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Here's what's in store for shoppers

Consumers want stores to make buying easier, quicker and available 24 hours a day. Companies are responding by testing a bewildering array of new technologies. At the National Retail Federation annual gathering in New York, Times staff writer Mark Albright finds retailers are under increasing pressure to cope with rapid change.

By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published January 18, 2006

HELP MAY BE JUST A COMPUTER KIOSK AWAY

Fed up waiting to ask a simple do-it-yourself question at the Home Depot paint department? Would a computer kiosk offering a live person talking from a call center in some other city keep you from marching off to another paint store?

Live customer support emanating from a call center is one of the new ideas catching the eyes of chain store executives.

The touch-screen kiosk shows live pictures of the clerk answering your questions. He or she is equipped with a store computer loaded with the inventory, store maps and product and how-to information. It all can be read or printed out at the kiosk.

The kiosks are supposed to pay for themselves within a year by replacing two clerks. Perhaps the camera picture also gives customers some visual assurance that their questions are not being answered by someone in India or the Philippines.

Central call center customer service has long been a staple of mail-order houses such as Dell computers and HSN in St. Petersburg. Now the cost-cutting idea is being tested by big store chains enamored with using technology to become even more self-service.

Best Buy and Staples are testing live support kiosks at single stores in Bellevue, Wash., and Boston. Each spread 10 kiosks around the store. Home Depot chairman and chief executive Bob Nardelli used one in a demonstration of technologies that the home improvement giant has tested, but has yet to deploy.

"Stores use them any place people stand in line for help," said D.L. Baron, founder of Experticity, a Seattle firm that developed the software. "No more clerks standing around during down times."

Will it work? It sounds a lot like driving to a store where the customers are served by people who could be summoned from home by phone or the Internet.

The popularity of flat-panel TV sets opened an opportunity that furniture makers see as a trend bigger than the sleigh bed.

Those skinny little sets disappear inside those cavernous entertainment centers made to contain thick, 30-inch console and projection TV sets. Marriott International started replacing the entertainment centers in all of its hotels last year with low-slung cabinets that the TV sets sit on, not in. Ethan Allen did a big redesign after the thin sets and plasma TVs made 15 of the company's 50 entertainment center modules obsolete.

Industry buzz is building over Ethan Allen's lift cabinet, which keeps the thin-screen TV hidden inside a piece of furniture. Flick a remote control and an electric motor pushes the screen up for viewing, much like the set Jay Leno uses to show movie clips on the Tonight Show. At $2,999, it's not cheap. But the company, never known for furniture with motorized moving parts, waited an extra year for tests and refinements before putting it on the market.

"I had one in my office for a year and tested them in some friends' houses to make sure it worked," said Farooq Kathwari, chairman and chief executive of Ethan Allen. He added that the lift has braking safety sensors and moves at the speed of a garage door opener.

Ethan Allen will promote it as the "now you see it, now you don't" TV cabinet.

About 75 Casual Corner Annex stores in factory outlet malls around the country will be converted into the first batch of Lane Bryant Outlet stores. Charming Shoppes Inc., the Bensalem, Pa., parent of Lane Bryant and other plus-size women's apparel retailers, agreed to take over lease payments for the defunct Casual Corner factory outlet stores by paying the chain's liquidators $2.8-million. The transformation will not begin until at least April. One of the stores is in Prime Outlets Ellenton. No word on the fate of other Casual Corner stores in Tampa Bay malls that closed after Christmas.

President Bush has signed legislation to help the nation's retailers mount a coordinated attack on organized theft rings. Store loss prevention people make most criminal cases against thieves who hit their stores by filing complaints and detaining suspects for police. Store detectives, however, complain about professional shoplifters who are often released without bail, then skip town to strike somewhere else. The National Retail Federation last fall set up a national retail theft crime database that enables participating chains and law enforcement to post and share case information. The new law defines organized retail theft for the first time, authorizes the FBI to join the effort with a special team to make cases and earmarks $5-million to help the effort.

Skeptics doubted that the fashion industry could persuade women to buy baggy gaucho pants.

Capri pants, okay. That wasn't too much of a stretch for a revival of a '60s trend. But billowy gaucho pants that end just below the knee?

Just back from his annual cross-country drive to learn what Americans are wearing, fashion trend forecaster David Wolfe, creative director of Donegar Group, confirmed several suspicions. Among them: The market for premium-price denim jeans (up to $200 a pair) has peaked. So Wolfe is recommending that stores push other denim styles, including white and pastels, in 2007.

"I saw a lot of denim on the trip, but most of it was the old comfort denim," he said. "And yes, I saw women wearing gaucho pants, even in Odessa, Texas. Nobody was wearing a Martha Stewart poncho. That was a fad."

[Last modified January 18, 2006, 01:10:21]