News

Smartphones, kiosks central to talks of retail's future

June 19, 2013

Retail's latest trends were discussed this week at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit in Half Moon Bay, Calif., and smartphones and kiosks were the talk of the event, according to an article on mercurynews.com.

Experts say kiosks are replacing costly big-box stores. Braintree, a mobile payments company in the Silicon Valley, is working to make mobile shopping easier for consumers, and Klout, a social network in San Francisco that assigns numbers to measure the influence of a person or company, says it will help drive a new era of personalized shopping.

Shoppers can buy almost anything on any device — phone, tablet and desktop — and most want the in-store experience to be as quick and painless as the experience of making a purchase on their iPhone.

Coinstar CEO J. Scott Di Valerio says automated retail is the answer. The company, which started as a coin-counting kiosk chain, has recently expanded to sell lattes, beauty products, sandwiches and gift cards, all through self-service kiosks. It's been busy in the Bay Area, where it recently partnered with eBay's PayPal to allow customers to convert loose change into a PayPal deposit, and joined Starbucks to launch Rubi, a self-service coffee kiosk in supermarkets across the Bay Area. Coinstar is also is developing a deal with Blackhawk, a Pleasanton company that provides gift cards for brands like Apple and Nordstrom, to offer consumers cash for unwanted gift cards.

Read more about kiosks in retail.