"Our main shopping spend went out of town years ago, and is now going online. If the government money helps us do some radical rethinking about what our high streets are for, that's excellent. If it just tries to subsidise activities that are declining it will be wasted."

"Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”"

Seriously useful supplier!

Haha

Fantastic work and figures here, notably linked to a google spreadsheet.

via Bruce Sterling: "What a spectacle".

Interesting: "# When a truffle was $0.15 and a Kiss was $0.01, 73% of subjects chose the truffle and 27% the Kiss
# When a truffle was $0.14 and a Kiss was free, 69% chose the kiss and 31% the truffle"

Retail has indeed shifted profoundly.

Definitely

"So while Tetris and Thriller may have sold about the same number of copies, Michael Jackson has touched many more people than Alexey Pajitnov. Allegedly." Smart post on games and culture.

"If the game industry wants to reduce the impact of used games, there's an obvious and simple way to do it: Change the retail discount structure."