As inflated grocery prices have sent shoppers heading to different retailers and switching to private labels to cross everything off their lists, getting consumers to keep coming back to the same retailers and brands has become a loyal pain.

From personalization to new innovations, Stuart Aitken, chief merchant and marketing officer at Kroger, and Gregory Guidotti, CMO at Ferrara Candy Company, owner of brands like Nerds, Trolli, and SweeTarts, have found several ways to effectively engage wayward shoppers. Retail Brew sat down with Aitken and Ferrara at Groceryshop in Las Vegas earlier this month to discuss how consumers’ needs are shifting and the top strategies they’re employing to keep them coming back.

Keep reading here.—EC

When inventory is declared dead, retailers can find themselves in a spooky situation. Without some kind of afterlife planned for these products, whether in a resale market or a landfill, they become what some in the industry call a “zombie SKU."

“It’s inventory that’s not going anywhere,” Kate Klemmer Terry, chief commerce officer at third-party logistics provider Outerspace, told Retail Brew. “It’s not selling for a variety of reasons. It never sold in the first place, or it came back and it’s now in need of refurbishing, or it’s passed its life cycle.”

She said Outerspace, which specializes in serving apparel, beauty, and home goods brands, is like a lot of 3PLs in that it doesn’t want to waste valuable space on products that are not moving, because it would rather get paid for outbound shipment than storage. Where it hopes to differentiate itself is in working directly with retailers to bring that inventory back from the dead.

Keep reading here.—AV

For parents of kids under 18, here’s one thing they may get this holiday season that they didn’t ask for: A dip in their credit rating.

Nearly 4 in 10 parents (38%) expect to take on more debt than usual buying gifts, thanks to cultural expectations and the beseeching eyes of their progeny. Almost half (48%) of parents report feeling the need to keep up with the Joneses, often spending more on holiday gifts than they think they probably should.

Those are some of the findings of a Harris Poll conducted in September on behalf of NerdWallet.

Keep reading here.—AAN