Sure, I’ll do some online research before making a big purchase like a washer and dryer; and of course, I’ll make all my travel arrangements through the internet, too. Heck, I’ll even buy my Mets tickets online, although for the life of me I don’t know why—no, not the online purchase part, the fact that I’m still a Mets fan. But shop online for household and personal care items? Nah, I’ll suffer the unconscious gentleman who’s still writing checks on the Pathmark checkout line before I start giving out my credit card number for a $2.99 tube of toothpaste.

But the tide may be turning for me, as well as a lot of other consumers. Customer satisfaction with retail is down for the first time in four years, according to a recent report by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). All brick-and-mortar retail categories show weakening or flat customer satisfaction for the final quarter of 2014. In contrast, internet retail rose from 2013, according to ACSI.

With Amazon.com, Birchbox for women and now men, drugstore.com and nearly every marketer selling their own stuff online, it won’t be long before our highways are empty and those drones have taken to the airways.

Yeah, right! Traditional retail still has some life left, especially for those little essential products we just can’t do without. This month’s edition of Happi is chock full of them, with articles on the $1.1 billion sun care category (p. 67), the incredibly diverse OTC segment (p. 50) and all shades of color cosmetics (p. 58).

So whether you’re tooling down the information superhighway clicking away to your heart’s content or stuck behind that old geezer who still can’t find a pen, we’re sure you’ll find some interesting reads in this edition of Happi. And don’t forget to check out Happi.com several times a month, where we update content on a daily, more often, hourly, basis.


Tom Branna
Editorial Director
[email protected]