Retail Stores

No one who's read the business press this year is surprised by this prediction, but it bears repeating: what we're watching here is the slow-motion retail trainwreck that is the demise of once-mighty tech giant Best Buy. In this case, a combination of the "Amazoning" of the consumer retail (particularly electronic) experience, a steady decline in shopping experience and quality, and a dependence on brick-and-mortar over a cohesively evolving web strategy (as well as limited product advantage) has brought Best Buy to its retail knees.

Michael Francis has been named to the newly created post of chief global brand officer at DreamWorks Animation. Francis, the high-profile former chief marketing officer at Target as well as president at J.C. Penney, will be responsible for worldwide branding initiatives, licensing and consumer products, and franchise management. "Michael has spent nearly three decades as a superstar in retail, and his expertise in building franchises is second to none," DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg said in a phone interview. 

Shocking no one, American Apparel is getting another slap on the wrist for the titillating ads it runs on its website. But this time, the charge is more serious: Britain's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is accusing the retailer of "sexualizing" models under the age of 16. Oof.

Looking through all of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday articles on the business wires over the past week has left me in a bit of a haze. Mobile sales are up. Store sales are down. Online sales are up. Promotions worked. Promotions didn't work. It can all get very confusing. How did Cyber Week pan out for your brand?

Joe Biden has a Costco card? Who knew? The vice president — who renewed his membership just this week, it turns out — flashed his Costco credentials Thursday as he helped the discount retailer at the grand opening of its first store in Washington, D.C. Costco CEO Craig Jelinek greeted Biden before his shopping spree, as did company co-founder Jim Sinegal.

Retailers that opened early on Thanksgiving evening gained an advantage and that promotional activity was about on par with last year, according to a new Moody's report, Thanksgiving Weekend: The Early Bird Gets the Worm. "Overall, the trends we observed this weekend are consistent with our expectations of 4 percent sales growth and 15 percent online sales growth for the 2012 holiday shopping season," said Charlie O'Shea, vice president, senior analyst at Moody's and author of the report.

Voxware, a provider of voice solutions, recently released research highlighting how late or inaccurate deliveries impact consumers’ future decisions to shop with a retailer online, by phone or in-store. Six-hundred consumers were surveyed on their expectations for delivery of items that they purchase online or by phone during the holiday shopping season and beyond. Highlights from the survey include the following:

Apple's retail stores are famous, taking on almost the status of local landmarks with their flagship locations in cities like New York. But how exactly did the Mac maker position its brick-and-mortar sales operations as something larger than life? A newly unearthed video spotted by 9to5Mac sheds some light on what went into evolving Apple retail from its just-another-store-in-a-mall origins to its iconic present-day status.

Consumer behavior changed this year as more Americans began or ended Thanksgiving Day by embracing early Black Friday deals and visiting stores on Thursday. ShopperTrak, the world's largest counter of retail foot traffic, estimates that when compared to "Black Weekend" last year, retail foot traffic rose 8.2 percent to more than 594 million store visits. Retail sales increased 2.7 percent, with shoppers spending about $22 billion across the weekend's four days. Thursday's "doorbuster" deals drove sales and traffic earlier in the weekend.

Top Toy created the holiday catalog for toy chains BR and Toys"R"Us. The catalog was released in both Denmark and Sweden, but the Swedish version features some photoshopped changes. Perhaps most notably, a boy wielding a toy gun in the Danish catalog was replaced by a girl, while a boy appears on another page playing with a very pink dollhouse. This secret is out. Sometimes girls like to play with He-Man action figures and boys like to nurture dolls.