Futuretail: The Retail Technology Weblog

Forget King Kong... here comes Donkey Kong!

Nintendo has joined the ranks of Apple and Sony in opening a flagship store to showcase the products it manufacturers. The new store will be in Times Square, which is... well, a "traditional" choice to say the least. When are manufacturers going to realize that no one has free time on trips to NYC to spend browsing and playing with their gadgets. Hint to Nintendo: airport retail. With an average wait time of 90 minutes, the 500 million passengers per year who pass through the USA's top 50 airports have plenty of time to kill on the Nintendo DS and GameCube. Who knows, we might even pay for the privilege: next time you're in the Atlanta airport, check out the "Dasani Listening Zone" in the Delta Crown Room for a chance to try Bose noise cancelling headsets and Sirius satellite radio.

New e-ink ESLs now available in Japan

OK, so it didn't quite round out our Japanese news this week... Finally, e-ink technology (using high-contrast black-and-white balls suspended between two sheets of plastic) rather than LCD technology has made it to commercial deployment in electronic shelf labels (ESLs) in Japan. Why is this news? Power consumption for one thing. A similar tag I was given by e-ink (different company) ran for two years on two AA batteries... Not bad for a constantly changing display visible from across the room.

Rounding out our Japanese news... China boycotts Japan

Reacting to perceived Japanese support for revisionist textbooks, the China Chain Store and Franchise Association announced a boycott of 10 Japanese companies. While this may be slightly more impactful than the American boycott of all things French prior to the Iraq war (remember "Freedom Fries"?), globalization will likely gloss this over pretty quickly. Good thing it wasn't the other way around... somebody boycotting China. Imagine the riots at Wal-Mart when those $15 billion in Chinese-made goods don't materialize on the store shelves and customers have to suffer those exorbidant American-made prices...

The Apple Store goes mobile... in Japan anyway.

Proving once again that - like Godzilla and vending machines that dispense beer and toilet paper (though not the same machine) - Japan gets all the cool things first. Now the Apple Store in Japan is available in a mobile-optimized form. (Don't click the link if you're not reading this on a mobile DoCoMo phone: you'll just see "You cannot utilize this ｻ ｲ ﾄ from the portable terminal of the customer."). It looks like Apple is the first "brick and mortar" retailer to offer multichannel features that extend to the phone (Amazon.co.jp did it earlier this year)

New retail format - free vending

Japanese vending company Fuji Electric Retail Systems has introduced a new vending system that has the ability to switch to a free mode when the power goes off, thus providing emergency sustenance to patrons. Just think... if we'd had these in college... where all you had to do to get free drinks is unplug the darned thing... This may work well in Japan, where everyone is honest, but here in the good old USA, we know how to take full advantage of a retailer's civic-spiritedness.