24 Jan 2009, Posted by Chris Kaufman in Business, Technology, 2 Comments

Kroger Paperless Coupons

Kroger has introduced paperless coupons that link to your Kroger Plus Card (pretty cool). You can browse for coupons online or on your iPhone, BlackBerry, etc., pick the coupons you want, and link them to your card. When you scan your card at checkout, the coupons you selected are applied to your order.

Here is the full article from the Detroit News:

Cutting a stack of coupons from the Sunday newspaper has helped pass many an afternoon, but now Michigan’s largest grocer wants customers to trim their grocery bills from the comfort of their own phones.

Time-crunched shoppers can download coupons on their BlackBerries, iPhones and other mobile devices now that the Cincinnati-based Kroger Co. has unrolled a mobile coupon program at all 2,477 Kroger locations nationwide. Savings apply to dozens of national brands including Colgate Palmolive, General Mills and Kimberly-Clark.

“Retailers have a wider generation of shoppers shopping with them than they ever had before,” said Kroger spokesman Dale Hollandsworth. Younger consumers have come to expect Internet and mobile-based savings, he said.

Coupon usage increases across all ages and income levels when the economy is down. Coupon redemption is up 72 percent nationwide, according to an August consumer poll by Massachusetts-based marketing consultant Prospectiv. Internet coupon usage has surged by 73 percent since 2005, according to a report by Scarborough Research.

Mobile couponing, savings that can be accessed on the go, represents the next frontier. However, no other major supermarket chain has debuted a program of Kroger’s scope, according to the Food Marketing Institute and the Michigan Grocers Association.

Twelve million people, or 5.2 percent of mobile subscribers, received at least one coupon on their mobile phones in November, according to the latest data available from market research firm comScore Inc. That’s a 66 percent increase over the year before.

Coupons link to an account

Kroger partnered with San Jose, Calif. digital company Cellfire to create the program and tested it last summer at 20 Kroger stores in Metro Atlanta. More than half of consumers in the pilot program redeemed more than one coupon, according to Hollandsworth.

Customers can register for a coupon savings account at www.cellfire.com from their mobile phone or computer. Entering their mobile phone number and Kroger Savings Plus card number links the coupons to the account. Shoppers can then browse coupons from their phones or computers and click on desired deals, which are then loaded onto the grocery card and redeemed at checkout.

Used or expired coupons are removed from the Cellfire account. New grocery offers appear every two weeks.

The service is free of charge but standard mobile usage charges may apply, depending on the carrier or data plan, according to Cellfire.

Convenience of Web coupons

Web coupons represent just 0.4 percent of the multi-billion dollar coupon industry, but are expected to grow.

Sunday newspaper inserts account for more than 88 percent of total coupons, according to the Promotion Marketing Association. Magazines. Direct mail and in-store handouts account for the rest.

Sunday newspaper inserts are “still predominant, but there is a tilt towards tech-based coupon delivery systems,” said Jeffrey Stoltman, Wayne State University marketing professor.

Web coupons are often more convenient for consumers, who can search for deals quickly and don’t need to remember to bring their clippings to the store.

“Clipping is laborious,” Stoltman said, “but a couple of clicks on a keyboard and you’re there.”

Mobile couponing has great potential “given the number of cell phones out there,” according to Charles Brown, co-chair of the Promotion Marketing Association Coupon Council.

Paperless coupon systems can also save money for retailers who spend “tens of millions of dollars in processing costs collectively,” said Dan Kihanya, vice president of consumer marketing for Cellfire.

However, mobile couponing is a new behavior and retailers could lose customers who don’t have cell phones or don’t feel comfortable with technology, WSU’s Stoltman warned.

Savings can be substantial

Kroger shopper Nancy McKinley of Grosse Pointe said she was not aware of Kroger’s mobile couponing program but would welcome a more convenient alternative to newspaper clipping.

McKinley, who saves between $5 and $15 with coupons at Kroger each week, said she generally sets aside newspaper coupon inserts and goes through them every couple of months.

“A lot of times they’ve expired before I get to them,” she said. “You’ve got to save money.”

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14 Jan 2009, Posted by Chris Kaufman in Culture, Science, 0 Comments

Don’t Mess with Mother Nature

It seems a plan to remove cats from an Australian island to save the sea birds has backfired. From the Associated Press:

BANGKOK, Thailand – It seemed like a good idea at the time: Remove all the feral cats from a famous Australian island to save the native seabirds.

But the decision to eradicate the felines from Macquarie island allowed the rabbit population to explode and, in turn, destroy much of its fragile vegetation that birds depend on for cover, researchers said Tuesday.

Removing the cats from Macquarie “caused environmental devastation” that will cost authorities 24 million Australian dollars ($16.2 million) to remedy, Dana Bergstrom of the Australian Antarctic Division and her colleagues wrote in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology.

“Our study shows that between 2000 and 2007, there has been widespread ecosystem devastation and decades of conservation effort compromised,” Bergstrom said in a statement.

The unintended consequences of the cat-removal project show the dangers of meddling with an ecosystem — even with the best of intentions — without thinking long and hard, the study said.

“The lessons for conservation agencies globally is that interventions should be comprehensive, and includerisk assessments to explicitly consider and plan for indirect effects, or face substantial subsequent costs,” Bergstrom said.

Located about halfway between Australia and the Antarctic continent, Macquarie was designated a World Heritage site in 1997 as the world’s only island composed entirely of oceanic crust. It is known for its wind-swept landscape, and about 3.5 million seabirds and 80,000 elephant seals arrive there each year to breed.

The cats, rabbits, rats and mice are all nonnative species to Macquarie, probably introduced in the past 100 years by passing ships. Authorities have struggled for decades to remove them.

The invader predators menaced the native seabirds, some of them threatened species. So in 1995, the Parks and Wildlife Service of Tasmania that manages Macquarie tried to undo the damage by removing most of the cats.

Several conservation groups including the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Birds Australia said the problem was not the original eradication effort itself — but that it didn’t go far enough. They said the project should have taken aim at all the invasive mammals on the island at once.

“What was wrong was that the rabbits were not eradicated at the same time as the cats,” University of Auckland Prof. Mick Clout, who also is a member of the Union’s invasive species specialist group. “It would have been ideal if the cats and rabbits were eradicated at the same time, or the rabbits first and the cats subsequently.”

Liz Wren, a spokeswoman for the Parks and Wildlife Service of Tasmania, said authorities were aware from the beginning that removing the feral cats would increase the rabbit population. But at the time, researchers argued it was worth the risk considering the damage the cats were doing to the seabird populations.

“The alternative was to accept the known and extensive impacts of cats and not do anything for fear of other unknown impacts,” Wren said. “Since cats were eradicated, the grey petrel successfully bred on the island for the first time in a century and the recovery of Antarctic prions has continued since the eradication of feral cats.”

Now, the parks service has a new plan to finish the job, using technology and poisons that weren’t available a decade ago.

Wren said plans to eradicate both rabbits as well as rats and mice from the island will begin in 2010. Helicopters using global positioning systems will drop poisonous bait that targets all three pests. Later, teams will shoot, fumigate and trap the remaining rabbits, she said.

Some of the earlier critics are now behind this latest eradication effort, saying it should help the island’s ecosystem fully recover because it would remove the last remaining invasive species.

“Without this action, there will be serious long-term consequences for the majestic seabirds which nest on the island including the four threatened albatross species, and for the health of the island ecosystem as a whole,” said Dean Ingwersen, Bird Australia’s threatened bird network coordinator.

“We believe that the process they are going to follow uses best practice for this type of work,” Ingwersen said. “And that all possible ramifications have now been considered.”

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08 Jan 2009, Posted by Chris Kaufman in Culture, Politics, 1 Comments

Presidential Aging

Here’s an interesting computer simulation from CNN showing how Barack Obama may change after just four years in office. According to experts, presidents age at a rate that is double the average American. According to one expert:
“Chronic stress can produce lots of wear and tear on the body,” said James A. McCubbin, a Clemson University professor of psychology and senior associate dean of the College of Business and Behavioral Science. “This is what we see in the changes in the appearance in the beginning and end of the presidency.”

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