Since the height of the pandemic, when e-commerce exploded, there has been much gnashing of teeth about the future of brick-and-mortar stores. With e-commerce so convenient and—let’s use one of retail’s favorite buzzwords—frictionless, what could lure shoppers off their couches?

In London, one answer to how to get consumers to leave their homes is a store that demonstrates how those homes can be more technologically sophisticated.

EE, one of the UK’s largest telecommunications companies, opened a new flagship in 2023 in the Westfield London shopping center in the capital’s White City district. Mobile carriers and internet service providers, like Verizon and Comcast on US shores, tend to be boutique-sized, which is plenty of space to show the latest phone models and accessories, but the new store occupies 4,230 square feet of space.

More than just showcasing products, it functions in some ways like a science museum, with what the brand calls “experience zones” that essentially are interactive exhibits. Each evokes a different room of the home and demonstrates how technology could transform those rooms.

Richard Bennett, creative director at London’s Dalziel & Pow, which designed EE Studio in collaboration with Your Studio, explained that the store was designed to be an “experiential platform” to tell a “connected home technology story.”

Bennett said stores need to embrace such trends as storytelling and experiential design to engage consumers.

Keep reading here.—AAN

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The Federal Trade Commission today said it’s suing to block the proposed merger between Kroger and Albertsons, calling the country’s largest supermarket merger in history anticompetitive.

The FTC issued an administrative complaint and filed a lawsuit in federal court in Oregon, it said in a statement, with the support of a bipartisan team of nine attorneys general. Kroger’s proposed $24.6 billion acquisition of Albertsons was first announced in October 2022; the two grocers want to compete with Walmart and Amazon, with a potential combined store count of over 5,000.

The agency alleges the deal would lead to higher grocery prices, “further exacerbating the financial strain consumers across the country face today,” Henry Liu, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, said. The deal could result in lower quality products and services and fewer options for consumers, the agency claimed.

Keep reading here.—EC

A new survey from Deloitte found that seven in 10 Americans said they’re still worried about the price of everyday goods. The indicator is down from the 83% who expressed the same concern back in the summer of 2022, when inflation hit a recent peak of 9.1%.

• The annual rate of inflation in January, for comparison, was 3.1%, according to the latest consumer price index.

“Despite low unemployment, GDP growth, and solid retail sales numbers, financial and geopolitical anxiety weigh heavily on the US consumer’s psyche,” Stephen Rogers, managing director of the Deloitte Consumer Industry Center, said in a statement.

In addition, Deloitte’s financial well-being index was 99.0 in January, down marginally from 99.8 a year ago. The research group highlighted that this index had trended inversely with headline inflation since 2020. But shoppers are still keeping a close eye on prices.

Keep reading here.—AV

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