Kroger Asset Protection Delivers 8th Consecutive Quarter of Shrink Improvement
Since rebuilding the Asset Protection effort and team, they've certainly made an impact since Mike Lamb, Vice President Asset Protection joined the organization in April 2017, just ten quarters ago.

With a relatively new field team and an established corporate support group staffed with subject matter experts, they've worked tirelessly on developing the 'One Best Way' throughout their 2,759 grocery stores. Operating in over twenty banners nationwide this has been a significant accomplishment given their decentralized independent history. And to have the senior team call out shrink improvement in each of the last eight quarters certainly speaks to the teams efforts and accomplishments. As it's a rarity to have it mentioned in one quarter alone. But to have it mentioned in eight consecutive quarterly conference calls is an accomplishment this writer hasn't seen before.

Congratulations to the entire Asset Protection team and to the operators supporting the effort. -Gus Downing

Discrimination Law Suits Have Spent 18 Years in Litigation
Walmart Likely Discriminated Against Female Store Workers, EEOC Finds
Retailer tells agency it is willing to engage in conciliatory process
Walmart Inc. likely discriminated against 178 female workers by paying less or denying promotions because of their gender, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said in memos viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The EEOC documents ask Walmart and the women who filed complaints to come to a just resolution of the matter, which could include a settlement and changes to Walmart’s practices, say labor lawyers. If Walmart and the women don’t reach an agreement, the EEOC could file a lawsuit against the retailer.

The determination by the federal regulator marks a milestone in a nearly two-decade effort by current and former store workers to seek damages from the retail behemoth for discrimination.

In 2001, Walmart workers pursued a sprawling class-action suit against Walmart, alleging the retailer systematically paid 1.6 million female workers less than men and offered fewer promotions. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2011 the group had too little in common to form a single class of plaintiffs.

Since then, more than 1,900 women in 30 states have pursued cases and filed charges with the EEOC against Walmart alleging sex discrimination. The EEOC said for 178 women, there is reasonable cause to believe Walmart paid women less or denied women promotions, or both, because of their gender.

The allegations are more than 15 years old and “not representative of the positive experiences millions of women have had working at Walmart,” said Randy Hargrove, a Walmart spokesman. Walmart has urged the EEOC to move forward on the complaints for years, and told the agency it is willing to engage in the conciliatory process, he said. The majority of cause findings “are vague and non-specific,” and Walmart has asked the agency to provide details, he said. wsj.com

Landmark Case: Significantly Impacts Securing Enterprise Data
Your LinkedIn Data/Profile is Public Info - Not Protected
Court Rules That ‘Scraping’ Public Website Data Isn’t Hacking
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals shot down LinkedIn's claim that a company that was using its public facing data was violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Scraping public data from a website doesn’t constitute “hacking,” according to a new court ruling that could dramatically limit abuse of the United States’ primary hacking law.

The ruling comes after a lengthy battle between data analytics firm HiQ Labs and Microsoft owned LinkedIn, which have been at each other’s throats for several years over HiQ Labs’ practice of scraping the business social networking website’s public-facing data, then selling it (fused with other datasets) to a laundry list of employers.

In the ruling by The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the court shot down LinkedIn’s claim that access to this public data violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

In its declaration, the court ruled that to violate the CFAA, somebody would need to actually "circumvent [a] computer's generally applicable rules regarding access permissions, such as username and password requirements," meaning it’s not really hacking if you’re not bypassing some kind of meaningful authorization system.

Corporations have also taken advantage of the law’s poor wording for financial gain.

HiQ Labs makes its money by scraping information on LinkedIn profiles that LinkedIn users have set be viewable to the broader internet. It packages that data with public data gleaned from other websites, then sells it to employers looking for more insight into the employment pool. Researchers also sometimes scrape data for public interest purposes.

“LinkedIn has no protected property interest in the data contributed by its users, as the users retain ownership over their profiles,” the court ruled. “And as to the publicly available profiles, the users quite evidently intend them to be accessed by others, including for commercial purposes.”

At its heart, the legal issue is over the definition of "authorized use" of data — something that security professionals must consider in many cases of deciding whether legal remedies can be sought for individuals and companies accessing data that is available through a Web interface. LinkedIn is likely to appeal this verdict.

Dylan Gilbert, a privacy expert at consumer group Public Knowledge also applauded the ruling, but told Motherboard that the United States still needs a cohesive privacy law giving consumers not only transparency into the scope of datasets being collected, but control over how this data is used. vice.com

Maine rolls out "Track & Trace" requirement for marijuana plants
The Office of Marijuana Policy and BioTrackTHC, the Florida software company that landed the 6-year, $275,000 deal to track medical and adult-use cannabis grown, processed and sold in Maine.

The system requires the producer use a single tag for a plant, a second tag that covered the harvest batch (that could cover a whole room full of plants if the grower harvested them all at once), and a third tag attached to the final package sold to the consumer.

Under this system, the financial impact of the tagging system could be limited if a grower can harvest a whole group of plants at once and if the consumer can buy products in bulk, growers and retailers said. But single-serving products, a favorite among new customers, would still be hard hit. pressherald.com

Retail's Hottest Topic: Self-Checkout - Automated Grocery Stores
A Self-Checkout Revolution & Start Up's Are Popping Up Everywhere
The days of supermarket queues are numbered. That’s if Amazon and a slew of well-financed startups’ recent activities are anything to go by. Amazon’s cashierless automated stores are expanding everywhere, while emerging competitors like Standard Cognition and Grabango are raising sizable sums to bring cashierless technology to more supermarkets.

The general idea is this: Once supermarkets are fitted with an array of cameras, sensors, and computer vision smarts, customers can simply pick items from shelves, put them into their cart, walk out, and have the payment automatically deducted from their account.

While this undoubtedly raises privacy questions — as it is likely as much a massive data-gathering play as it is a customer-convenience exercise — it’s clear that supermarkets of the future will be “smarter” and far more connected than those we’re used to. This is also why we will continue to see investors lining up to back startups like Trigo, which launched out of stealth last July with $7 million in seed funding.

“There is very strong demand globally among grocery retailers to dramatically improve customer experience,” added Trigo CEO Michael Gabay. “The common denominator is that everyone is searching for technology to enable the most seamless in-and-out shopping experience. venturebeat.com

What U.S. Malls Forgot About Retail: Community
In April, Thasos, a data analytics firm, released an analysis that showed that mall traffic, after moving back into positive territory briefly in July-December 2018, is back into year-over-year declines. They further found that experiential retailers like Apple, Eataly, or Tesla aren’t enough to reverse the declines. And just investing in additional entertainment destinations like movie theaters or more unique experiences like Legoland or Dave & Busters may not be enough either.

Ironically, malls in other parts of the world are thriving. From my own experience, malls in Mexico City and the Philippines aren’t just thriving – they’re crowded. It’s easy to be dismissive – “oh, people only go for the air conditioning” or “of course they go there, online shopping is just not that entrenched there yet.” But that is missing an essential element of what malls in these regions have, that American malls do not, and that is community. forbes.com

Editor's Note: Great Read for the True Retailer in all of us - After all our livelihoods depend on it. And you might want to read it's companion article 'Have U.S. malls lost their sense of community? and see the discussion. Does it in fact boil down to "chasing out the teens"?

Viewpoint: 8 Things Managers Do That Make Employees Quit
Algorithms are becoming increasingly relevant in the workplace. From sifting through resumes to deciding who gets a raise, many of these new systems are proving to be highly valuable. But perhaps their most impressive, and relevant, capability is predicting which employees will quit. IBM is in the process of patenting an algorithm that can supposedly predict flight risk with 95% accuracy. Given that we are in a candidate-driven market, this is a significant innovation. There are now more job openings in the U.S. than there are unemployed Americans.

It takes an average of 24 days to fill a job, costing employers up to $4,000 per hire—maybe more, depending on your industry. The good news is that only about a quarter of employees that leave do so within their first year. This means you have plenty of time to assess flight risks and address them.

Eight common leadership mistakes that help explain this why. Understanding them, and how they impact your team, will help you identify those who are a flight risk and make changes that may convince them to stay.

Mistake 1: Setting Inconsistent Goals or Expectations
Mistake 2: Having Too Many Process Constraints
Mistake 3: Wasting Your Resources
Mistake 4: Putting People in the Wrong Roles
Mistake 5: Assigning Boring or Overly Easy Tasks
Mistake 6: Failing to Create a Psychologically Safe Culture
Mistake 7: Creating a Work Environment That Is Too Safe
Mistake 8: Leading with Bias

It's true there is no way you can control every aspect of your team's work experience. If someone wants to leave bad enough, sometimes they just will. That said, focusing on your own behaviors and what you can control will do wonders to improve the performance and cohesiveness of your team. The better you manage, the more productive, innovative, satisfied, and most importantly, loyal your team will be. shrm.org

 

Meijer completes mobile checkout initiative

Holiday sales growth could top 5%

Crate & Barrel to Expand its In-Store Restaurant to Up to 15 Locations - We're going to see a lot more of this in-store development of various offerings and services

Destination Maternity exploring sales or merger


Quarterly Results
Destination Maternity Q2 comp's down 10.5%, sales down 12% (closed 61 stores)