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[…] Supermarket retailers in particular need to pay attention to what’s going on. Indeed, showrooming is just one of numerous e- commerce threats to conventional food retailing, all of which seem to be gaining greater traction by the day. Let’s take a look at what one retailer is doing proactively about showrooming. Perhaps the most dramatic action came earlier this year when Target delisted Amazon’s Kindle book reader from its stores in a bid to discourage showrooming. The action takes on greater significance with the realization that Target, with its 1,800 retail locations, is among the largest offline vendors of Kindle. But let’s take a step backwards. Target’s flirtation with Kindle has some strange aspects to it from the beginning. Target started offering Kindle about two years ago. To offer it in the first place was an odd decision given that Amazon is a direct competitor of Target’s on many fronts. Target might just as well have distributed coupons for Walmart in its stores, given the Amazon competitive threat. In any case, once in the stores, Kindle did prove to be a strong traffic draw for Target. So the wisdom of delisting Kindle isn’t immediately obvious. Possibly the delisting was in a fit of pique sparked by Amazon’s short-term offer during the last year-end holiday season of a 5% discount, up to $5, to shoppers who scanned UPC codes in a store, then used its app to research Amazon’s price and order those goods for less. This is worth underscoring: customers can use Amazon’s app to submit orders to Amazon as they stand in a rival retailer’s premises. The theory that Target sought to punish Amazon for encouraging showrooming is bolstered by the fact that Target continues to offer Barnes & Noble’s Nook reader and some Apple products. Kindle continues to be widely available offline at other retailing venues such as Walmart, Best Buy and Staples. Consumers’ potential to use mobile apps in retail stores to price-check and order product has to be the very worst scenario possible for retailers. After all, conventional retailers traditionally had the psychological advantage of more or less compelling consumers to execute a purchase from them just because they were standing in front of product they wanted, and there was no handy way for them to know whether it was well priced or not. That advantage is rapidly vanishing. Food retailers should make note of the fact that Amazon is a purveyor of a wide range of grocery consumables, so the knock on food retailing’s door is sounding a bit louder. See our related article Target Builds Sales Volume with Food >> Perhaps even more ominous is the fact that grocery-delivery retailers such as Fresh Direct and Peapod already offer mobile apps […]