Money and Finance
- Tomorrow’s Retail World – Speech By Matt Atkinson, Chief Marketing Officer, Tesco
I’ve worked in retail for many years. But never before has there been such rapid and profound change as we see today. A fundamental change not just in how people shop, but how they live their lives, and what their expectations are of the companies they...
- The Psychology Of Discounting: Something Doesn’t Add Up
WHEN retailers want to entice customers to buy a particular product, they typically offer it at a discount. According to a new study to be published in the Journal of Marketing, they are missing a trick. A team of researchers, led by Akshay Rao of the...
- Competing With Amazon On Amazon
Thousands of small merchants depend on Amazon.com Inc. to reach customers who otherwise wouldn't know they exist. A few of them complain, though, that Amazon sometimes eats their lunch. According to some small retailers, the Seattle-based giant appears...
- Wal-mart Ceo Bill Simon Expects Inflation
U.S. consumers face "serious" inflation in the months ahead for clothing, food and other products, the head of Wal-Mart's U.S. operations warned Wednesday.The world's largest retailer is working with suppliers to minimize the effect of cost increases...
- Bargain Hunting With Ross Stores, Inc.
I'm always on the lookout for excellent companies with a long growth trends in front of them. Ross Stores, Inc. (NASDAQ:ROST) fits that bill but are the shares currently priced for perfection? Ross Stores is a discount retailer that offers consumers...
Money and Finance
Stores Confront New World of Reduced Shopper Traffic
Best Buy Co. on Thursday became the latest retailer to chime in with weak holiday results. Like other chains, the electronics retailer blamed the race to offer the deepest discounts, a game of brinkmanship that hurt profit margins and held back revenue.
But there is a deeper malaise at work: A long-term change in shopper habits has reduced store traffic—perhaps permanently—and shifted pricing power away from malls and big-box retailers.
Consumers' rush to e-commerce is a challenge that brick-and-mortar retailers have wrestled with for years. Across a number of retailers, their defensive strategies don't seem to be panning out. Best Buy, for example, overhauled its store layouts and marketing in the past year, even inviting shoppers to "showroom" the electronics retailer—co-opting the term for people who try out products in stores and then buy them for less online.
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Traffic to U.S. retailers was hurt during the financial crisis and recession, when job losses soared and shoppers kept a tight grip on their dollars. But nearly five years into the recovery, it appears many of those shoppers may never be coming back.
Retailers got only about half the holiday traffic in 2013 as they did just three years earlier, according to ShopperTrak, which uses a network of 60,000 shopper-counting devices to track visits at malls and large retailers across the country. The data firm tracked declines of 28.2% in 2011, 16.3% in 2012 and 14.6% in 2013.
- Tomorrow’s Retail World – Speech By Matt Atkinson, Chief Marketing Officer, Tesco
I’ve worked in retail for many years. But never before has there been such rapid and profound change as we see today. A fundamental change not just in how people shop, but how they live their lives, and what their expectations are of the companies they...
- The Psychology Of Discounting: Something Doesn’t Add Up
WHEN retailers want to entice customers to buy a particular product, they typically offer it at a discount. According to a new study to be published in the Journal of Marketing, they are missing a trick. A team of researchers, led by Akshay Rao of the...
- Competing With Amazon On Amazon
Thousands of small merchants depend on Amazon.com Inc. to reach customers who otherwise wouldn't know they exist. A few of them complain, though, that Amazon sometimes eats their lunch. According to some small retailers, the Seattle-based giant appears...
- Wal-mart Ceo Bill Simon Expects Inflation
U.S. consumers face "serious" inflation in the months ahead for clothing, food and other products, the head of Wal-Mart's U.S. operations warned Wednesday.The world's largest retailer is working with suppliers to minimize the effect of cost increases...
- Bargain Hunting With Ross Stores, Inc.
I'm always on the lookout for excellent companies with a long growth trends in front of them. Ross Stores, Inc. (NASDAQ:ROST) fits that bill but are the shares currently priced for perfection? Ross Stores is a discount retailer that offers consumers...