Shopping Centers Today -> October 2003
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BIENVENIDOS A WALGREENS
Walgreens has launched a Spanish-language Web site
(
www.walgreensespanol.com)
that offers users access to drug information, an online prescription-refill
form and a store locator. “It’s a great opportunity to
extend our online health-care services to millions of people,”
said Tim McCauley, the chain’s director of e-commerce, in a
news release. The company’s online store remains English-only,
however. “We’ll continue to develop the site, based on
user feedback,” a spokeswoman told
SCT, but added that
the company hasn’t announced plans to sell through it. Sears
and Office Depot offer Spanish-language sites through which consumers
can buy merchandise.
SPAM JAM
E-mailed promotions by online retailers are getting blocked by antispam
filters before they can reach their customers, many complain. The
insertion of words and phrases commonly used in spam mail, such as
“hot,” “free” and “act now” often trigger
the programs, as do exclamation points, Matthew Berk, a Jupiter Research
analyst told
Computerworld magazine. The filters are installed
by Internet service providers as well as by computer owners.
COUNTERFEIT COUPONS
Store-based retailers are facing yet another threat from the Internet:
counterfeit coupons. Grocery stores have exchanged the computer-generated
coupons, only to find that manufacturers won’t honor them,
reports Harris Teeter, a chain that operates in six Southern states.
As a result, it is no longer accepting coupons downloaded off the
Internet, some of which had been turning up on eBay. “This
new scam is the biggest of its kind to hit Georgia in more than
14 years,” Kathy Kuzava, president of the Georgia Food Industry
Association, said in a news release. The association estimates that
it could cost the nation’s grocers more than $1 million.
INTERNET SAFETY NET
J.C. Penney’s Internet and catalog sales are a bright spot
in its overall operations, according to its second-quarter results.
Sales in those two areas increased 3.9 percent during the period,
representing the first quarterly gain in three years and helping
offset the 26 percent decline in operating income at its Eckerd
drugstore chain. Internet sales alone were up 60 percent over the
previous quarter, the chain reported.
JUNGLE WARFARE
Amazon.com
does not have an exclusive claim to its name, says the owner of
a site that goes by several URLs —
Amazonbooks.net,
Amazonbooks.org, Amazonbookstore.net and Amazonstore.net. Yes, it
does, ruled the United Nations copyright agency, World Intellectual
Property Organization, according to an article in the
Houston
Chronicle. The site, owned by a Paul Horner, provides some information
on the Amazon river and jungle, plus links to a lot of other sites
not necessarily connected to the region at all. In particular, Amazon.com
objected to a link to its rival, eBay, the Chronicle reported.
BLACKOUT TURNS GREEN
Entrepreneurs quickly recognized an opportunity in August’s
power outage, with Web sites appearing within hours of the lights’
going out. Many sold T-shirts and other memorabilia emblazoned with
references to the outage. “We started working on it straightaway,”
Jonathan Cornish, a Toronto resident selling T-shirts with the message,
“New York, the lightweight city,” told the
Associated
Press.
