Retail Stores

March couldn't come quick enough for retailers, especially those in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the country, who watched record-setting snowfalls in February do a number on their bottom lines. According to a recent report from Planalytics, a provider of business weather intelligence, February snowstorms resulted in a $36 billion loss for the U.S. economy.

A 2009 year-end survey of store traffic conducted by ShopperTrak, a provider of shopper traffic counting technology, showed a reasonably encouraging year-over-year increase of 3.5 percent. But store traffic has been so light over the past couple years that retailers, and their software vendors, are seeking ways to not only get consumers into stores, but also take them by the hand and guide them right to the cashiers. Case in point, take two recent retail technological innovations from Escalate Retail and NCR.