Retail Systems Research, LLC has released findings from "The 2012 Retail Store: In Transition". The report, based on a survey of 72 retailers, finds retailers increasingly understand the need to make the store more relevant for today's smarter, better-informed customers, but vast differences in how they plan on acting on that need.

"In-store technologies are critical to improving the customer experience," said Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner at RSR. "This year we see dramatic differences between those whose sales are already strong ("Retail Winners") and their underperforming counterparts ("Laggards"). Retail Winners are far more interested in improving their in-store workforce; laggards look to in-store technologies to win new customers, but seem challenged to understand exactly how that will occur. It's a tremendous difference."

Key Findings include:

• Mega retailers (over $5 billion in annual sales) cite the ability to educate and empower their in-store employees via technology as a top-three opportunity. To them, it has become fundamental to staying relevant.
• The largest retailers have an increased appetite for technologies which allow them to locate and sell inventory from anywhere in their company; as retailer size increases, so does the need to treat inventory as a shared resource: using stores as distribution centers, and online inventory for in-store fulfillment.
• The lack of a wireless infrastructure on the selling floor in more than half of respondents' stores is the single biggest inhibitor to improving the in-store experience.
• Because consumer behavior is becoming harder to predict, retailers are carrying less inventory in-stores; an increasing number of retailers report products being out-of-stock as a problem.