The National Retail Federation is forecasting a 0.5% reduction in U.S. retail sales this year, the first year-over-year decline in fourteen years. Bloomberg News National Retail Federation Jan. 27, 2009
Battered by the free-fall in the housing market, Home Depot will close its 34 Expo Design Centers, five YardBIRDS, two Design Centers and HD Bath, a bath remodeling business with seven sites. In addition, the company will eliminate 7,000 of its roughly 300,000 jobs, including 500 from the headquarters staff. AP on Yahoo.com (Jan. 26, [...]
“The International Council of Shopping Centers … described November’s figures as the weakest in more than 35 years. Declines were recorded in every retail segment the group tracks, with the biggest coming from department stores…” where sales were down 13.3 percent compared with November a year ago, and specialty apparel retailers, where sales were down [...]
The NYT reports on signs of a new coupon chic. Among them, Time Inc.’s Wal-Mart-only All You is offering subscribers to a new weekly e-mail newsletter, All You Deals and Meals, an advance look at coupons to appear in the coming issue of the magazine. The New York Times (Dec. 4, 2008)
Casting a pall over the Hoiday season, the Commerce Department reported Friday U.S. retail sales dropped by 2.8% in October, the largest monthly drop since it began keeping this particular, broad measure of retail sales in 1992. It was the fourth straight month of declines in consumer spending. The Wall Street Journal (Nov. 17, 2008) [...]
Frugal all year, U.S. consumers appear to be pulling back sharply on consumer spending in recent weeks, as the financial crisis has deepened. Economists are now predicting that spending shrank in the quarter just ended, which, if true, would be the first quarterly decline in almost twenty years. The New York Times (Oct. 5, 2008)
Consumer spending in August turned in its weakest performance since the last “flat” month — February. Some observers attribute the poor performance to the drying-up of the government stimulas well. The last of those checks went out mid-July. The New York Times (Sept. 29, 2008)
The showdown between Wal-Mart and Tesco starts October 4th in Phoenix, Arizona, where the first four Wal-Mart Marketside stores will open. Wal-Mart’s 15,000-square-foot, small-format grocery stores are seen as a direct competitor to the 78 Fresh & Easy stores Tesco has opened in western states this year. Reuters (Sept. 23, 2008)
The stores will be closed for between one and eighteen months for remodeling. A complete list of store addresses – most in the central part of the state — appears in the source link. CoStar’s Retail News Roundup (Sept. 14 – 20, 2008)
Discount supermarket operator ALDI will open another fifteen stores in Florida by mid-November, as part of the chains more than 100 new store openings nationwide this year. The addresses of the ten Fla. stores opening tomorrow appear in the source link. Aldi Press Release at PR Newswire (Sept. 22, 2008)