I’ve blogged here and here about good and bad implementations of wipes in grocery stores.

I found another one in Coupeville, WA, the other day.

Despite the rather industrial graphics, there’s a few improvements. It’s very clearly for cleaning the cart, not your hands (as Safeway suggested).. It’s right next to the carts, so when you take a cart, you use it (rather than located near the exit, at Safeway). And should the Red Apple employees fail to maintain the display, there’s at least an encouraging reminder to the customer that they should ask to have it replenished.

This is no iPhone, it’s not a radical innovation, but it’s a definite response to a need, and tracking how it is and isn’t being dealt with is enlightening. First, one has to understand the need. Then one has to develop a solution. Then the solution must be implemented. Properly. Effectively. And throw in iteration, for fun. The fact that something as simple as this fails around solution/implementation at a major chain like Safeway tells you something about the organizational barriers to even the most mild of innovations.

One of the highlights of Kansas City was the chance to check out Cabela’s, a hunting/fishing/camping superstore. Although it’s chock full of animal killing products (and animal killing accessories), it manages to (in that way that the hunting community has always done) reframe this as pseudo-conservation and love for animals. The awe-inspiring amount of taxidermical displays feels like a trip to the national history museum, but the outdoor grill right next to one of the displays reveals the true nature of the endeavor. Lots of surprise and general challenges to my own perspectives made for a fun visit.

Here is a flickr set of my photos.

A quick update on the lame hand-wipe station at Safeway (blogged earlier here) – an unattractive display that cleans hands (not cart handles), and doesn’t really address the perceived problem.

It’s been shoved further against the wall, the container for the wipes is sitting open, and is empty.

Add neglect to the problem, I guess.

That Mall’s Sick And That Store’s Dead! is a blog that documents shuttered stores, office buildings, restaurants, malls…failures in commercial real estate that remain like small scars on our landscape. Nice niche!

Old and run-down business goes away, omnipresent Dunkin Donuts comes in. One shouldn’t infer timing, nor cause-and-effect, of course. But perhaps signs of the times?

Meanwhile, a recent post on Bostonist maps out the density of DD in nearby Boston.

I figured I’d be eating some donuts on that trip, but I did not. I was quite excited to see a Tim Horton’s (a rare sighting in the US, especially away from a Canadian border) and ran in to get a butter tart (a dessert fave). Yum!

Bruce Nussbaum offers some great insight about the problems and history with leadership at Home Depot (I hadn’t heard any of this). It reminded me of last weekend’s interesting shopping experience…

We were planning on painting the ceiling in our family room/kitchen. We had some paint on hand from our last ceiling job. It was Glidden ceiling paint, and we wanted to match it exactly with the same brand. Ceiling paint from different companies won’t match exactly and the job will look terrible if you switch color/finish midway through. We had bought this Glidden stuff a number of times at our local Ace, just down the road from us. Last time, they had a big display for a new variant, ceiling paint that goes on pink and dries white. It’s tough to paint ceiling white over primer, since you can’t really see where you’ve painted very easily. We were too cheap to opt for the fancy stuff, but we liked the Glidden just fine.

Sure, ceiling paint is just a specific color and finish that they’ve repackaged, but it’s much easier to ask for ceiling paint as a product rather than have one mixed up custom. It’s a great idea to package and brand a solution.

We hit the Ace, with our list of stuff. But no ceiling paint. No Glidden. No pink. No Ace brand ceiling paint. We asked and got an inarticulate and unhelpful “We just have regular paint.” Amazed and frustrated, we checked out (another inarticulate employee). We got in the car and drove north to the next paint store we knew about. They weren’t a Glidden dealer, but they had been helpful in the past with paint. No ceiling paint on display, so we asked for help. Apparently “Mark” who dealt with paint was occupied, so our guy went to ask him for us. He came back and told us “All these paints go on the ceiling.” Uhh, yeah, but that’s not the point.

Back in the car to the next hardware store north. Seemed to be an Ace that had been disenfranchised. Rusted tools on the shelves. Ladders covering the paint display. We were told “we don’t carry ceiling paint any more.” Obviously.

At this point, we just drove the remaining few miles to Home Depot. We got a good parking spot (their parking lot being enough to keep me away from the store) and strode purposefully to the paint department. We found, without help, the Glidden ceiling paint. We walked to the self-check, waited 30 seconds, swiped, weighed, paid, and walked out. We were back in the car in 5 minutes. The most successful Home Depot trip ever.

After all this driving around, we were pretty hungry and we went to the Burger King drive-through across the street (sort of a protein-of-last-resort choice). When we came to the window to pay and pick up our food, they noticed our dog in the backseat, and a small flurry of excitement ensued. “Is that a dog back there?” “Look at the lovely doggie!” and “Can we give your dog a treat?” We said sure, and they went and got him a piece of bacon, wrapped in a napkin. (and in case he’s reading this, sorry, dog, but you don’t get people food, so you didn’t even know about this).

The local stores were unable to provide us with the product we needed (including something we had previously purchased from them) and they were unpleasant and frustrating to deal with. The big box corporate experiences were efficient, satisfying, and/or surprisingly pleasant and touching.

I’ve certainly bitched here extensively about bad experiences at Home Depot and their ilk, but in one hour we had a series of disappointing local retail visits, and two very successful (especially so when the previous ones failed so badly) corporate visits. We tried to shop local and support smaller businesses. What will we do next time?

Postscript: Glidden had changed their label since the last purchase, removing any information about the coverage per gallon. Why? And they changed the formula; this new version smells like sour milk and what Marge Simpson calls “heinie.” But the ceiling looks great.

Staples ladders up to a higher-order benefit, from commodity office supplies to a sense of well-being. Selling security without using fear; nicely done. Seems empowering, rather than manipulative.

An in-store display for Pillsbury products. Press the button on Pop’n’Fresh’s belly and he emits his signature giggle. A nice and simple touch that extends the brand; links the merchandising to the ads. And is fun, of course.

Midnite Sun & Cruise? What the heck does this business do? It’s not a travel agent, or a place to take a cruise. It’s a tanning salon. A place you visit before you take a cruise? And what kind of sun is Midnite anyway? Very confusing.

A few tidbits from this story

On a recent Friday morning in the southern India city of Hyderabad, one of the country’s biggest companies, Reliance, plunged into the retail market by opening 11 neighborhood supermarkets simultaneously across the city.

The stores offer customers long, clean, brightly lit aisles lined with deep black plastic bins full of produce, all clearly labeled with prices. There are even modern juice bars near the exits.

“I’m already a Reliance fan,” said one early customer, Amrit Dugar, a wedding planner. “I use them for my telecom and petrol.”

Such a different notion of brand. Phone company, gas station, grocery store? Seems like these large companies in India have unique combinations of holdings, but their brands transcend their categories.

India has only a few dozen very large supermarkets, but Reliance plans to change not just the scale of what Indian retailers have seen before, but also the way they get products to market.

The Reliance Fresh stores are a mere fraction the size of the average Western supermarket, but huge compared to the majority of Indian shops; fewer than 5 percent of the country’s stores are more than 500 square feet. In three to six months, Reliance Retail will open a few flagship stores with about 100,000 square feet of space each (the average Wal-Mart is 85,000 square feet) focusing on foods, not manufactured goods.

It plans to spend $5.6 billion to open more than 4,000 stores in 1,500 towns, cities and villages over the next four years, exceeding 100 million square feet of retail space.

The article goes on to describe the coming of retail in a big way, beyond just Reliance, and the impact that this can have on small businesses, and on employment in India. The numbers in this story, the size of the country and the tiny-ness of the current retail footprint and the plans — all are mind-boggling.

Of course they’ve already discussed this on the graphic design/branding website Speak Up (where I nicked this image) but last weekend we saw (in Pacific Grove, CA, of all places) a new Baskin-Robbins logo on a storefront.

Yikes! It looks even worse on the outside of a store!

The Hannaford grocery chain has developed their own ratings system for the nutritional value of grocery products. From this story

A New England supermarket chain has developed a 1-to-3 star nutritional rating system that flunks most of the foods consumers think are good for them.

After plugging 27,000 products into its system, the Hannaford Brothers chain found that 77 percent of the foods failed to receive even one good nutrition star, The New York Times reports.

Hannaford said many of the processed foods advertised as being healthy failed to gain a star because they contained too much sodium, sugar or fat.

Most fruits and vegetables earned the highest rating of three stars along with salmon and high-fiber cereals.

Making its debut in September, Hannaford’s rating system puts the chain in the awkward position of judging the very products it’s trying to sell. In fact, most of Hannaford’s own store brands failed to get any stars, the Times said.

“We are saying there are no bad foods,” Hannaford spokeswoman Caren Epstein told the newspaper. “This is a good, better and best system.”

Hannaford’s nutritionists acknowledge their system is more stringent than the guidelines used by the Food and Drug Administration.

A couple of things of note here. First, the subjectivity of any measuring and rating system means that establishing standards will always be tough. The challenge to non-nutritionists to understand the complexity of ingredients, preparation, nutrition, etc. is enormous. I would suggest it’s impossible. Do multiple layers of ratings systems help or hinder? And related, is the second issue, where a retailer (a food retailer, even) is assessing the quality of the products they are selling. If a product is packaged and branded as being healthy, but it’s label is in opposition to how many stars it receives, will there be pressure on Hannaford to back down? It seems that this is healthy for consumers (so to speak) but may be a retailing nightmare. I hope they stick to their guns, but I wonder if other channels would be so bold. The online world has brought us a lot of customer reviews that obviously can be quite critical, but does that work in a bricks+mortar setting when the negative assessment comes from the bricks+mortar itself?

Edited from the New York Times. Wasn’t the mall the ultimate in egalitarianism? And even something approximating user-friendliness? So here’s a “trend” to create mystery and exclusivity in order to drive the right customer to increased loyalty.

In malls across the country, the floor-to-ceiling glass storefront – a tradition of transparency in retailing that dates back at least 100 years – is beginning to give way to elaborate walls that make it impossible to see inside.

The outside of Ruehl No. 925, a new chain from Abercrombie & Fitch, is a brick facade that mimics the front of a townhouse. The exterior of its corporate sibling, a clothing store called Hollister, resembles a beach shack, its windows covered by wooden shutters. And the entrance to Martin & Osa, a new retailer from American Eagle Outfitters, is a long wooden wall with a thin strip of dark blue glass.

As retail companies race to open new chains that serve ever-smaller slices of the population – Abercrombie & Fitch has four different stores, each for approximately a decade of life – they are using storefronts cloaked in wood and brick to ward off those who do not belong inside (and whose presence might diminish the shopping experience of those who do).

Retail executives say that by drawing the curtain over their storefronts, they can stand out in mall corridors crowded with glass-encased competitors. The modern mall, said Michele Martin, the head women’s clothing designer at Martin & Osa, “is too transparent, too naked. It’s just a sea of clothing.”

Intrigued by a store they cannot see into, consumers walk in to solve the mystery and stay to shop, executives said.

…

“It has this cool apartment vibe,” said Ms. Palotta. “Instead of being in Bergen County in the middle of New Jersey, we are on a street in New York, and that is where we want to be anyway – living in New York City.”
…
Then came the glass-shattering Abercrombie & Fitch. In 2000, the chain began experimenting with an opaque exterior when it introduced Hollister, a clothing store geared toward high school students.

The outside of the store evokes a California surf shack whose residents have shuttered the windows and hidden the front door to keep out the riffraff.

Or, as Tom Lennox, the director of communication at Abercrombie & Fitch put it: “You can feel yourself on the beach with the sunlight shining through.” (The sunlight being, in this case, the fluorescent mall lights.)

Hollister proved an immediate success, so Abercrombie & Fitch extended the darkened storefront to its namesake stores, placing heavy wooden shades over the existing glass windows.

Finally, there was Ruehl, by far the starkest-looking storefront in the American mall: a brick wall, rising up behind cast-iron gates and guarded at all times by an employee – or, a “model,” as Abercrombie aptly calls its young workers.

Andrew McQuilkin, vice president of design at FRCH Design Worldwide, which designs stores for dozens of retailers from Target to Tiffany’s, said the Abercrombie storefronts amount to a barrier.

“They are sending a message early in the conversation that says you belong or you don’t belong.”

All of which Abercrombie & Fitch freely admits. “We are not targeting middle-aged men,” said Mr. Lennox, the communications director. “To have them flee the store, that is fine with us.”

It’s a gorgeous sunny day on the California coast. Halloween seems far off. Thanksgiving even further. Yet today we received our first (of many, no doubt) Crate and Barrel xmas catalog? The grocery store is featuring egg nog (as well as other nogs). I don’t know if I can handle multiple streams of holiday pressures.

We did an unplanned meal shopping thing at Safeway the other day – went in for that night’s meal, thinking “let’s get some fish, and maybe some vegetables.” We check out the fish and choose Dover Sole, relatively bland. We think about some spices and I go off to the spice aisle for something from Zatarains or whoever has that silhouetted dancing chef (anyone?), but then we see this pretty cool display right in front of our noses (there’s so much crap on display in these stores that I guess we tend to look past it when possible) – a variety of spices and marinades.

The fish-prepping man was incredibly nice, very genial, and asked lots of questions as he prepared our food (“how spicy do you like it?”, etc.). We could get the spices on the fish, or on the side. He pointed out another flavor they had but didn’t have room for in the display. We went from ingredients to meal with an enjoyable and custom bit of service (yeah, you can buy flavored/spiced fish and chicken, already done, but this was done at that moment, just for us).

Of course, there were no ingredients on these containers and if you’ve ever read the packages on marinades and flavoring spices you’ve probably noticed the ridiculous amount of salt they contain. We usually comparison shop at length until we find something that is not going to drown us in NaCl. Well, as you can imagine, the fish was spicy and really really really really salty. Each bit was like someone held your tongue with a pair of tongs and held a container of free-running salt above your head for a full minute.

Interestingly, I don’t blame Safeway for that. I take responsibility – caveat emptor – for purchasing a likely-to-be-salty product without finding out more. I compliment Safeway for providing a value-added experience (with the quality of the service – the human – really making it work). I guess we won’t do that next time, and will take the prep burden back on ourselves.

also: I thought the design of the marinade dispensers was kinda cool, allowing you to measure and presumably prevent overpouring.