Every year on Black Friday (the post-Thanksgiving shopping day that ushers in the Christmas buying season), millions of people wake up at 3 a.m. and drive to malls and big-box stores. For hours, they stand outside in the dark and the cold, hoping to score incredible deals. But they’re not really there to save money….

Just how solid are brick-and-mortar stores? For every brand that closes a store, two others open a new one, according to an August 2018 IHL Group study. And certain segments — such as food and grocery, drugstores, convenience stores, and superstores and warehouses — see almost four openings for every closure. Increasingly, what separates the…

In recent years, many retailers have rolled out solutions that rely on mobile beacon technology in their stores, only to find that these solutions have failed to yield the results that users craved. The problem hasn’t been with mobile beacons themselves. The technology still holds a lot of potential, which some retailers are using to…

More than 83 percent of Americans now own a smartphone, up another 4.3 percent over the past year, and users have more than 7 million apps to choose from. All these numbers mean that when people need information, they’re far more likely to pull out their smartphones than fire up a PC. About the only…

When the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation went into effect in May, the new mandate affected organizations far beyond the boundaries of the EU. GDPR’s requirements that organizations protect the privacy of any personal data they handle apply to the personal information of EU residents wherever it may exist in the world. This means…

I went for a walk last week and wandered into a bookstore, where I stumbled upon two books that I wanted to buy. The problem: I’d left my wallet at home. I asked the cashier whether the store accepted mobile payments. He wasn’t sure, so he had me wave my phone in front of the…