article thumbnail

How Retailers Can Appeal to Lower-Income Shoppers

Harvard Business Review

This blog post is part of the HBR Online Forum The Future of Retail. Retailers face several challenges as they enter the 2011 holiday season. Many retailers are responding with across-the-board price promotion strategies. Unemployment remains high. cost per meal) or at an individual unit level.

Retail 15
article thumbnail

Chain Stores vs. Amazon

Harvard Business Review

State after state enacted laws to tax chain retailers , to prohibit price discounting, and to protect small merchants and the wholesalers who served them against the onslaught of the chains. A group called the Anti-Monopoly League, which claimed to represent 80,000 independent merchants, announced its intention to drive chain retailers out.

Retail 11
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Ouch: A Year's Worth of Occasionally Disturbing Research on How to Get Ahead

Harvard Business Review

Researchers in the fields of business, economics, and psychology maintained their relentless pursuit of knowledge in 2011, discovering, among other things, that a joke can get you a raise and that it's OK to mimic your customers. Chi and Allan W. Snyder of the University of Sydney. Roediger III of Washington University. from nonmimickers.

P&L 15
article thumbnail

Top 10 Green Business Stories of 2011

Harvard Business Review

These drivers underpin a number of stories from 2011, but a few new themes came out as well. Coca-Cola was not alone in facing increasing costs in 2011; one of my clients, Kimberly-Clark, took an earnings hit from record pulp prices. Was a year like 2011 possible in a world without climate change? Was a year like 2011 likely ?