Shopping and Retail

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Louis Vuitton Owner LVMH Sees Stock Drop on Weak China Sales

      by

      Weak sales in China at LVMH, the owner of Dior, Tiffany and more, sent a shudder through the luxury sector.Shares in LVMH dropped on Wednesday after the luxury goods giant warned about an “uncertain economic and geopolitical environment” and its latest earnings disappointed analysts.The conglomerate — which owns Dior, Tiffany, Fendi and more — is a bellwether for the industry. Its financial results, released on Tuesday after European markets closed, has sent a shudder through the luxury sector, particularly in response to slowing sales in the hugely important Chinese market.LVMH, which is run by the French billionaire Bernard Arnault, said that sales for last quarter fell 3 percent from the same period the previous year. The company also reported a decline in sales in its fashion and leather goods unit, which makes up about half of the conglomerate’s revenue, for the first time since early in the coronavirus pandemic.Shares of other fashion and lifestyle brands also declined, including Hermès and Kering, the owner of Gucci.Investors are jittery about the Chinese economy. Beijing introduced a package of measures last month that spurred a major rally in Chinese stocks, but details remain vague about the extent of the measures to bolster weak consumer spending, stabilize the real estate market and strengthen banks.China recently announced retaliatory penalties on European brandy — LVMH owns Moët Hennessy — in response to higher tariffs imposed by the European Union on Chinese-made electric vehicles.“Consumer confidence in mainland China today is back in line with the all-time low reached during Covid,” Jean-Jacques Guiony, LVMH’s chief financial officer, told analysts on Tuesday.Some industry observers are betting that LVMH will cope. “We are not sure this quarter particularly changes the LVMH story,” analysts at Bernstein wrote in a note. Even without a lot of detail, the stimulus signals in China are encouraging and demand will return, the analysts said.China’s housing minister is set to hold a news conference on Thursday and is expected to outline more measures to bolster growth.Danielle Kaye More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Walgreens Says It Will Close 1,200 Stores

      by

      The pharmacy giant said it would close the stores over the next three years and plans to “redeploy” the majority of the workers at the closed stores.Walgreens plans to close about 1,200 stores over the next three years, its parent company said on Tuesday, in an effort by the struggling pharmacy giant to cut costs and change focus.The chain, which is owned by Walgreens Boots Alliance, announced the closures in its latest quarterly earnings report, released on Tuesday.The closures will allow Walgreens to “respond more dynamically to shifts in consumer behavior and buying preferences,” Tim Wentworth, the chief executive of Walgreens Boots Alliance, told investors during an earnings call on Tuesday.There are more than 8,000 Walgreens stores in the United States, Mr. Wentworth said, and about 6,000 of those stores were profitable.“While the decision to close the store is never an easy one, we feel confident in our ability to continue to serve our customers,” Mr. Wentworth said, “and we intend to follow our historic practice to redeploy the majority of the work force in those stores that we closed.”About 500 of the closures will take place in the current fiscal year, which runs through September 2025, but the company did not say where they would occur.The company reported an operating loss of nearly $1 billion in the three months through August, roughly twice as much as the loss in the same period last year. Its stock price jumped more than 10 percent in early trading on Tuesday, as the results were slightly better than analysts had expected.Walgreens said in June that it would most likely close a significant amount of stores as part of a plan to turn around its business in the United States. At the time, Walgreens said spending by lower-income consumers in particular was lagging, driven by high inflation and depleted savings. The closures announced on Tuesday include 300 stores that had previously been approved to shut under that plan.Mr. Wentworth said that the company was also making changes to how it stocks its stores, by being “more selective” with the brands it carries, as well as expanding its own brands. This, he said, would enable the company to be “a destination for categories for which we believe we are uniquely positioned to lead, like health and wellness and, specifically, women’s health.” More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Spirit Halloween Will Experiment With Spirit Christmas

      by

      Known for its pop-up stores — and its army of seasonal workers — Spirit Halloween will try its hand at a longer run and a bigger holiday.For many fall enthusiasts, the season’s start is marked by the arrival of autumn leaves and apple picking. For others, it is marked by the emergence of the Borg-like retail empire that is Spirit Halloween, a Halloween goods purveyor that opens more than 1,500 locations across North America, only to shutter them in the days after Halloween.The script has remained constant: Spirit Halloween outlets appear in strip malls, and just about any abandoned storefront, selling vast inventories of costumes, wigs, vampire fangs, fake blood, devil pitchforks and ghoulish animatronics. Year after year, its stores create a dependable seasonal economy for thousands of workers before disappearing as quickly as they materialized.But this week, Spirit, which was founded in 1983, announced that it intends to test the waters of the Christmas season, too, with the introduction of a new retail concept, “Spirit Christmas.” Ten test locations will open across the Northeast, starting on Oct. 18 with a store in Mays Landing, N.J., which will be followed in November with outlets in locations like Albany, Poughkeepsie and Erie.At these locations, Spirit’s Grim Reaper-like mascot will be replaced with a winking Santa, and its stock will be replaced with gingerbread houses, wrapping paper, ugly sweaters, elf hats, reindeer ears and stocking stuffers. Locations will also offer family photo ops with resident bearded Santas.“Spirit Christmas is a new concept for us, and we’re hopeful it will resonate with our customers,” Kym Sarkos, Spirit’s executive vice president, said in a statement. Her statement added that customers will be able to wander through a “life-sized gingerbread village, where you can mail your letter to Santa at the North Pole and find out whether you’ve been naughty or nice.”The storefronts change, but the Spirit Halloween signage remains the same.Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn recent years, as Spirit Halloween’s seasonal retail empire has grown, the ephemerality of its business structure has made it the subject of endless parody. In the recent season premiere of “Saturday Night Live,” the sketch show aired a prerecorded spot that poked fun at Spirit Halloween’s impending, yet ultimately temporary, emergence.In the skit, an employee played by Heidi Gardner walks through the aisles of a busy Spirit store while she tells viewers about the company’s seasonal aid to depressed local economies around the nation.“Since 1983, Spirit Halloween has been helping our struggling communities by setting up shop in every vacant building in the country for six weeks,” she says. “And then bouncing.”After the skit aired, Spirit shot back at “Saturday Night Live” in a post on X.“We are great at raising things back from the dead @nbcsnl,” Spirit’s social team wrote alongside a photo of a Spirit costume package titled “Irrelevant 50-year-old TV show.” The package’s description noted that the outfit came with “Dated references,” “Unknown cast members” and “Shrinking ratings.”The joke landed well online, and now the company will find out if its customers are interested in having Spirit stick around through the holiday season. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      David Liederman, Who Found Sweet Success With David’s Cookies, Dies at 75

      by

      His innovative version of the chocolate chip cookie, studded with irregular pieces of dark Swiss chocolate, led to a chain of more than 100 stores worldwide.David Liederman, whose confections redefined the chocolate chip cookie and whose chain, David’s Cookies, eventually grew to more than 100 stores nationwide, died on Thursday in Mount Kisco, N.Y., near his home in Katonah. He was 75.His wife, Susan Liederman, said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was a heart attack. He was also being treated for myelofibrosis, a type of blood cancer.Mr. Liederman’s innovative version of the chocolate chip cookie will keep his name alive.The cookie’s unique feature was that it was not made with standard Toll House chocolate chips but was studded with irregular pieces of dark Swiss Lindt chocolate. He chopped the chocolate by hand, the way Ruth Graves Wakefield did when she created the Toll House cookie in 1938 in Whitman, Mass., before Nestlé took over and began manufacturing its little chocolate drops. Mr. Liederman called his cookies chocolate chunk, a term that has become widely understood and used in the world of baking and confections.But long before his revisionist cookie came on the scene, creating his reputation and cranking up his income, his career in food, as a chef, was starting to simmer like a good pot-au-feu.He was 19, still an undergraduate, when he went to France. Intrigued by Michelin three-star restaurants, of which there were but a handful at the time, he decided to eat at Troisgros in Roanne, near Lyon, because it seemed to be the cheapest. The meal set him back $19 (the equivalent of about $172 today); the food was an epiphany.He persuaded the Troisgros brothers to let him hang out in the restaurant’s kitchen and work for the next few summers, despite his lack of culinary training. While he was studying for a degree at Brooklyn Law School and clerking for Judge Maxine Duberstein of the New York State Supreme Court, he began taking classes at night in the culinary program at New York Technical College (now the New York City College of Technology) in Downtown Brooklyn.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Target Tests an A.I. Tool to Help Its Workers Aid Shoppers

      by

      The retailer is rolling out a chatbot to help workers answer questions from shoppers — and workers.Target is the latest retailer to put generative artificial intelligence tools in the hands of its workers, with the goal of improving the in-store experience for employees and shoppers.On Thursday, the retailer said it had built a chatbot, called Store Companion, that would appear as an app on a store worker’s hand-held device. The chatbot can provide guidance on tasks like rebooting a cash register or enrolling a customer in the retailer’s loyalty program. The idea is to give workers “confidence to serve our guests,” Brett Craig, Target’s chief information officer, said in an interview.Target is testing the device in 400 stores and plans to make the app available to most workers across its nearly 2,000 locations by August.As the retail industry experiments with generative A.I., some see its potential to eventually make in-store shopping feel more like online shopping, said Roy Singh, the global head of Bain & Co’s advanced analytics practice who works with retailers on generative A.I. initiatives.Retailers have personalized online shopping for customers with things like predictive technology, which suggests items to buy. Shoppers also see e-commerce as more convenient than having to walk in a store and track down workers. The Target app is meant to help workers assist shoppers with their questions faster.Mr. Craig is often asked if these sorts of tools will replace workers, he said. “I believe the relationship between people and technology is so very important,” he said. “We’re here to make sure that they get the right tools to do their work.”Walmart recently expanded access to the A.I. tool it had started using in its corporate offices last summer for use in its retail stores, rolling it out to 13,000 managers of its Sam’s Club stores.While there is significant investment and hype around generative A.I., some retailers have also rolled back experiments with the technology that have failed.“We are still in that growth curve — learning, failing and relearning — and trying to get through adoption at scale,” said Duleep Rodrigo, who leads the U.S. consumer and retail sector for KPMG. More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Martha’s Vineyard Will Have Enough Pot This Summer

      by

      For the island’s cannabis dispensaries, a sudden change in regulations came just in time.Until recently, Geoff Rose, the proprietor of a cannabis business on Martha’s Vineyard, believed he was in for a bleak summer.That was because his marijuana dispensary, Island Time, had run out of product — and it seemed as if he would be unable to replace it during the busy tourist season on the 96-square-mile Massachusetts island that has long been a haven for vacationers.But on Thursday, state regulators issued an order that would allow cannabis products to be transported across the ocean to licensed businesses.Mr. Rose closed his shop — temporarily, as it turns out — on May 14. At the time, the display cases were empty. No gummies. No tinctures. No pre-rolls. The only item of interest to some of his customers was the chocolate.“I believe there were 14 chocolate bars left,” Mr. Rose said in a phone interview. “They were the last to be sold. More than 14 people came in. Some were disappointed: ‘I don’t want chocolates.’ But some said, ‘OK, I’ll take it.’”The shortage, first reported by The Associated Press, had to do with conflicting laws surrounding the sale and transport of marijuana.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Companies Counter Pushback on Price Increases With Promotions

      by

      “The consumer was a fat pig — now there’s nothing left, and they need to feed the pig again,” one banker told DealBook.The president of McDonald’s USA, Joe Erlinger, pushed back on “inaccurate” reports this week that said the chain had more than doubled its prices on some items over the last decade. But his retort wasn’t exactly reassuring: The average price of a Big Mac is up 21 percent from 2019.Erlinger’s rebuttal underlines the heat that some companies are facing as the news media, politicians and consumers focus on steadily rising prices. Whether persistent price increases reflect price gouging, or simply companies’ own rising costs, is a matter of fierce debate. Either way, one thing is clear: Consumers are becoming fed up.McDonald’s first-quarter earnings fell short of analyst expectations on sales, as “consumers continue to be even more discriminating” with their dollars, the chain’s chief executive, Chris Kempczinski said. Starbucks, Target and Yum Brands, the parent company of Pizza Hut and KFC, also reported earnings misses, each acknowledging increasingly cautious customers among other factors like the war in the Middle East.Consumer spending remained surprisingly resilient in the face of stubbornly fast inflation, but now savings from the coronavirus pandemic have dried up, economic growth has slowed and many companies are working to counteract the belief that their prices have gotten out of control.As one banker told DealBook: “The consumer was a fat pig — now there’s nothing left, and they need to feed the pig again.”The message: Consumers have hit their limit. During periods of rapid inflation, companies tend to push to see how far they can raise prices. “We’re taking smaller, more frequent price increases because it gives us the flexibility to be able to see how consumers are reacting and then adjust if or when necessary,” Kevin Ozan, the chief financial officer of McDonald’s, told analysts in 2022.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Who Was Bruce Nordstrom? The Force Behind the Multibillion-dollar Empire

      by

      Bruce Nordstrom was both the force behind his family’s multibillion-dollar retail dynasty and a stealth godfather to the fashion trade.“Nice” tends to be dirty word in business. The cliché holding that nice guys finish last has seldom seemed more true than in the landscape of contemporary retailing, where business is dominated by corporate consolidation, monopolistic practices and shareholder returns as the ultimate value.Yet nice, as it turns out, may not be altogether pejorative — at least judging by the career of Bruce Nordstrom, who died May 18 at age 90. It may even be a key to success.For decades, Mr. Nordstrom helped lead the Nordstrom retail empire, which was founded in Seattle in 1901 by his grandfather, an immigrant from Sweden. The fashion retail colossus began as a shoe store, and ultimately expanded to include 150 locations worldwide.Publicly traded since the 1970s and still family-run, the Nordstrom chain was predicated on an ethos of decency and niceness, Robert Spector wrote in “The Nordstrom Way,” his 1996 book about the company’s vaunted reputation for customer service.“I came at the reputation with skepticism,” Mr. Spector said by telephone from his home outside Seattle. “I wish it were more complicated, but they are who they say they are, decent and humble and focused on the customer first.”The Nordstrom culture of customer care is not only real, it originated from a family tradition of bottom-up managerial training. Bruce Nordstrom may have run a multibillion-dollar company, but he never forgot his beginnings sweeping floors and breaking down boxes for 25 cents an hour. “It may be the biggest competitive advantage they have,” Mr. Spector said of Nordstrom’s unusual company structure.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More