Retail Industry Archive

Sears is making its statement about the holidays and fashion is a big part of it. Sears (SHLD) got a jump on Black Friday this weekend, in fact creating its own in an effort to gain some attention in a holiday season. The Black Friday Now! Doorbusters event was meant to be splashy. Advertising for it featured the company’s top draws, with an email blast, for example, mounting buttons for...

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Why go out looking for bargains when they’ll come home looking for you, eventually? This holiday could witness a sea change in the relationship between consumers and online shopping. Coupon and other bargain oriented sites, including a new generation of discount search aids, are launching – or relaunching – on the web and retailers already are fighting it out over books. Such initiatives...

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Walmart is applying methods to marketing that have propelled its operations and will become ever more effective in getting its low-cost message to consumers, the company informed financial analysts last week As reported earlier in this blog, Walmart (WMT) is cutting costs on fixed expenses and applying the savings to creating price separation between itself and its competition. But it also is...

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Vitamin Shoppe’s recent IPO is exciting investors. The North Bergen, N.J.-based company, with just more than 400 stores, saw its stock open at $19.50 per share on Wednesday, 15 percent higher than the initial offering of $17 a pop. In a retail world that seems to concentrate on luxury versus necessity shopping or the next batch of store closings coming down the pipe, this news is...

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Macy’s clearly believes in Believe, so the department store chain is bringing the promotion back so large that it requires characters more potent than Donald Trump and Martha Stewart as its representatives. So, this year, Santa Claus will lead the Believe effort along with a Queen, in this case, Queen Latifah. Queen Latifah’s participation is particularly interesting, but more on that...

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Z Gallerie, a retailer of home furnishings and furniture, recently emerged from bankruptcy after shedding 21 stores and filing Chapter 11 six months ago. The retailer received a boost in the form of a $22 million financing package from Wells Fargo as part of its emergence. It bodes well for the furniture sector, which is directly tied to the U.S. housing market, that an uncommonly successful...

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Walmart is launching another major cost cutting program that will fund an initiative to make it even more competitive: price separation. As detailed in this blog yesterday, Walmart is applying a concept it has visited in the past, the productivity loop, to squeeze costs out of sales, general and administrative expenses, and particularly those associated with planned growth, with a significant...

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Department store retail will never be the same again as Nordstrom and other luxury operators respond to the recession by launching mass-market style programs they might never have considered prior. The department store world is changing and in more ways than one. While Macy’s has adopted mass-market oriented brands such as Martha Stewart, J.C. Penney has taken its populist approach beyond its...

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Retail real estate investment trusts, the companies that own the shopping centers and malls that consumers frequent every day, are reporting losses during this quarterly result period. However, those entities’ occupancy rates, which illustrate how many stores are staying open or closing in the properties, are holding up surprisingly well. This is significant due to the number of store...

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The productivity loop is back at Walmart, and that could have a big impact on retailing if the company accomplishes its goal of maintaining store growth while cutting critical costs. As Mike Duke, Walmart CEO, described it at Walmart’s analyst meeting last week, the productivity loop is the company’s model for identifying and squeezing inevitable expenses to generate greater efficiency. Of...

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