With Billions of Bytes of Customer Data, How Can Retailers Be "Starved for Information"?

These days, it seems that both traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers and online “e-tailers” are drowning in a sea of customer information, including data from online transactions, point-of-service scanners, membership programs and even sensor chips on shopping carts. The question is, with all this sophisticated technology on hand, why have department store markdowns over the last 20 years grown from 8% to 33% of sales? And why are customers still going away dissatisfied because what they want isn’t in stock? In an article entitled “Rocket Science Retailing Is Almost Here – Are You Ready?” in the July-August 2000 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Wharton operations professor Marshall Fisher and two co-authors take a hard look at why many retailers are “awash in data but starved for information.”