Anticipating supply shortages, consumers began shopping for holiday gifts as early as September, says Charles de Brabant, Executive Director of the Bensadoun School of Retail Management. Looking ahead to Black Friday, he predicts huge crowds and empty shelves amid surging demand.
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With a simple app download, customers can shop in-person at several Couche-Tard stores in Arizona without even taking out their credit card. And, with new contactless technology, stores can track which items consumers remove from the shelves in real time. Couche-Tard continues to work closely with the Retail Innovation Lab at 韩国裸舞 to study this technology鈥檚 impact on consumer behavior and retail profits, with the hope of expanding the system to additional stores across the country.
The Retail Innovation Lab at 韩国裸舞 in partnership with Alimentation Couche-Tard has been officially inaugurated by Lucie Lecours, Quebec鈥檚 Minister of the Economy. As the first of its kind in the world dedicated to on-the-ground simulation research for retail technology, the lab represents monumental progress and future growth for the Bensadoun School of Retail Management and its industry collaborators.
In the race to cut down on global carbon emissions, many experts are turning their attention to automotive manufacturers and their customers. As a potential solution to slowing the vehicle supply chain, Professor Saibal Ray, Academic Director at the Bensadoun School of Retail Management, suggests a collective pivot toward car rentals or other ride-share services in place of purchasing personal vehicles. The move would significantly decrease the number of cars in factories and on the road.
COVID-19 caused massive shifts in the way we do even the most mundane of things. Take grocery shopping, for example. This past October, Dr. Yu Ma, Associate Professor of Marketing and Academic Director of the Master of Management in Retailing (MMR), spoke at Grocery Innovations Canada. Here, he shared his insights on how COVID-19 has transformed the grocery shopping environment and what retailers can do to mitigate shopping anxiety and provide a positive shopping experience for consumers.
With e-commerce here to stay, dynamic pricing algorithms are adjusting what individual consumers pay for their items online using a complex system of price comparisons and purchase histories. In a new episode of the podcast "In Machines We Trust,鈥� produced by MIT Technology Review, Professor Maxime Cohen recommends clearer regulations for data collection to better protect the privacy and fair pricing experience of consumers.
Through its partnership with the retail innovation lab, Alimentation Couche-Tard is working steadily to develop frictionless shopping solutions using AI tracking and smartphone technology.
Now, the company is expanding its efforts to pioneer a new customer experience as Circle K, one of its daughter brands, rolls out a fully frictionless option in several Arizona stores.
Whether you are looking to begin an MBA or delve deeper into the world of finance, retail or analytics, when considering a graduate degree there are four main things to look at: what you learn, who you learn it from, who you learn it with, and who else has learned it. In other words, the curriculum, the faculty, your classmates, and the alumni.
On September 1, 2021, the first ever cohort in the Master of Management in Retailing (MMR) commenced with 31 students in total. Hailing from eight nations across the world and with eight languages spoken among them, this cohort features a diverse set of academic backgrounds. Our inaugural class holds degrees in economics, finance, business, engineering, marketing and communications, and retail management, from universities around the globe. Welcome to our first ever MMR students!
According to Charles de Brabant, Executive Director of the Bensadoun School of Retail Management, investing in smart technologies may help retailers profit in the long-term despite a steep upfront cost. In a pandemic world, frictionless alternatives to face-to-face interactions prioritize consumer safety, which could lead to increased brand loyalty and in-person browsing.
The labour shortage created by the pandemic forced many large retailers to decrease their hours of operation, leading to significant revenue losses, particularly over weekends. As the academic year progresses, Charles de Brabant, Executive Director of the Bensadoun School of Retail Management, predicts more students will be willing to work weekends if it means regaining some semblance of normal, pre-pandemic life.
Eric Bosco, the head of business development and partnerships at MITACS, provides recommendations for solving the current labour shortage in Quebec. He cites the Bensadoun School of Retail Management鈥檚 new Retail Innovation Laboratory as an essential partner in encouraging and supporting innovation within local companies.
Across Canada and the U.S., schools are opening their doors for in-person learning, causing a spike in back-to-school revenues that retailers haven鈥檛 seen since before the pandemic. Anwar White, Program Director of the Master of Management in Retailing, predicts that parents will spend more money than usual on supplies in their eagerness to give their children a normal back-to-school experience.
Throughout the pandemic, in-store technologies like price-check kiosks and self-checkout have created a more convenient shopping experience for consumers and provided retailers with greater access to valuable data on shopping habits. But consumers are concerned about privacy, and retailers may not have the necessary resources to purchase and upkeep in-store tech.
Professor Maxime Cohen joins Boston College鈥檚 Dmitry Mitrofanov to weigh in on tax opportunity zones in the U.S. Designed to generate cash flow in lower-income areas, opportunity zone programs have proven useful for both residential and corporate real estate developers. On the other hand, these programs would benefit from clearer metrics and more adaptable protocols for identifying communities in which to invest.
