S. business, which has taken a hit along with the rest of the retail industry as consumers keep their wallets close. On Thursday, the Bentonville, Ark.,-based retailer reported that its U.S. division, its most important market, had seen its seventh straight quarter of declining traffic and its sixth straight quarter without sales growth at stores open at least a year. But there was a silver lining: As Wal-Mart’s U.S. division struggles overall, its small-scale Neighborhood Market locations and e-commerce sales are thriving.…

August 15, 2014 The Age Airport officials are asking the Transportation Department to consider classifying e-cigarettes as hazardous materials after a Massachusetts fire marshal focuses on an e-cigarette as the possible cause of smoldering in a bag that had to be removed from a jet on Saturday night at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Baggage handlers pulled the bag off the jet, a JetBlue flight bound for Buffalo, New York, and put it out with a hand-held extinguisher. It was not clear if the combustion had reached the stage of fire. The episode raises the question of whether e-cigarettes that use rechargeable lithium-ion batteries should be added to the list of banned items, which already includes matches, flares and most batteries that are “spillable.” Ed Freni, director of aviation at the Massachusetts Port Authority, said it was clear that lithium-ion batteries posed a hazard. “The more you see these type of…

Dr Joanna McMillan August 15, 2014 The Age Yep that’s what is happening in Australia. In the midst of all our talk about the obesity epidemic and debating the optimal diet, junk food home delivery is here. If one thing is abundantly clear it is that we have a nutrition crisis in our country. Of course we’re not alone – pretty much every developed country, and many developing countries, are on the same path as us. But let’s be absolutely honest with ourselves about the situation. We have an explosion of diabetes where 280 Australians develop the condition every single day. One in 12 of us die every minute from cardiovascular disease. One in three women, and one in two men will be diagnosed with some form of cancer before their 85th birthday, if they make it that far. While of course many of these cases are due to factors…