Retail Watchers

JCPenney is spending $1 Billion on store refreshes and remodels to improve their shopping experience according to Brookfield. I doubt any department store chain has made a comparable investment in years. Also doubt it will be enough to address all the deferred repairs. Nordstrom just remodeled its ...

Despite the "we're working past the department stores" talk, there's a lot of things wrong with malls still. Most of the department store replacements aren't real replacements (often not connecting into the mall), unique specialty stores are almost extinct, and despite hopes that some mal...

I wonder how that will work given how little parking most of their sites have. I guess you get to sit in your car in a line that starts out in the street (hope you don't get hit idling in the street) and create exhaust for 20 minutes to claim your mobile order. But they're creaming Starbucks and th...

Grocery outlet has always been a treasure hunt store for me. You never know what you will find. I really enjoy walking through there and seeing all the failed products end up on the shelves there and shaking my head how those products made it past multiple rounds of review in each company. They have...

Never see any traffic in their Sephora shops. Of course I am perhaps blind and am missing out on the big crowds that supposedly exist. The busiest area at Kohls is the Amazon counter. Second is Sephora. Now having said that, the Sephora's I have seen usually have 3-4 customers, about equal to the n...

The reality is that their store real estate strategy changes after opening stores in the Northwest and California. Their original plan was to go into any mall that could support them. When they decided to go national, they changed their strategy to open only one or two large stores per market. That...

Many of their closures have been small markets in the Pacific NW that probably date back to when they bought Best. I'd imagine these either had cheap long-term leases or were owned by them but never generated much volume. The Best stores were only in Seattle with one store in Portland. They may hav...

They are now asking for an extension to July 31 to make decisions on lease rejections... This would imply they still plan to be in bankruptcy on July 31...? This is not looking good to me, a month ago it felt like they were making preparations to emerge soon... now I see stores with hardly any inve...

Costco has something like 10 new store projects going in NorCal. It is quite interesting. I think they're trying to play chess to prevent Sam's Club from doing any expansion in the market. After Sam's Club closed two stores in metro Sacramento it doesn't bode too well. I think Costco may be hitting...

Did the purchase price.change? I don't see that anywhere.