Jayne O’Donnell:

J.C. Penney hopes to get rid of cashiers and cash registers by 2014, and instead have salespeople use iPod Touch devices to check out customers, or self-checkout lanes.

Starting this weekend, salespeople in Penney’s new Levi’s shops will use only iPads to check out customers. All of Penney’s 1,100 stores will offer mobile checkout by the end of the year, spokeswoman Kate Coultas says.



More than 6,000 Nordstrom salespeople are already using mobile devices to check people out, just like at Apple stores. By the end of this year, Nordstrom salespeople will be able to do everything on their handheld devices that they can at a register, says Jamie Nordstrom, president of the company’s online division.



“I believe the future of our point-of-sale systems is completely mobile,” he says. “It’s hard to know whether it’s in one year or five years because the technology is evolving so rapidly.”

Learn more about our fourth generation native iPad, iPhone and Android apps, here.

Terry Teachout:

With the New Group’s ill-fated Off-Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra” having recently closed on account of bad reviews, the Harold Clurman Theatre will remain dark until further notice, and young playgoers will stop asking me an all-too-familiar question: Who was Harold Clurman, anyway?

Nobody had to ask that question when Clurman died in 1980 at age 78. Though his name was never to be found above the title, he was one of the half-dozen most influential figures in modern American theater. In 1931 Clurman co-founded the Group Theatre, the legendary left-wing drama company that nurtured the early careers of Lee J. Cobb, John Garfield, Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets. In the ’30s he directed the Group Theatre’s productions of Odets’s “Awake and Sing!” and “Golden Boy,” and after World War II he staged the premieres of O’Neill’s “A Touch of the Poet,” Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” and “After the Fall,” William Inge’s “Bus Stop,” Carson McCullers’s “The Member of the Wedding” and Tennessee Williams’s “Orpheus Descending.” Except for Kazan, no other director has succeeded in bringing so many serious new dramas to Broadway.