GigaOM Pro

Consumer-directed information technology is starting to do to traditional brick-and-mortar retailing what search engines and aggregation tools have done to cyber-retailing.

Nearly three decades ago, Wal-Mart Stores revolutionized the science of retailing by deploying information technology on a massive scale to track inventory, measure sales by the minute and allocate shelf space among competing vendors. Apart from making Wal-Mart more efficient, the retailer’s vast databases gave it enormous leverage over manufacturers and marketers, who no longer had a monopoly on information about consumer behavior and preferences, inventory levels throughout the supply chain and pricing. Wal-Mart used [...]