Category Archives: Retail

UPS survey of online shopping

June 15, 2016 By in internet, Retail, Uncategorized Tags: , , , Leave a comment

A week ago, UPS released its fifth annual survey of online shopping.  The main results:

–for the first time ever, more than half of the purchases made by survey respondents are made online

–over three quarters use smartphones for their buys

–a third use social media sites to gather information; a quarter have bought things through social media sites

–a third start their shopping either at Amazon or eBay

—half of online shoppers take delivery at a physical store.  Almost half make additional purchases when they go to pick their items up

–60% of returns go through physical stores.  Again, consumers frequently buy additional items once they’re inside

–almost a third of purchases in a store are smartphone-guided, meaning buyers use their phones for product information, price comparison or download discount coupons

–35% of packages not sent to a store go to non-home locations, a trend that has been steadily rising recently

—pure physical-store shopping, meaning no online involvement in either search or purchasing, is down to 20% of all buys in the US.

 

No wonder traditional retailers, especially mall-based ones, are taking such a beating.  No wonder Amazon is aggressively beefing up its own shipping operations, while starting to tiptoe into opening physical stores (as a better way of processing returns?).

Toys R Us redux

February 23, 2016 By in Retail, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Toys R Us (TOYS (not a ticker symbol today)) has been an iconic name in retailing over the past forty years.

–In the 1970s urban department stores came under attack by upstart specialty retailers who extracted the most profitable “departments” from the older merchant conglomerates and opened stand-alone locations focused on a single line of goods in direct competition with their older rivals.  More nimble, with a wider selection, often lower-priced, more willing/able to follow customers to the suburbs, specialty retailers ate the department stores’ lunch for years.  Many still do.

Toys were at the top of the extraction list.

TOYS was the first of the three contenders (the others were Child World and Lionels Kiddie City) to complete a nationwide retail network yielding the economies of scale that eventually won out against the other two.  As such, TOYS is a textbook case of the successful 1980s retailer.

It took market share both from department stores and mom-and-pop toy retailers.

–The 1990s saw the rise of Wal-Mart (WMT) and Target (TGT), who, more modern versions of the department store, used their floor space in a flexible way than their predecessors.  Their toy departments were relatively small for most of the year, but expanded dramatically during the holiday season–meaning, in contrast to TOY, they had toy overhead expenses for only a small part of the year.  Because they had other lines of merchandise to sell, they could (and did) use the hottest toys as loss leaders, as well.

For the first half of the decade, TOYS steadily lost market share to WMT and TGT but made it up by taking share from mom and pops.  Then there were no more m&ps   …and TOYS’ underlying competitive issues became more evident (there are a lot more wrinkles to the story–like store locations–but I think WMT and TGT were the main plot line).

–In 2005, TOYS was taken private in the first of a series of attempts to reorganize or restructure the firm to restore its past glory.

 

—today TOYS is back in the news as markets worry about the firm’s ability to refinance its substantial junk bond borrowings.  It’s now being looked at as a possible canary in the coal mine for future troubles in sub-prime debt.

More tomorrow.

 

 

assessing the holiday sales season

December 29, 2015 By in Millennials vs. Baby Boomers, Retail, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

The commentators and analysts I read all seemed to argue that this holiday selling season would be sub-par.  They all trotted out the familiar stories of general economic malaise, lack of wage growth, the shrinking of the middle class, globalization, China, warm weather…

We’re now entering the home stretch of the holiday sales race as post-Christmas bargain hunting comes into full swing.  What I find striking is that the results so far have been much better than the consensus had expected.

What catches my eye is the jump in online (and especially online mobile) spending, and the strength of Millennial categories like furniture.

The mismatch between projection and reality seems to me to suggest that the consensus is trend following, and because of that tracking the spending of Baby Boomers–who have dominated the retail scene over the past few decades.  At the same time, it’s failing to capture the emergence of Millennials as an economic force.

The change may be as simple as that Baby Boomers no longer have gigantic home equity to tap to fund current spending.  Or it may be more powerful than a subtraction of the Boomer excesses of the past twenty years.  In either case, the overall economy is likely in better shape than the consensus believes.  And Millennials may be emerging as economic drivers faster than most have thought possible.

 

 

US retail inventories

November 30, 2015 By in Millennials vs. Baby Boomers, Retail, Uncategorized Tags: , , Leave a comment

Going into the end of year holiday shopping season, inventories of US merchants–especially of apparel–seem to be unusually (i.e., too) high.  I don;t think this is the case across the board.  It appears to be especially true of department stores, however.

I think this oversupply is partly caused by a reaction to last year’s troubles at the West Coast ports, meaning that merchants made their buying decisions early, to avoid running out of stock if labor problems resurfaced.

But I also think a couple of mindset issues are at work, as well.

–the recent strategic shift Wal-Mart announced to emphasize the internet suggests to me that throughout established retail, high level, long time executives who made their careers controlling the logistics of servicing physical stores have been in denial about online.

–in a housing upswing, the typical pattern around the world is that people who are establishing new households, either by renting or by buying, find the money to pay the rent/mortgage, paint, decorate, furnish…by shifting spending away from other, less immediately pressing, items.  Like apparel, for example.

The only time I can recall this reallocation not occurring is in the US, during the period from the mid-1990s to the crash in 2008.  That’s when homeowners were financing consumption by borrowing against the equity in their houses.

That’s no longer the case.  We’re back in a more normal environment, where a dollar spent on furniture or hoe improvements means a dollar less to be spent on clothes or toys (except for Star Wars, of course).

My thoughts:

It’s easier to adjust from having made the second mindset mistake than the first.  Revenues may not show who has made either; profits (or a lack of them) will.

The idea that as investors in retail we have to play the housing cycle as a key determinant of profit growth is another aspect of the Millennials vs. Boomers phenomenon in the economy.

am I reviving my Odds and Ends page?

November 18, 2015 By in Current Market Thoughts, Entertainment, Industry Analysis, internet, Retail Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I once thought that Odds and Ends would be a regular feature of my blog–a place to record information that might be useful but which had no immediate stock market urgency.  It hasn’t turned out that way.  I’m not sure why.

Fir the first time in a long while, however, I”m writing about two items that really belong there:  Activision and King Digital, and Urban Outfitters’ acquisition of a small upscale pizza business.  Here they are.