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May 30, 2012 CSNews JAKARTA, Indonesia — 7-Eleven stores are fast becoming the new hot spots in Indonesia, filling a void in an area with few outdoor recreation spaces and limited mobility. In addition to blending convenience store offerings with inexpensive ready-made food and seating, 7-Eleven stores have turned into nighttime gathering spots with live bands and Wi-Fi, according The New York Times. The stores have taken over as the spot for young people to gather, hang out and gossip. Ten years ago, the place to be were street-side food stalls called warung; however, rapid economic growth has come with social change, the newspaper added. “People still like to talk about their lives, they like to gossip,” said Henri Honoris, president director of Modern Putra, 7-Eleven’s Indonesian franchisee. “Now we give them an alternative. It’s a warung with better quality.” Sixty-five percent of the franchise’s customers are younger than 30,…

Linda Lisanti Apr 19, 2012 CSNews BREWERTON, N.Y. — It’s only been six months since Nice N Easy Grocery Shoppes opened its first mini-grocery store in Brewerton, and already the community has taken to the store as if they’ve been doing their grocery shopping there for years. The mini-grocery, which opened its doors on Oct. 25 — replacing an existing Nice N Easy convenience store on the site off Interstate 81 — was built at the request of town officials who approached the chain to see if they could help fill the need in the community for a grocery store. Both the closest supermarket and Walmart are four miles away. The 6,750-square-foot store is Nice N Easy’s largest location, and it will serve as a prototype for future builds in select communities that have the need for such a store, like Brewerton did. On a recent visit to upstate New…

Eli Greenblat June 1, 2012 The Age ONE of the world’s most successful supermarket bosses, Sir Terry Leahy, who took the British chain Tesco from a struggling, third-ranked competitor in its home market to one of the biggest grocers in the world, has a message for Woolworths and Coles: there is a limit to how much private label goods can dominate their shelves. Sir Terry knows what he is talking about. Tesco helped drive the proliferation of private labels in Britain’s supermarkets, and when Woolworths revealed its new strategy last year to match a resurgent Coles and improve its own bottom line, it named Tesco as the world’s leading supermarket when it came to house brand penetration as a proportion of total sales. ”Like so many strategies it depends on how you execute,” Sir Terry told BusinessDay from London. ”The UK consumer has always trusted private label, as much as…

June 1, 2012 – 11:16AM The Age Taking clock-watching out of the equation can produce happier employees. Imagine being employed by a company that lets you work whenever you want. You can work a one-hour week or a 50-hour week. You can take a 10-minute lunch or a 10-hour lunch. You can turn up at 7am or you can rock up at 3pm. You can work whatever hours you like … and still get paid a full-time wage. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it actually exists. It was a trend that was started in 2004 by Best Buy, a retail chain in the US. The organisation introduced a system in their head office of 3000 workers called ROWE – Results Only Work Environment. In essence, it meant one thing: employees were judged on their performance, not their presence. The result was a 35 per cent increase in…

June 1, 2012 The Age New York food outlets would be forced to restrict the size of cups in which they dispense fizzy drinks to a maximum of 16 fluid ounces, or a little under 500ml. In his crusade for public health, the mayor of New York has taken on transfats, smoking, calorie-labelling and alcohol. Now Michael Bloomberg has revealed a new target, proposing a ban on the sale of large-sized high-calorie drinks in restaurants, cinemas and other public outlets. Bloomberg’s plan will confirm him in the eyes of libertarians and the hugely powerful food lobby as ‘‘nanny-in-chief’’, but health experts hailed it as a necessary move in the battle to curb a growing obesity epidemic that affects more than half of adult New Yorkers. Under the proposal, all food outlets regulated by the city authorities – including restaurants, street carts, delis, cinemas and sports arenas – would be forced…

May 31, 2012 CSNews DALLAS — Three years ago, Alon Brands Inc. began to incorporate mobile marketing into its multi-channel promotion strategy and now, it’s the heart of the overall program. Through text messages and social media — offering its customers discounts, coupons, contests and games — the company is building a database of loyal customers and tracking each interaction in a social customer resource management (CRM) system from PocketStop. “Texting was our gateway drug,” Scott Shakespeare, Alon Brands’ general manager of branding, advertising and promotions, told the audience at this year’s MCommerce Summit in New York. “We started simple with pumptoppers and posters, telling customers to text in a code for an offer like a free Big Gulp with a tamale purchase, or a gallon of milk for $1.89, which is a $2 savings.” Customers use their mobile phones to text in a unique code, and the company captures…