Winning at retail requires innovation across bundles of brand benefits.  By Vinit Doshi. (more)

The rise of hhgregg could be the second coming of Best Buy, reports Miguel Bustillo in the Wall Street Journal (2/5/10). "Barring a major setback, this looks like the next national chain in this space," says analyst Brad Thomas. One reason is that hhgregg has been "getting cut-rate rentals on locations once held by Circuit City, Inc., which closed last year." Another is that hhgregg sells relatively more appliances than its rivals, and appliance sales are up these days.

But the main reason is that hhgregg has differentiated itself by empowering its sales staff to negotiate deals with shoppers. Unlike Best Buy, and other national chains, hhgregg does not place its fortunes in the hands of "an hourly-wage workforce." Instead, it hires experienced personnel, pays them on commission, and lets them haggle with shoppers in hopes of talking "customers into buying higher-priced televisions and washing machines."

It appears that at least some shoppers like this. "You can work with them," says Michael Rodriquez "who recently haggled and won a reduced price on a washer, dryer and refrigerator." He adds: "We looked at the traditional options, like Sears. But at hhgregg, there was also more of an ability to negotiate." Hhgregg plans to open "40 to 45 stores in the ... coming months as part of a broader plan to expand to 600 stores this decade from 127 currently." The retailer projects fiscal 2010 sales of $1.53 billion, up 51 percent since 2007.

At the Topia Inn in Adams, Mass., the walls are painted in clay, the insulation is made of recycled blue jeans, and you can drink all the fair-trade coffee you want, reports Sara Rimer in the New York Times (2/5/10). The driveway, well, it's made "of grass, organic soil and recycled plastic." The roof is solar and the lights low-voltage, and there's turndown service without chocolates because they might stain the organic sheets. The inn itself is recycled from an old, abandoned hotel sitting next to a railroad station that used to be busy back when Adams, which is in the Berkshires, was an industrial mill town.

Now the inn is part of a plan by its owners, Caryn Heilman and Nana Simopoulos, to support a non-profits arts center, which they are assembling in "an abandoned vaudeville theater," which sits next to a restaurant, which they also own (Note: Alice doesn't live in the restaurant, she lives in the church nearby the restaurant, in the bell-tower, with her husband Ray and Fasha the dog). But if you want to stay at the Topia Inn, be prepared to take off your shoes at the door so you don't track in any pesticides and leave all your eco-unfriendly toiletries at home.

Caryn and Nana might give you some hemp slippers to wear instead, provide all kinds of organic grooming products and you can treat yourself to chromotherapy, which is a lavender bath illuminated by colored lights. And you get your choice of any of 10 themed rooms -- Moroccan, Greek, French, Zen, Native American. The wireless is free and you can watch anything you want on the flat-screen television. Breakfast is "freshly baked banana bread, baked pears with pomegranate seeds and an egg souffle (made with a rotary beater)." And all the fair-trade coffee you can drink.

You can get any kind of nuts you want in New York City, but if you want them warm and freshly roasted, there's about only one shop left that still does that, reports Diane Cardwell in the New York Times (2/4/10). That would be SP's Nuts and Candy, where a "classic stainless-steel roaster spins in the window, churning out seven-pound batches of hot almonds, cashews and pistachios, up to 10 times a day." Michael Yeo, the store's owner, bought the store in 1996, and enjoys a devoted following. "My customers know that I roast here so I cannot stop," he says, "If I do -- big trouble."

A Korean immigrant who never developed a taste for nuts himself, Michael just stumbled into the business, finding it for sale in a newspaper ad. "Literally I didn't have any idea there were this many different kinds of nuts, this many kinds of candy," he says. But the previous owner taught him what he needed to know, and he's now "keeping alive a New York tradition that has all but vanished over the past several decades ... Of the 38 Manhattan retail food operations licensed with the word 'nut' in the company name, only seven bear any resemblance to the nut sellers of yore, and none of them roast."

Jerry Cohen, who runs Economy Candy on the Lower East Side, still sells nuts, but gave up roasting. "It just became too much, with the oils and the smells and the Fire Department coming to inspect each week," says Jerry. "You need this permit, that permit -- they don't let you live." Rocco Damato of Bazzini, a nut importer and wholesaler, meanwhile says a combination of fancy imported nuts, high rents, and customer migration to the suburbs created "the catastrophe you have now." It's a catastrophe that William Black saw coming "in the early 1930s, when he converted 18 Chock full o' Nuts stores into coffee shops." This was, of course, during the Great Depression, when it seemed like fresh roasted nuts were "too much of a frivolous luxury."

If efforts to cross-breed oysters are successful, it could "turn a delicacy for the wealthy into the food of the masses," reports the Economist (1/30/10). Dennis Hedgecock of the University of Southern California has been working on this for several years now. He and his colleagues discovered that crossing "a tiny inbred strain called 'oyster 6' ... with a the similarly puny 'oyster 7,' the result is a large and fast-growing oyster -- 'oyster 6x7' -- which is easy to open and produces tens of millions of eggs."

The only problem is that you can't then breed the 6x7 oyster with itself because "the resulting offspring are puny again." That wouldn't be a problem if it were possible to produce large quantities of the 6x7 oyster, but it isn't. So Dr. Hedgecock and his team have taken "some other puny inbreds and created a second hybrid line, oyster 8x9. This variant doesn't breed well with itself either, but the magic happens when the 6x7 makes whoopie with the 8x9.

When that happens, the result is the "super-duper 6x7x8x9 crossbreed," which is large, flavorful and can be produced in "large quantities." Next year, these hybrid oyster SUVs will be "grown on a commercial scale." If that works, "oyster farming could follow the same path as salmon farming." Unlike salmon farming, however, oysters "are filter feeders that clean up the water column, making oyster farms healthy parts of the ocean," perhaps pleasing "consumers and environmentalists alike."

A free website called Flit helps online shoppers "shop using the same method they use at the mall," reports Katherine Boehret in the Wall Street Journal (2/3/10). This is of course quite different from the way online shopping usually works, which Katherine compares to sorting "through a giant bucket of gloves with few identifying marks other than price." One deficiency, she says, is that you're shopping by product, not retailer, and this omits the "style and spirit" of individual merchants. Another is that you lose the convenience of stored addresses and credit card information.

Flit addresses these issues with a search engine where you can enter the item for which you're shopping, with the results consisting of direct links to relevant retailers -- you can specify either "value" or "premium" shops. You can then "flit" from favorite store to favorite store, just like at a real mall. To keep you anchored, "an orange button remains in a Flit.com toolbar at the top of the page; click there to return back to home base before flitting off to yet another shopping site." Flit keeps track of which stores you've visited, and if you want to save this information, you can.

One problem is that Flit is only as good as each retailer's own search engine. Another is that it returns results from retailers that "have limited or no selections" for the searched item. Flit's chief says "this is valuable because it shows shoppers that a certain store doesn't carry an item -- just like a physical store." Hm. And while Flit remembers which stores you shopped, it doesn't retain specific items you found while shopping. Flit plans to fix that problem while it haggles with retailers to get a cut on any sales it drives. In the meantime, it is surviving on venture-capitalist money.

There may be 140,000 or more apps, but the average person uses only five or ten, reports Katie Hafner in the New York Times (1/31/10). That stat is according to a research firm called Flurry, and applies to iPhone and iPod Touch users. But it is supported anecdotally by iPhone user Caroline Cua, 27, who says she has downloaded exactly five apps, of which she regularly uses just four. She's joined by Julie Graham, 50, who comments, "I think I'm supposed to want more of them than I have."

Even among those who do want more apps than they have, few ever actually see more than a small percentage of those offered on the iTunes store, for example, where most "people gravitate to the most popular" offerings. "The top apps featured at the store do change out," says Stewart Putney of Moblyng, an app developer. "But most users will never see more than one percent of the total offered." And, according to Pinch Media, "most people stop using their applications pretty quickly, particularly if those apps are free."

However, count Phil Minasian, 18, among the "app-happy." Phil says his iPhone is loaded with apps, most of them free games. But he does pay about $15 a month for other apps and thinks people are indeed missing out on apps "that help with everyday life." He says he uses an app to find apps, to find his apps. Simon Sinek, 36, makes his choices based on the most popular apps that are also highly rated by at least 60 percent of at least 5,000 users. In any case, analysts say that "Apple and its developers receive $1 billion a year in revenue from selling applications (Apple itself won't say).

The science-fiction dream of "smart dust" is still a ways off, but moving closer to reality, reports Steve Lohr in the New York Times (1/31/10). Hewlett-Packard has embarked on a ten-year mission "to embed up to a trillion pushpin-size sensors around the globe (link)." The dream is to connect "the physical world to computing as never before," using so-called "smart dust" sensors to enable "buildings that manage their own energy use, bridges that sense motion and metal fatigue, cars that track traffic patterns and report potholes, and fruit and vegetable shipments that tell grocers when they ripen and begin to spoil."

The hangup is that the sensors need batteries: "Instead of dust ... the sensors would be the size of grapefruits." But the battery barrier is coming down, which is expanding "the potential data workloads that sensors can handle and the distance over which they can communicate -- without batteries." The key is that "the more sensors there are, the better the data quality should be. When mined and analyzed, better data should in turn help people make smarter decisions about things as diverse as energy policy and product marketing."

If this happens, some envision the result to be something like "an internet for things," giving rise to "fresh demand for a wide range of hardware and software to store, process and search the new data for nuggets of useful information." Others, such as computer scientist Deborah Estrin, says that future is already here -- in the form of the cellphone, which are in fact "versatile data collectors" that can monitor a person's daily life (link). Deborah thinks the killer app "is personalized health and wellness," saying, "The potential to help people make behavior changes and lead healthier lives is tremendous."

Marc A. Chavannes had his head in the clouds -- literally -- when he came up with the idea for Bubble Wrap, reports James Barron in the New York Times (1/26/10). The year was 1960, and Marc and his business partner, Al Fielding, had invented "a textured plastic wall paper" some three years earlier. They had yet "to find a profitable application for it," though. But as the plane descended, it seemed to Marc that the clouds were "cushioning the descent." And that's how he got the idea that his textured wallpaper might make dandy packing material.

Fifty years later, Bubble Wrap is all that and so much more. Bubble Wrap has been used to create "wedding dresses, chocolate molds, paint applicators," and more. It has been the subject of a book, "The Bubble Wrap Book," and even has its own day -- Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day -- which is always the last Monday in January. This was established "some years ago, after a shipment of microphones was delivered to a radio station in Bloomington, Ind." The station's announcers had a lot of fun popping bubbles on-air.

Perhaps Bubble Wrap's ultimate legacy is its therapeutic value, as documented by Kathleen M. Dillon, who conducted "experiments that established that popping Bubble Wrap reduces stress and leaves the popper less tired." If you can't get your hands on some wrap, there's virtual bubble wrap online (link). You just move your cursor across the bubbles, pointing and popping. It's not quite as satisfying as the real thing, but it might help. As Kathleen notes, there's just "something about the experience of making those little packets of air explode."

To heck with crowdsourcing -- Steve Jobs believes that "the economics of elitism trumps the wisdom of the crowd," reports Steve Lohr in the New York Times (1/31/10). Mr. Jobs subscribes to what John Kao, an innovation consultant, calls the "auteur model of innovation." That's when "there is a tight connection between the personality of the project leader and what is created." In film-making, examples include Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and James Cameron's "Avatar." And in product-making, the example is Apple's Steve Jobs.

Or maybe that's Steve Jobs's Apple. Either way, Apple products clearly reflect his "personal taste," which is evident both in the simple way he dresses (black turtleneck, jeans, sneakers) and the way he lives; his home is "uncluttered," featuring "spare interiors." He believes his products represent a triumph of taste (maybe it's time to lose the "mom" jeans, Steve :-). And he thinks that taste "is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and present."

Rather than pursuing design by committee or hewing to market research, Steve Jobs "relies heavily on tenacity, patience, belief and instinct." While he leads a large team, he looks for "designers, engineers and managers" who are "10 times better" than "merely very good." Perhaps most important, he considers himself to be "a skilled listener of technology" who tracks "vectors in technology over time," introducing new products like the iPad only when "technical progress, affordable pricing and consumer demand" align.