I love these snippets of 2-page $400 Forrester reports that tell you just enough to not want to spend the money on 2 glowing pages of the obvious (OTOH, I highly respect Forrester for their reporting on blogs & RSS...something that's often times not so obvious as retail)

This recent report on the state of kiosk use in retail is a striking example of "oh look, a shiny object..." and the quick fade from fashion once the initial momentum and mood were lost. Retail stores installed kiosks and just as quickly forgot about why they were installed. (or, due to cosmic force against self service, most retail stores never installed kiosks - period) Personally, I think that it should be mandatory for every X amount of retail staffing or square footage, the retail outlet should have have a corresponding number of self-service kiosks to facilitate customer service that's so lacking in many retail locations. Borders is one of the few that I've seen get it right. Why the hell can't Barnes & Noble do the same thing. I can count in hours the time that I've had to spend waiting for one of their sav-a-buk retail associates to perform the same low value add task of typing my request into a dumb terminal to see if the item in question is in the store...or can be ordered online. If BN had self-serve kiosks, prominently marked, as the Forrester paper points out, they'd likely be better served by these wonders of customer automation.

It's called lift-and-shift, people. Lift the no/low value add tasks off of your highly paid staff and onto the customer or to lower cost resources. Given the general helpfulness of your average retail drone, I'd venture a guess that 8 times out of 10, we'd be better served by a computer with an above average search function & store inventory at hand.

Further, if the store kiosk used cross & upsell technology that even the most astute $7/hr retail associate has no grasp of, think of the incremental sales that could flow... "OH, I see that you're looking for bath towels. Other customers have purchased the matching bath mats, hand towels and shower curtain which can be found in Aisle 8." Wouldn't that be cool!?