Retail roundup 9/18

How to save money at Wal-Mart or anywhere else From The Street:
Research by Wal-Mart consultant Global Insight indicates that the retailer saves the average U.S. family $2,500 a year, an increase of $171, or 7.3%, from an estimated $2,329 that Wal-Mart saved families in a 2004 survey.
Savings at Wal-Mart stores -- or any other retailer -- can be found in a number of places, as long as you're willing to commit the time to find them. Here are some simple steps you can take to save even more money when shopping:
Wal-Mart as savior? From Ad Week;
The new strategy is based on data from an updated Global Insight study that contends an average American family saves $2,500 a year by shopping at Wal-Mart.
Why personalized marketing may work better upside down From The Wise Marketer
The long term benefit of personalised marketing is customer loyalty, in the form of an increased overall lifetime revenue value of the customer. The term "loyalty" has been defined and redefined by a wide range of books and articles, many of which actually object to the term because "customer loyalty" is not the same as "family loyalty" or "sports fan loyalty". But, ignoring the other uses of the word, for many retailers customer loyalty means keeping the customers they have and increasing the spending of each.
Because the grocery retailer cannot induce a household to eat more, the only way to extract higher revenues from existing customers is to increase the number of visits to the retailer's store at the expense of visits to competing stores. Personalised marketing can entice the customer to stop at store A instead of store B for the sake of even one interesting discount offer, where all else is equal. The assumption that seems to be holding true for Pay By Touch's early adopters is that, while at store A, the customer purchases the rest of the basket that would have been purchased at store B. The long term benefit is therefore in attracting a larger portion of the household budget through more frequent visits.