News English — NRF

Day 1 at NRF Big Show kicked off with a keynote featuring Target's CEO Brian Cornell and Matthew Shay, President & CEO National Retail Federation. After the usual smalltalk about how business was over the holiday period, the two men started talking about supply chain problems and how they could be overcome alongside any other headwinds the retail sector is bound to experience in the next few months and years.  The main focus for Brian Cornell was upstream improvements in visibility and improvement of ports in the US. It was a bit disappointing not to hear about onshoring of manufacturing or alternative sourcing strategies...

A review of the frictionless store concepts on view at #NRF2019; Ai-Fi, Cloud Pick, Cisco, Toshiba, Zippin, and Soul-M. Only one of these appeared commercially available right now - Cloud Pick, a Chinese company.

At a recent visit to #NRF2019 we noticed a less than perfect working AI which apparently mistook a man's elbows for two packets of Cheerios. We presume there is a potential for these types of 'AI mistakes' once these stores are rolled out on mass scale. Not all stores will have the very latest technology and may come with flaws such as this. How do you explain to your customers that their elbows look like Cheerios? Image source: STIQ Ltd, 2019 The real thing

This simply is the place to be if you are into retail and retail technology. The show attracts 37,000 visitors including 16,000 retailers covers 265,000 sqft in Manhattan. Despite retail's headwinds, the show looks promising and we are yet again on the spot to report from the show. Day 1 INTEL How does a TRex tell smaller dinosaurs there is definitely s space for them.  H&M sent 8 people to attend NRF. Shows the level of interest in the show.    

  Final day at the NRF 2018 show. (images to come - upload speed is particularly bad at JFK airport) Disappointed by the number of businesses that cannot explain what they do in a few sentences. Ok, some businesses are a bit more complex than say "we help retailers to become omni channel retailers"... However, for the companies who think this is a good explanation of what you do, perhaps you ought to think through your trade show strategy a bit more and losen up on the sales schpiel and get down to the nitty gritty. Sometimes the simplest explanation...