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New Online Price Trackers Alert Shoppers to Good Deals

January 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment

“I spend my day chasing my daughter around, so I don’t have the luxury of sitting at my computer,” said Ms. Hughes, 29, of Reading, Mass. Many sites “have sales every other day, but I don’t have time to go on and see if the things I actually want have made it onto the sale yet.”

Now she doesn’t have to.

With retailers’ Internet prices now changing more often — sometimes several times within the space of a day — a new group of tools is helping shoppers outwit the stores. Rather than requiring shoppers to do the work by entering an item into price-comparison engines throughout the day, the tools automatically scan for price changes and alert customers when the price drops.

Some tools, including one from Citibank’s Citi Card, even scour sites for lower prices after a purchase and help customers get a refund for any price difference.

Web sites that help shoppers compare prices and track online deals have existed as long as e-commerce itself. But rapid changes in pricing at many major retailers have made it more difficult for shoppers to keep on top of it all.

The research company Dynamite Data, which follows prices on behalf of retailers and brands, tracked hundreds of holiday products at major retailers in 2011 and 2012. During a two-week period around Thanksgiving, Amazon and Sears were changing prices on about a quarter of those products daily, a significant increase from the previous year. Walmart, Toys “R” Us, Kmart and Best Buy also changed prices more frequently in 2012.

Even the Web browser a customer uses can make a difference. The Web site Digital Folio, which shows consumers price changes, did side-by-side comparisons of televisions. On Newegg using the Chrome browser, the firm was offered a $997 price on a Samsung television. Using Firefox and Internet Explorer, the price was $1,399.

The firm found a difference on another Samsung television model at Walmart.com, where using Firefox yielded a $199 price and Chrome and Internet Explorer $168.

“A lot of times the price will have a big difference on consumer behavior,” said Larry S. Freed, chief executive of ForeSee, which analyzes customer experiences.

One of the new price-tracking tools is Hukkster, introduced last year by two former J. Crew merchants. It asks shoppers to install a “hukk it” button on their browsers. Then, when a shopper sees an item she likes, she clicks the button, chooses the color, size and discount she is interested in, tells Hukkster to alert her when the price drops, and waits for an e-mail to that effect.

“We wanted a way to know, on a specific style we want, when it goes on sale,” said a co-founder, Erica Bell. Hukkster also looks for coupon codes that apply to specific items, so a J. Crew nightshirt that was originally $128 came out to $62.99 after a site markdown combined with a 30 percent discount code that Hukkster found.

Currently, Hukkster makes money from referral traffic — it is paid a fee when shoppers buy something via a link from its e-mails. The founders say they are approaching retailers about ways of working with them by, for instance, offering personalized discounts based on shoppers’ “hukks.”

“Retailers are forced to do, say, 30 percent off all sweaters when what they’re really trying to move is the green merino sweater. This provides them the option to do that on a one-to-one basis,” a co-founder, Katie Finnegan, said.

Ms. Hughes, the Massachusetts mother, “hukks” items in specific sizes and colors, and then waits for the notification, like one on a Boden sweater she recently bought for her daughter.

“Now, of course, I’m hukking everything under the sun, including diapers, which I don’t think is their target audience,” she said.

Digital Folio charts the 30-day price history on electronics items at a number of retailers so shoppers can see not only where the lowest price is, but also whether that price might go lower still.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/business/new-online-price-trackers-alert-shoppers-to-good-deals.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Consumer Prices Unchanged in December

January 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment

WASHINGTON — Lower gas prices offset more expensive food and higher rents to keep the main measure of consumer inflation flat last month, the Labor Department said Wednesday.

Food prices increased 0.2 percent in December from November. Rents and airline fares also rose. Gasoline prices fell a seasonally adjusted 2.3 percent.

The flat reading of the December Consumer Price Index meant that prices rose only 1.7 percent in 2012, down from 3 percent in 2011. Food prices increased 1.8 percent, down from 4.7 percent in 2011. Energy prices rose slightly.

Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core prices ticked up 0.1 percent in December compared with November. And core prices rose only 1.9 percent in 2012. That was below the Federal Reserve’s inflation target of 2 percent and it was lower than 2011’s increase of 2.2 percent.

Mild inflation leaves consumers with more money to spend, which is good for the economy. Lower inflation also makes it easier for the Fed to continue with its efforts to accelerate the economy. If the Fed were worried that prices are rising too fast, it might have to raise interest rates.

With job gains and economic growth steady but modest, many businesses are reluctant to raise prices for fear of losing customers, and that has helped keep inflation tame. Workers also aren’t able to demand higher wages when growth is weak.

Prices are likely to stay low in the early months of 2013, based on a measure of wholesale prices reported Tuesday.

The Producer Price Index, which measures price changes before they reach the consumer, fell for the third straight month in December. Wholesale food prices dropped by the most in 19 months, largely because of a sharp drop in beef and veal costs. Vegetable and cheese prices also declined.

Separately, the Federal Reserve said factory production in the United States rose in December for the second straight month, buoyed by more output of autos, electronics and business equipment.

The Fed said factory output increased 0.8 percent last month compared with November. That followed a 1.3 percent rise in November, which reflected a rebound from Hurricane Sandy.

Total industrial production increased 0.3 percent in December following a 1 percent rise in November. Production slowed mostly because utility output dropped 4.8 percent, reflecting unseasonably warm weather.

The back-to-back gains in factory output offered some hope that manufacturing could be picking up after a weak year. One area that has been notable strong is the auto industry, which ended 2012 with its best sales in five years. Production of autos and parts grew 2.6 percent in December.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/business/economy/consumer-prices-unchanged-in-december.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

8 States to Raise Minimum Wage

December 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Eight states will ring in the New Year with a higher minimum wage, under state laws that require wage floors to keep apace with inflation. San Francisco, one of the few cities that sets its own minimum wage above the federal level, is also raising wages for the lowest-paid workers in the new year. It will become the first big city in the country to require companies to pay their workers more than $10 an hour.

The minimum wage increases in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington will be 28 cents to 37 cents an hour, according to the National Employment Law Project. That is an extra $582 to $770 a year for a full-time minimum wage worker, and resets these states’ minimum wages to $7.64 to $9.04 an hour.

At that higher end is Washington State, which will become the first state in the nation to set its minimum wage above $9 an hour. For reference, the federal wage floor for most workers is $7.25 an hour.

About one million minimum-wage workers will be affected by increases in the eight states, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization. An additional 400,000 workers who make just above minimum wage will also most likely get a raise because many employers adjust their pay distribution for all employees when there is a new minimum.

Most of the minimum-wage workers affected in these states are women, over the age of 20 and white, according to the institute’s analysis of Labor Department data.

A national minimum wage was first enacted during the Great Depression and has been raised sporadically by Congress rather than being automatically indexed to price changes. Adjusting for inflation, the federal wage floor was highest in 1968.

The eight states, as well as 10 others and the District of Columbia and a handful of cities, however, have set an even higher wage floor, which in many cases is indexed to consumer price increases. How that floor changes, and when, depends on the state. Labor organizers are planning additional minimum wage campaigns in several other states next year, according to the National Employment Law Project.

The broader economic effects of raising the minimum wage are disputed.

Some economists argue that raising the cost of labor will actually hurt low-wage workers because employers will decide to hire fewer people. Others say the increased spending power of low-wage workers will create jobs to support added demand.

It is not clear that employers will actually offset the cost of higher wages by employing fewer workers. Some economists say they believe that these higher labor costs might be passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices for goods and services, and that employers might also just accept a smaller profit margin when wages rise.

A landmark 1994 study by David Card and Alan Krueger, who is now the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, found that raising the minimum wage did not lower employment in a case study of a local fast-food industry.

Dozens of similar studies, looking at a variety of locations and industries, have been published since then, and the results have run the gamut.

For example, a study of San Francisco airport employees, conducted in 2004 by economists at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Waterloo, also found that increasing wages did not lower employment, and instead reduced employee turnover. But a literature review of a variety of studies published around the same time came to the opposite conclusion.

Whatever the effect on total employment, for those workers who do receive raises in the new year, the added income still will not be enough to push their families above the poverty line.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f87b533c948b027726c18bc3254fd470

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,