Retail Stores
August 18, 2015 at 2:53 pm
Just over four months since the Apple Watch began its Apple Retail Store debut for try-ons, Apple has started to tweak the process this week, according to Apple Retail employees. Until this week, a customer who walked into an Apple Store seeking to try on Apple Watch was required to make an appointment and provide…
August 18, 2015 at 12:53 pm
Holiday preparations are in full swing as retailers gear up for their busiest time of the year. In this debut issue of Total Retail Talks, Total Retail's new podcast channel, Joe Keenan, executive editor of Total Retail, chats with with Jim Davidson, Bronto Software's head of research, about the release of the cloud-based marketing automation…
August 17, 2015 at 4:33 pm
Sam’s Club wants to move beyond its parent’s DNA. The warehouse-club retailer, owned by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., for years has struggled to turn around sluggish sales. Now it's pursuing a more fundamental fix: breaking away from the low-income consumers who shop at Wal-Mart.
August 17, 2015 at 3:34 pm
Nordstrom Rack, the rapidly expanding off-price version of Nordstrom, is working exactly as the company hoped it would: it’s bringing in a boatload of new customers to the regular brand. One million Rack customers started shopping at the company’s full-line stores or at Nordstrom.com for the first time last year, said Blake Nordstrom, the company’s…
August 14, 2015 at 9:15 pm
J.C. Penney's turnaround is gaining traction. The department store chain said Friday that its losses narrowed in the second quarter on better-than-expected sales, fueled by men's clothing, fine jewelry and the beauty brand Sephora. And a key revenue measure rose for the third straight quarter. But J.C. Penney still has an uphill road to a…
August 13, 2015 at 1:35 pm
Sales at U.S. retailers rose in July on growing demand for everything from cars to clothing, and a decline the previous month was wiped away, signaling consumers are propelling growth in the world’s largest economy. The 0.6 percent advance matched the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg and followed little change in June that…
August 12, 2015 at 4:41 pm
Back-to-school (B2S) shopping, the second largest shopping season of the year, is now in full swing and growing in popularity with consumers. With B2S shopping no longer just constrained to one specific day, there’s more opportunity than ever before to draw shoppers into stores and online. To make the most of their B2S marketing efforts,…
August 12, 2015 at 3:19 pm
Fashion can be a fickle thing. Fads come and go. Sartorial tastes change. Even the ways we shop go in and out of style. “It’s really important to be willing to try new things,” says Susan Gregg Koger, co-founder and chief creative officer of ModCloth, the e-commerce site specializing in vintage-inspired fashions and accessories. Plenty…
August 5, 2015 at 1:45 pm
We find ourselves mid-year 2015 with the back-to-school shopping season upon us. The National Retail Federation reports that shoppers plan to spend about $630 overall on clothing, shoes, supplies and electronics for their K-12 students this year, a nearly 6 percent decline from the $669 average planned budget in 2014. Since the recession, consumers’ back-to-school…
August 5, 2015 at 1:21 pm
As Target Corp. began rolling out smaller-format stores in the past few years, their names — CityTarget and TargetExpress — sometimes sparked confusion. While CityTarget stores located in dense urban areas are generally smaller than Target’s other big-box stores, that wasn’t the case with the CityTarget store that opened last month next to Fenway Park in…
