The Future of On Demand Retail

We’ve seen how Ghost Kitchens have started to change the face of restaurants. Ghost Kitchens are essentially restaurants with no physical space for customers which means they are delivery-only restaurants. And in fact, some Ghost Kitchens will actually support multiple online-only restaurants from the same location. The economics of Ghost Kitchens are very different than […]

Black Friday at My House

Several years ago my oldest son bought himself an iPad mini. Recently he received his first iPhone and as a result has been using his iPad infrequently. At the same time, my seven-year-old wants to buy an iPad and so his brother offered to sell him his iPad for $250. Over the last two or […]

A Review of Apple’s Q2 Results

Yesterday I posted a few thoughts and my predictions for Apple’s fiscal Q2 results.  Here’s my follow-up with some additional thoughts on the market implications and where we go from here. iPhone I had predicted Apple would sell around 37M iPhones in the quarter. Consensus was calling for 38.2M. Apple blew away not only the […]

Holiday 2013

A few quick thoughts on the holiday shopping season: November 1st marks the officially official opening of the holiday shopping season. This year we saw a tremendous number of promotions kick-off on November 1st. Walmart kicked off its campaign at midnight and Amazon launched its Black Friday Deals Store, offering “Deals of the Day” through Dec. […]

An All-Digital World Speeds Commerce

An all-digital world accelerates commerce. As “things” become digital or as physical non-digital things gain a virtual and digital identity the speed at which they can move approaches the speed at which digital things can move. This all results in the speed of commerce for both digital and non-digital things accelerating. In a digital world […]

Weekly Retail Visits: CityTarget

While in Seattle last week, I was able to visit the CityTarget between Union Street and Pike Street. Target announced their CityTarget initiative in the summer of 2012 and the first stores opened on July 25, 2012 in Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Stores in Portland, New York, and San Francisco would follow later that […]

Insights from Apple’s (Past) Quarterly Financial Results

Apple released quarterly results for their fiscal third quarter yesterday.  While a tremendous amount of ink has been spilled dissecting every ounce of the most recently concluded quarter as well as pontificating about the implications, I thought it worthwhile to look back over the last 15 quarters to see if any insights might be gleaned. Here […]

August is the New September…Which was the New March…

For many tech categories, new models were historically announced at the beginning of the year and then brought to market in the Spring period (March/April). I think some if not all of this timing was driven by the need to sufficiently inventory the supply chain in advance of the holiday season. A few years ago […]

Best Buy’s European Exit: Thoughts on What Scales Well

Yesterday Best Buy announced they were exiting Europe through the sale of the 50 percent stake in their European joint venture to their partner in the JV – Carphone Warehouse. The deal totals roughly $775M – 573M in cash at closing, $124M in common stock of Carphone Warehouse with a 1-yr lockup period, $39M in […]

Holiday 2012: Part XII – How Many Products were Promoted over the Weekend?

For my past holiday predictions and commentary see the following: Holiday 2012: Part I Holiday 2012: Part II Holiday 2012: Part III Holiday 2012: Part IV Holiday 2012: Part V Holiday 2012: Part VI Holiday 2012: Part VII Holiday 2012: Part VIII Holiday 2012: Part IX Holiday 2012: Part X Holiday 2012: Part XI – […]