CONVENIENCE STORE PRACTICES AND PROGRESS WITH EFFICIENT CONSUMER RESPONSE: THE MINNESOTA CASE

The adoption of Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) practices by Minnesota convenience store (C- store) is explained in this study. Data were collected through a mail survey distributed to more than 250 Minnesota C-stores ranging in size from single, independently owned stores to over 100 store chains. The survey instrument was developed to collect data on the following components important to C-store operations and the implementation of ECR: information systems, ordering, receiving, inventory management, and pricing practices. Findings are presented from three distinct perspectives: 1. Location: Rural C-stores, which often meet customer needs that were once met by small supermarkets, carried a wider range of products and offered more services than C-stores in urban and suburban locations. However, rural stores had the lowest adoption rate for practices related to the ECR initiative. Urban chains coordinated business practices with suppliers to a greater degree than suburban and rural chains. 2. Chain size: Larger chains were more likely to have implemented the more costly technological practices than were small chains. This was expected since large chains can spread the fixed costs of ECR adoption over a larger number of stores. Larger chains also cooperated and communicated more with their suppliers than small chains. Again, this was expected, since larger chains can economize on transaction costs involved in maintaining these business relationships. 3. ECR practices: ECR adoption and superior performance were positively related. Having adopted six to nine practices was positively correlated with higher inside and outside sales per square foot of selling area and higher annual inventory turns. However, it was not clear whether there was a causal relationship in either direction between ECR practices and store performance. The C-store industry is changing, as new information technologies, new business practices, and new retail strategies are developed. The results from this survey can serve as a baseline for future research monitoring the adoption of these innovations and assessing their impact on productivity and profitability. Minnesota C-Stores appear to be smaller but more productive than the national average. Overall, it appears ECR is just beginning to impact the Minnesota C-store industry. Nonetheless, regression analyses confirmed ECR practices are positively related to store sales performance and those stores adopting the most practices had higher productivity measures.Industrial Organization, Marketing,

Authenticity of product: Italian heritage and branding in the Australian wine industry. [abstract].

This paper will discuss the use of cultural markers in branding and marketing techniques of Italian Australian winemakers. A survey of these brands carried out by the author found that Italian wine makers in Australia almost invariably refer to their Italian heritage in their marketing material. The use of this reference, and often their immigrant ‘rags to riches’ stories are utilised in an attempt to add authenticity to their product, to make them stand out from the others in an increasingly competitive and overcrowded market. But does it work? What do we think we are buying when we buy an ‘Italian’ product? What cultural associations do we make as Australian consumers? The commodification of culture is an area of study that would be well adapted to Italians in the wine industry in Australia, and is the focus of this paper

Out of the Box: Homegrown in Greater Lafayette: Hispanic Community in Greater Lafayette [full paper]

Students from the Honors 299 course, “Homegrown,” researched local Hispanic culture, sound, green spaces, and coffee shops, among other areas of study, as well as the role of each in establishing a sense of place

STORE-LEVEL INNOVATION IN THE RETAIL FOOD INDUSTRY: THE ECR INITIATIVE AND BEYOND

Agribusiness,

Building blocks of settlement: Italians in the Riverland, South Australia

The Riverland region is situated approximately 200 km. north-east of Adelaide and consists of a strip of land on either side of the River Murray from the South Australian-Victorian border westwards to the town of Morgan. Covering more than 20,000 sq. km., it encompasses the seven local government areas of Barmera, Berri, Loxton, Morgan, Paringa, Renmark and Waikerie. The region was first identified as an area of primary production in 1887 when two Canadian brothers, George and William Chaffey, were granted a licence to occupy 101,700 hectares of land at Renmark in order to establish an irrigated horticultural scheme. After World War 1, the SA Government made available new irrigation blocks at Renmark and other localities in the Riverland area to assist the resettlement of more than a thousand returned soldiers. A similar scheme operated in New South Wales, where returned servicemen were offered blocks in Leeton and Griffith, in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area. The period after World War 2 saw further settlement of returned soldiers on fruit blocks in the Riverland and new irrigation areas were developed to cater for this growth. In the 1950s and 1960s large numbers of migrants, especially Greeks and Italians, settled in the area, often buying the blocks of retiring first world war soldier-settlers. Today the Riverland is among South Australia’s strongest regional economies

Extensions of Autocorrelation Inequalities with Applications to Additive Combinatorics

Barnard and Steinerberger [‘Three convolution inequalities on the real line with connections to additive combinatorics’, Preprint, 2019, arXiv:1903.08731] established the autocorrelation inequality Min_(0≤t≤1)∫_Rf(x)f(x+t) dx ≤ 0.411||f||²L¹, for fϵL¹(R), where the constant 0.4110.411 cannot be replaced by 0.370.37. In addition to being interesting and important in their own right, inequalities such as these have applications in additive combinatorics. We show that for f to be extremal for this inequality, we must have max min_(x₁∈R 0≤t≤1)[f(x₁−t)+f(x₁+t)] ≤ min_max(x₂∈ R0≤t≤1)[f(x₂−t)+f(x₂+t)]. Our central technique for deriving this result is local perturbation of f to increase the value of the autocorrelation, while leaving ||f||L¹|| unchanged. These perturbation methods can be extended to examine a more general notion of autocorrelation. Let d, n∈Z⁺, f∈L¹, A be a d×n matrix with real entries and columns a_i for 1≤i≤n and C be a constant. For a broad class of matrices A, we prove necessary conditions for f to extremise autocorrelation inequalities of the form Min_(t∈ [0,1]^d)∫R∏_(i=1)^n f(x+t⋅a_i)dx≤C||f||^nL¹

Recent weakening in the winter ENSO teleconnection over the North Atlantic‑European region

New observational evidence for variability of the atmospheric response to wintertime El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is found. Using different approaches and datasets, a weakening in the recent ENSO teleconnection over the North Atlantic-European (NAE) region is demonstrated. Changes in both pattern and strength of the teleconnection indicate a turning point in the 1970s with a shift from a response resembling the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) to an anomaly pattern orthogonal to NAO with very weak or statistically non-significant values; and to nearly non-existent teleconnection in the most recent decades. Results shows the importance of the background sea surface temperature (SST) state and sea-ice climatology having opposite effects in modulating the ENSO-NAE teleconnection. As indicated with targeted simulations, the recent change in the SST climatology in the Atlantic and Arctic has contributed to the weakening of the ENSO effect. The findings of this study can have implications on our understanding of modulations of ENSO teleconnections and ENSO as a source of predictability in the NAE sector.publishedVersio

Towards application-specific query processing systems

Database systems use query processing subsystems for enabling efficient query-based data retrieval. An essential aspect of designing any query-intensive application is tuning the query system to fit the application's requirements and workload characteristics. However, the configuration parameters provided by traditional database systems do not cover the design decisions and trade-offs that arise from the geo-distribution of users and data. In this paper, we present a vision towards a new type of query system architecture that addresses this challenge by enabling query systems to be designed and deployed in a per use case basis. We propose a distributed abstraction called Query Processing Unit that encapsulates primitive query processing tasks, and show how it can be used as a building block for assembling query systems. Using this approach, application architects can construct query systems specialized to their use cases, by controlling the query system's architecture and the placement of its state. We demonstrate the expressiveness of this approach by applying it to the design of a query system that can flexibly place its state in the data center or at the edge, and show that state placement decisions affect the trade-off between query response time and query result freshness