First, there's evidence to suggest that the showrooming is not quite as bad a problem as some think. A Pew Internet & American Life Project survey from the beginning of 2013 found that of surveyed consumers, fewer than half (46%) called someone for advice for a purchase, and only 28% used their phone to look up product reviews and 27% used their phone to look up product pricing during the 2012 holiday shopping season. All told, 58% of cell phone owners used their phones to try one of these shopping activities in the store. Not surprisingly, younger shoppers (78% of 18-29 year olds) and smartphone owners (72%) led the way.

Not Everyone Showrooms

But here's something telling… even though the number of cell-phone shoppers increased from 2012 to 2013, "When asked what happened on the most recent occasion they looked up the price of a product inside a store using their cell phone, 46% of 'mobile price matchers' say that they ultimately purchased the product in that store - an 11-point increase from the 35% of such price matchers who said this in 2012," the report stated.

The rest of the results were equally interesting: 30% of cell-phone shoppers didn't buy the product at all, just 12% purchased the product online and only 6% went to another store to buy the product.

Retailers, it appears, are getting better at keeping customers buying in the store, no matter what they are finding on their phones and tablets.

(See also Paper, Bricks & Cash Will Die: The Inevitable Evolution Of Local Commerce.)

Still, 12% of cell-phone owners is a significant chunk of revenue. And there's every indication that as smartphones continue to penetrate the market and older shoppers are increasingly replaced with younger, more showrooming-friendly buyers, retailers have to address the problem head on.

There are plenty of ways that proactive retailers can fight showrooming. These five are a good place to start:

1. Differentiate Your Products

Amazon got its start selling books for reason. Bookstores are especially vulnerable to showrooming because unless they are selling very specialized publishers' catalog items or very rare and special books, a book is a book is a book. 

If anything, the big booksellers made the very bed they are now forced to lie in. By presenting books as a bulk commodity, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and the extinct Borders reinforced the notion of books as a pure commodity, and that it didn't matter where you got the book, as long as you saved money. That was great when they were cheaper than independent bookstores, but it's come back to haunt them in the form of lower prices online.

Other retailers may have things a little easier, because not every product is available online in exactly the same form as in the local stores. But stores getting hurt by showrooming should think about switching up their inventory with unique items that may be harder to find online. 

2. Incentivize Local Shoppers

It's old-school business to entice customers into your establishment with sales and coupons. Don't stop; people still like that stuff. But other techniques can also help pull customers in the front door.

Mobile shopping apps are the bane of a retailers' existence - anything that makes it easier to comparison shop can encourage users to walk out the door. But what about an app that does the opposite, rewarding users every time they walk in a participating merchant's store?

That's the hook for Shopkick, a mobile, location-based app that reward users with points that can be redeemed for in-store purchases and rewards from other merchants and brands who have partnered with Shopkick.

Cyriac Roeding, CEO and co-founder of Shopkick, said the app has more 5 million users and has delivered $200 million in revenue to Shopkick's 15 retail partners - including Target and Best Buy.

While Shopkick is not primarily about anti-showrooming, Roeding explained, it can tend to help depress that activity. The main objective, Roeding said, is to get foot traffic in the door. Shopkick also includes features designed to help customers shop and discover products before they enter the store.

3. Provide Service... With A Smile

One thing missing from most product retailers these days is the need to repair anything. In our mostly disposable society, it is usually cheaper and faster to junk a broken product rather than have it repaired.

That means most buyer's connection with a store ends the moment they walk out the door with their purchase - reducing the differentiation from online retailers. It doesn't have to be that way. If post-purchase service doesn't make sense, what about training and support? 

4. Make Shopping An Event

Special events offer another way to entice buyers into brick and mortar stores. Grocery stores can set up cooking classes. Apparel outlets can host fashion shows. Any special and even semi-regular event that convinces your customers to come back will strengthen the perception that  connection and make it less likely the customer will use your store for showrooming.

5. Don't Panic

What retailers don't need to do is panic. Most customers don't walk into a store with showrooming in mind; they're there to shop, as quickly or as leisurely as they would have been before smartphones came along. Pay attention to customers' needs, put in the extra effort and, as the stats still indicate, they'll likely follow buy from you, not from some faceless online retailer.

(Need more? See also Showrooming: 5 Ways Retailers Can Fight Back [Slideshow].)

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

No matter where in the world you go, you remain tied to some latitude/longitude position in time and space. This is what makes local media and local commerce so powerful and the reason why real-time, on-demand services delivered via smartphone are becoming so important.

Already, if you're in New York City, you can Uber (on-demand car service) yourself to the airport, eBay Now laundry detergent from Target, Jetsetter Tonight yourself a quick weekend getaway and even Zeel yourself a massage at 10pm before you go to bed.

What A Local-Commerce-Enabled World Would Look Like

Soon enough, location-based platforms will enable us to Uber (or Seamless) a pizza from our favorite Joe's Pizza to enjoy while having a picnic in the park. While you're munching your slice of Joe's in the park, perhaps you might want to simultaneously Zeel yourself a massage too?

Better yet, how about OkCupid/Match Mobile-ing yourself a date with the gal/guy sitting on the bench across from you? If that works out, you may not need that Zeel after all, and you might want to extend the date and OLO (mobile payments/ordering) "Groupon-discounted" theater tickets to a Broadway show. (If nothing else, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason did a phenomenal job making it OK to use a coupon on a first date.)

There will eventually be an Uber for everything local. Consumers will be able to Uber a plumber, Uber a place to live (Airbnb or Zillow style), Uber a ZocDoc, Uber a hairdresser, the list goes on... But all that's only the beginning. Here are four more inevitabilities brought to you by local commerce:

1. Paper becomes obsolete - except maybe toilet paper. The United States Postal Service will also become obsolete - or end up as Amazon's express delivery unit. The telephone companies, traditional print media and direct-mail companies will have no choice but to go green and stop publishing/delivering their printed directories and circulars. Without the USPS, paper checks will also become obsolete.

(See also ReadWrite's coverage of paperless technology.)

2. The arrival of self-service, location-based, deals-on-demand.  In the same way food trucks now use Twitter as a mobile coupon platform, local small businesses like Joe's Pizza will finally adopt Groupon Now's self-service vision. Joe will be able to promote deals to sell off the rest of his pepperoni slices at 3pm when the restaurant is empty. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc. will launch (or acquire) self-service, location-based "Deals-on-Demand" direct marketing/couponing platforms.

(See also 5 Reasons Foursquare Is Losing The Social Local Mobile Revolution.)

3. Brick-and-mortar retailers become showrooms. Traditional physical retailers will jump on the local commerce bandwagon and embrace the role of showrooms for online and mobile purchases, or they will go out of business. Retail chains, together with startups like ShopRunner as well as some of the e-commerce giants will begin to make the model work for local retailers. Amazon Locker and Google's Shopping Express and BufferBox will get real showrooms where customers can see and scan items for next day delivery. WalMart, eBay and others will follow suit.

(See also Showrooming: 5 Ways Retailers Can Fight Back.)

4. Cash becomes obsolete. Consumers will (finally) be able to pay for all local products and services by waving or tapping their mobile device. Cash will slowly wither and die.

(For a different opinion, see also Mobile Payments' Cashless Utopia is Not Coming Any Time Soon.)

Joe's Pizza mage courtesy of Rob Young/Flickr.

The moment appears to have come and gone.

Schulze missed last week's bid deadline as he was unable to line up the necessary debt and equity financing. On Friday, the company released a statement closing the door on the buyout process:

The deadline by which Mr. Schulze could make an offer to acquire the company expired yesterday, February 28, 2013, at the end of the day. The company received no such offer and will continue to focus on its transformation for the benefit of all of its stakeholders.

According to Bloomberg, there remains a remote possibility that Schulze, who stepped down as chairman of the company last June, will continue his efforts to buy back the company. And other sources have speculated that Shulze could rejoin the electronic retailer's board.   But nothing has surfaced so far. Schulze remains Best Buy's largest shareholder, with an approximate 20% stake.

(See also ReadWrite DeathWatch: Best Buy.)

Best Buy has continued to struggle of late, though it did appear to be stabilizing. CEO Hubert Joly closed several stores over the past year and placed a greater emphasis on e-commerce. Last week, Best Buy reported a loss of $409 million for the quarter ending Feb. 2. This compared with a loss of $1.82 billion a year earlier. Revenues for the quarter rose 0.2% to $16.71 billion. While Best Buy stock was upgraded to a Buy rating Jefferies, the company has more recently been in the news for following Yahoo's lead and banning telecommuting, and cutting 400 corporate jobs. 

(See also Why Banning Telecommuting Is A Sign Your Company Is Screwed.)

Last month, however, US News & World Report named Best Buy as the retailer most vulnerable to "showrooming." Showrooming is the situation when shoppers use their smartphones from within a store to find a better price elsewhere. Best Buy shoppers, for example, often find the product they like inside the store then purchase the product online from Amazon for a lower price. To combat the trend, Best Buy recently announced it will match competitor prices for most items, including those purchased online from Amazon.com, Buy.com and Apple.com.

(See also Another Reason Best Buy Is Doomed - And Why That's A Problem.)

Such efforts are not likely to sustain the company, however. Michael Pachter, a research analyst with Wedbush Securities, told ReadWrite that Best Buy's sizable physical retail footprint demands approximately 10% higher prices than pure-play e-commerce companies. "Best Buy can't be competitively priced. Store operating costs are approximately $5 billion on $50 billion annual revenues - that's a 10% cost disadvantage compared to companies like Amazon. The numbers don't add up."  

Pachter added that if the investment community thought favorably of Best Buy's long-term prospects, founder Schulze likely would have been able to line up the appropriate financing.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

That's one of many cool little factoids put together in an infographic published by NowSourcing on behalf of mobile developer Moovweb.

There's a lot to take in here, but one of my favorite bits of info justifies a position that many in the media have been pounding on for quite some time: sometime in 2013, according to a graph from Morgan Stanley Research embedded in the infographic, the number of mobile Internet users is expected to surpass the number of desktop Internet users.

The days of the desktop user as the dominant Internet force are about to end.

That can translate into big dollars, too. In 2011, for instance, global mobile transactions totaled about $241 billion. By 2015, that figure is projected to jump to more than $1 trillion.

Clearly, Moovweb is making the argument that retailers had better get off their collective butts and get into this exploding marketplace. (The "52% of surveyed retailers do not yet have a mobile optimized website" is a bit of a giveaway on the booga-booga tactics.) Self-interest aside, they have a point: smartphones are the wallets of the future, and commercial organizations need to figure out a way to tap into this new source of revenue, fast.

Check out the rest of the infographic to see what stats jump out at you.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Technology Isn't Everything

Technology is important, but don't forget that people need to build things, buy things and pay for them, and those industries generate revenue, too. Only 12 of the world's 100 richest hail from the tech industry, so it's far from a dominating presence. The tech billionaires are well distributed throughout the list, with only Bill Gates and Larry Ellison in the top 10, and half the techies landing the bottom 50. Tech has a significant showing on the list, but its not as strong as retail (17 total, with 9 in the top 20). Overall, technology seems to be about as lucrative as mining or finance. It's still a much better bet than newspapers, though. Only three of the top 100 hail from the media world.

Almost All-American - For Now

All but two of the tech 12 are Americans. The others – Wipro CEO Azim Premji, (India, #49) and Samsung Chairman Lee Kun Hee (South Korea, #91) – are the first of what is likely to be many more future overseas members of the club. The U.S .list is still weighted pretty heavily toward the heavy hitters of the 1990s. SAS, Microsoft, Oracle, and Dell are solid companies, but most people wouldn't consider them the future of tech. Yet these "legacy" companies account for 6 of the 10 Americans on the list. It's a pretty sure bet that 5 to 10 years from now, we'll see a lot more members from South Korea, China, India and Russia.

$10 Billion Takes Time

Becoming an overnight millionaire in the tech industry is no big deal, but there's no shortcut to the top 100 billionairs. Well, there might be just one. Mark Zuckerberg. Zuck is the only person under 30 in any industry to make the list. Even stepping up to the sub-40 bracket, there are only three more additions: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Colombia's Alejandro Santo Domingo, who manages a collection of media companies and SABMiller. Technology can certainly make you rich in a hurry, but to join the ranks of the mega-mega-rich, even geeks have to work at it for a while.

Family Planning

One bonus for the children of tech billionaires is inheritance. While many of the more traditional industries seem to favor having lots of children, the tech industry tends toward a more reasonable family size. The sweet spot seems to be 2-3 children - which leaves lots more cash for each offspring. Zuckerberg and Paul Allen have no children (yet), while Jeff Bezos and Michael Dell each have 4. On the rest of the list, 21 have 5 or more kids, and Malaysia's Robert Kuok has 8! Of course, since many of the techies on the list have already signed Bill Gates' Giving Pledge to donate the bulk of their fortunes to charity, those kids might have to settle for measly single-digit billions, anyway.

Polaroid's (awkwardly-named) "Fotobars" will be manned by (yet-more-awkwardly-named) "Fototenders" who can presumably help you edit, crop, and tinker with your digital creations to your heart's content. The stores look ripped right out of Apple's retail playbook, right down to the sparse white countertops at the Genius Bar... er, Fotobar.

Look familiar?

The catch? Unlike the camera that made Polaroid a household name, you won't have your photos instantly - in fact, you'll be waiting up to a few days. According to Polaroid, "All products created by consumers at Polaroid Fotobar retail stores... are handcrafted and shipped from the company’s state-of-the-art manufacturing facility within 72 hours." 

The Polaroid camera, invented by the company's co-founder Edwin Land, first went on sale in 1948. He reportedly dreamt up the notion of an instant camera in 1944 after his daughter famously asked "Why can't I see the picture now?" after her father snapped a portrait of the three-year-old with his twin lens Rolleiflex.

Our thoughts exactly. 

Photo courtesy of Alexander Norman via Flickr

Apple's Wake Up Call

Apple's score of 80 is still considered very good, but the fact that the company did not make the list of top five online retailers should be a wake-up call. "It is a little bit of a yellow caution flag," said Larry Freed, president and chief executive of Foresee.

Apple's score fell three points from last year, because it did a poorer job helping customers wade through its growing list of products, Freed said. For example, outside of price, the difference between the iPad mini, iPad 2 and iPad with Retina display is not readily apparent for many consumers.

By comparison, Amazon topped the list for the eighth year in a row, despite having a vastly wider variety of products from multiple manufacturers. While Amazon is the equivalent of an online department store, Apple is more of a boutique shop.

Apple Avoids Social Reviews

Amazon's success is in consistently providing "great features" for customers to find and compare products, Freed said. The site's product reviews are particularly helpful.

"There are no product reviews on Apple's site," he said. "In trying to decide if the (iPad) mini is right for me or not, you're really forced to go somewhere else to get somebody's opinion."

ForeSee's index is based on more than 24,000 customer surveys collected between Thanksgiving and Christmas. A drop in the index is significant because each point on average represents a 14% decline in a site's growth rate in sales, according to Freed. For example, if a site had a 20% growth rate year to year in 2011, then dropping a point this year would cut that rate by 3%.

Apple's decline was not the worst among the 100 companies listed. The biggest drop in customer satisfaction was on J.C. Penney's site, which fell five points to 78. Among PC makers, Dell's site also dropped 3 points, but to a lower overall score of 77.

Like Apple, Dell's problem stems from providing too little assistance in figuring out which PC is the best fit among a wide variety of choices. "When you have too many choices, consumers tend to freeze and don't know what to do," Freed said. "Dell has that [problem]. They've got to simplify how you find what you are looking for."

Turmoil In Apple Retail Operations

Apple experienced significant turmoil within its management ranks in 2012, although it's difficult to say whether that contributed to its weaker performance in online customer satisfaction. John Browett, head of Apple's retail operations, was ousted this year after only six months at the helm. He had replaced Ron Johnson, who was responsible for Apple's highly successful retail stores. Johnson left Apple to become CEO of J.C. Penney.

Browett joined Apple from Dixons, a British consumer electronics retailer, where he had been CEO. Browett's troubles at Apple were mostly operational. His plans for cutting costs included reducing employees' hours and freezing hiring, decisions Apple later reversed.

While it would be unfair to pin Apple's latest ForeSee score on Browett, there's no doubt the consumer electronics maker needs to double down on improving its online customer experience to avoid turning the decline into a trend. Apple did not immediately return requests for comment.

ForeSee finds that site satisfaction leads to brand loyalty, positive recommendations and repeat purchases.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

But the grossest, creepiest thing: 

Geniuses looking through people's hard drives for nasty personal photos, collecting them and sometimes even posting them on the Internet.

Women, Beware

Reporter Sam Biddle writes: "If a woman walked in, her stuff would get digged through, shared and laughed at. Team bonding. Your iPhone camera roll isn't safe."

Quote from one tipster: "I used to be an Apple store Expert and the most common practice by Geniuses was going through young girls computers and emailing their private photos to themselves so they could have them for personal use."

Another Apple employee tells a tale of a girl who brought in a computer with a broken display. They took it out back to fix it, went through her photos, found naked pictures she'd taken of herself, and "added that to the collection."

Biddle sums up:

"There are - and always will be - miscreants in every job... But when emails arrived in droves repeating the same naughty phenomena, you have to wonder why a company whose rep is as sterling as Apple's seems to have such a pattern of internal havoc."

One tipster who claimed to be a former Apple employee who had opened retail stores in North America and Asia wrote: "The corruption within Apple goes straight to the top... Apple is fracturing from the inside out."

It's an amazing, scary, must-read story with lots of screen grabs, emails, documents and photos. See the full story here.

Image courtesy of Reuters.

But retailers increasingly believe that even for luxury items, all the matters is the lowest price - and maybe they're right. But bowing at the altar of the almighty dollar inevitably means less money and attention lavished on the shopping experience. Employees are paid less and get less training. Inventory and quality is reduced. Stores get dingy, dirty and ugly. Too often you end up shopping in a messy, over-lit warehouse, being ignored by reluctant, resentful clerks just to save a nickel on a few poorly made items. Fun.  

The Online Alternative

Compare this experience with that of the online shopper. Sitting at home in comfort, you can browse the best retailers in the world. A quick search finds you the best price. The only reason to get up off the couch is that, sometimes, you may want to check out an item in person before plunking down your credit card. 

Ironically, that makes things even worse for brick and mortar retailers. More and more shoppers now visit retail stores only to check out the merchandise, and then buy online instead.

Called "showrooming," the practice is increasingly performed right from shoppers' smartphones while they're standing in the store. That means even less money for the store, and ultimately an even less pleasant shopping experience - which pushes even more shoppers online. 

ReadWrite managing editor Fredric Paul found that out the hard way on a recent trip to Best Buy (see Another Reason Best Buy Is Doomed - And Why That's A Problem), but he's not the only one. Cyril Vart, vice president of strategy and development for "innovation architects" faberNovel had an even worse experience attempting to buy a digital camera. But Vart says it doesn't have to be this way - and he came up with a presentation on 5 ways brick-and-mortar retailers can fight back against showrooming. Let's hope at least some real-world retailers give it a shot.

There's just one problem. The new flagship store is "unpleasantly, almost unbearably noisy," according to Jean-Louis Gassee, a former top Apple executive, who writes in his weekly "Monday Note" blog that the sound levels in the store are not just annoying - they're dangerously high.

It's so bad, Gassee says, that the wife of one of his friends "walked in, spent a few minutes,  and vowed never to return for fear of hearing loss."

Someone else Gassee knows, the wife of an Apple employee, refuses to go into the store "because of the cacophony."

Monsieur Gassee Does Some Sleuthing

Gassee is one of the best writers on Apple in the world. He's a former head of marketing and advanced product development at the company, and since leaving in 1990 he's remained a huge Apple fan, as well as an entrepreneur and investor.

He's also a guy who studied math and science in college, and so, puzzled by the sound levels he had noticed, he decided to investigate. He returned to the Palo Alto store with an iPhone app called SPL Meter that measures sound pressure levels. 

What he discovered was pretty shocking. The sound level in the store was higher than 75 decibels - well above the 70dB threshold where a the EPA says long-term exposure could cause hearing loss.

In fact the inside of the store was 10dB louder than the sound level outside on University Avenue, a busy street in Palo Alto. And the way decibels work is that every 3dB gain represents an approximate doubling of sound pressure. So that 10dB difference means the inside of the store was roughly 10 times louder than the busy street outside.

What's going on? Gassee reckons the problem is caused by the shape and volume of the store, and the fact that it has so many reflective surfaces, like huge glass windows and a curved glass roof. "There isn't a square inch of sound-absorbing material in the entire place," he writes.

Heads May Roll, But Don't Worry You Won't Hear It Because Of All The %$#@ Noise

It's an uncharacteristic blunder for the usually perfectionist-to-a-fault company. "Could Apple really be this tone deaf?" Gassee writes, adding that he doesn't know how the architects and building contractors didn't notice the problem.

Fortunately, Apple seems to be aware of the problem. Gassee, as he made his rounds, noticed a professional SPL meter set up on a tripod. He also noticed two store employees roaming around with sound recorders on their shoulders. 

"It appears that Apple is taking the problem seriously," he writes. He figures Apple must have already hired acousticians to study the problem and find a solution.

Whatever that solution may be remains to be seen. For now, if you're visiting the big new Apple store in Palo Alto, you might want to wear a pair of sound-canceling headphones.

Image courtesy of Apple.