Retail Industry Archive

Customer service ratings don’t always pick who will succeed in retailing, and that seems to apply to online retailing, too. The American Consumer Satisfaction Index, a study that comes out of the American Society for Quality, gave Target a rating of 77 in the fourth quarter of 2008, near the top of the pack in the department and discount stores category and on par with the year-earlier...

More...

Wal-Mart’s success in the recession is in significant measure due to its embrace of the supercenter format, the only one in the food, drug and discount store universe that enjoyed increased shopping frequency last year. And that’s bad news for supermarkets. Supercenter shopping frequency, a measure of how often customers stop by the store, gained 0.7 percent last year despite the slowing...

More...

In his annual letter to Sears Holding investors and employees, Edward Lampert once again comes across more as a hedged fund manager than the chairman of a retail business, but he eventually makes an important point about the company’s prospects. Much of Lampert’s missive is a scold of the federal government’s financial crisis management. Of course, that has an impact on Sears, but it...

More...

Every crisis is an opportunity the saying goes, and while Home Depot is trying to turn its troubles into better operations, observers say it can do more. During Home Depot’s Tuesday conference call on 2008 results, Frank Blake, the company’s chairman and ceo, laid out a series of steps the company will take to get it through a recession that has driven home construction, a critical source...

More...

You would think that the discount retailers that are offering low prices and thriving during the recession, like Wal-Mart, would get some love in the form of customer satisfaction. Not so much. In fact, a recent report by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, a group that tracks consumer satisfaction, suggests that some of the retail industry’s best performers get terrible customer...

More...

Even as it continues to consolidate its corporate structure, Macy’s is investing money and hope for improving results in the year’s second half into My Macy’s, an initiative to localize the product mix in its stores. In its year-end conference call yesterday, Karen Hoguet, the company’s CFO, said Macy’s wants to spread chain wide the 1.5-point improvement on comparable store sales...

More...

Target plans to add meat, produce and bakery items at its discount stores in an expansion of food and commodity products designed to get customers onto its sales floors more often. In a year-end conference call this morning, chairman and CEO Gregg Steinhafel said Target had seen a “fundamental change in consumer spending patterns.” The company is concerned that consumers, even after the...

More...

Meijer is advancing its environmental initiatives, planning to add turbines to its headquarters and two stores near Lake Michigan, and putting more green products on its shelves. Meijer has been evolving a sustainability strategy for several years now, opening a store in a Detroit suburb in 2007 that won Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification from the U.S. Green Buildings...

More...

The J.C. Penney bridge plan, initiated in early 2008 to help it mitigate the impact of a slowing economy, has helped the retailer survive the recession and position itself for market share gains. In discussing 2008 results during a Friday conference call that included lower but a better than expected earnings, the company reported that it cut headquarters and store labor expenses, managing to...

More...

Consumers might have been stingy in the fourth quarter, but they came out of the period happier about the way they were treated by retailers, the American Consumer Satisfaction Index demonstrated, with Wal-Mart and Dollar General being exceptions. Considered in two categories, department/discount store and supermarket, Wal-Mart gained a point in the ACSI rating system to 70 as a general...

More...