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Of interest to editors and journalists covering:
lifestyles, retail, commerce, tech news, and pop culture

New Furniture Company Makes Traditional Furniture Stores Take the Back Seat
From bedroom sets to kitchenettes, Magic Dingleberry Furnishings can match your style, and they promise you'll like theirs. This new store uses a breakthrough computer program to enhance your living space.
ANAHEIM, CA - April 27, 2010 - Magic Dingleberry Furnishings, an innovative new furniture and decor company, announced its official launch this week. Georg Holzenkopf, founder of MDF, has teamed up with the same programming wizards that brought us Dunkelblau, the super-program that defeated the World Parcheesi Champion, Barry Kasparitus, in 2002. The Carnegie Mellon-based computer gurus worked with Holzenkopf to develop TasteUrSpace, a brilliant system that can select an item of furniture to perfectly fit any decor.

Furniture-shoppers simply provide TasteUrSpace with digital photographs of each room they're shopping for. Then, they tell the program what particular items they need, and TasteUrSpace instantly provides a list of recommended furnishings. The super-program calculates the ideal matches based on 1) the color of existing furnishings, walls, and floors 2) the size and shape of the room 3) the size and shape of existing furnishings, and 4) the style of existing furnishings. TasteUrSpace was designed to extract this information directly from photographs, with no additional input required.

After the list of furnishings is generated, shoppers make their selections, and they can either take home their new purchases immediately, or for a small fee, have Magic Dingleberry deliver it directly to their door within 24 hours. Says Holzenkopf, "I think our customers will be very impressed with how intuitive TasteUrSpace really is. It's truly revolutionary. And, you can expect the same great customer service you'd get from a mom and pop's furniture business."

About Magic Dingleberry Furnishings:

This company is the brainchild of entrepreneur Georg Holzenkopf. Originally a furniture designer for a local home furnishings outfit, he saw such great success, he wound up buying the furniture store he had worked at for over 3 decades. After spending 2 years developing and co-programming the TasteUrSpace software, he equipped his sales model with the new technology, and thus, Magic Dingleberry was born. Funded by monies from Holzenkopf's personal empire and private investors, you can follow Magic Dingleberry on the stock market under the abbreviation MADF.

Contact:
Georg Holzenkopf, CEO
ggholzenkopf@magicd.com
310-555-0505

Wal-Mart Undercover: Inside Loss Prevention

Retail giant Wal-Mart is a target for crime. Find out what goes on behind the scenes to prevent shoplifting in the aisles of a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Yeah, that was me, over a decade ago: a bona-fide Wal-Mart employee. I'd don my khakis, a nice polo shirt, and Wal-Mart's trademark blue vest - nametag clipped in place over my left breast pocket - and I was ready to do some serious customer service. I worked at two different Wal-Marts over a period of two years in central Pennsylvania. And although I was ready to help customers find the DVD player of thier dreams, my smiling face didn't tell the whole story...

A few months into my Wal-Mart career, I had met a gentleman employed by Wal-Mart - he was wearing plain clothes, no blue vest - whose full-time duty was to track down thieves in our Wal-Mart supercenter. I worked in the electronics department, and CD's, DVD's, and video games were favorite targets of shoplifers, so I saw a lot of our undercover watchdog. Some of the more expensive items were kept behind locked cabinet doors, but many of the electronics items were still left out on normal, unsecured shelves.

Day after day, he would stalk suspicious customers and wait for them to stuff the store's merchandise in their pants or purse. He had to wait for them to attempt leaving the store with the items still unpaid, but then he'd nab them, grab them by the arm, and tell them to come with him. It seemed like twice a day he'd catch someone. He had seen everything from new mothers lifting their infants out of their strollers to place unpaid items under them, to groups of thugs grabbing handfuls of goods and making a run for the exit. We'd watch him escort the criminals to the back of the store, where he'd hold them for a time until the police arrived to make the prosecution official.

If one of us spotted a shady character in a particular department, we could page the undercover Wal-Mart agent by his real name, and tell him to report to that department -- only we'd say that a customer needed assistance instead of announcing over the P.A. that someone suspicious was in the store.

Once, I was interviewed by a detective about a transaction I had rung-up in the Wal-Mart electronics department. It seems a criminal had purchased a television and some other accessories with a stolen credit card. The store I was employed by was a favorite target for credit card fraud, and the detective needed to make sure it wasn't an inside job; that I hadn't deliberately helped this criminal make his purchase in exchange for a cut of the goods.The Wal-Mart corporation focused largely on "shrinkage," or "loss prevention." If you heard a Wal-Mart employee ask another if they had seen "BOB" lately...that was a code to remind that employee to check the "Bottom Of the Basket."

In other words, the employee asking the question thought that a customer was trying to steal some Wal-Mart merchandise by leaving it in the bottom of his or her shopping cart on purpose so the cashier couldn't ring it up. If the employee began talking about "LISA," she was really saying "Look InSide Always" -- telling other employees to check inside any bags or containers among the items the customer was purchasing to see if he or she was stowing away extra merchandise there.

What appeared to be the everyday world of retail was actually a web of crime, espionage, and justice. Every shopping day was an adventure...at Wal-Mart Undercover.