Retail Watchers

Publix has a lot of social capital from people who have a connection to Florida. Moving northward makes more sense for them than going West. Their mean store size has been inching up over time and probably isn't much different from a lot of the stores with which they compete. They could do quite wel...

The Waltons are much less generous with philanthropy than other wealthy families, and misers compared with Gates or Buffett (this is well documented). They family has never played much of a role in the active management of the company and are basically lazy dividend collectors--to see what that does...

It seems odd that they want to take on such a large geography which has a diverse collection of markets (in terms of competitors, demographics) and its a swath of the country where other Europeans have not had rousing success. Aldi, with its generic stores and simple model has taken an organic, meth...

I'm sure the changes in ownership are part of the problem, but they haven't changed the underlying problems with their business model. And yet they're still in business. It seems as though businesses can reach a certain mass where a tremendous amount of incompetence is needed to really bring them do...

BK's problems go back years, even decades and I am mystified they're still in business. The execution by franchisees has been erratic for as long as I can remember and their featured items have been hit or miss. They seem stronger outside the US than domestically.

I'm surprised they're still in business. They seem to be the last survivor of the old regional electronics chains like Highland, Fretter, et al.---they never made it national. Haven't been to one of their stores recently, but they always seemed to have less breadth than other chains. That might have...

The combos probably can work in places like mall food courts, airports and locations in urban cores or transit hubs where a single operator may lease multiple spaces. In fact, I wonder if BK's NYC franchisee (Reise) inspired this, as they probably also have the Tim Horton franchises at places like P...

Of course, this absurd--they are so locked into a centralized way of doing things and so oblivious as to how they can attract a slightly better off customer into their stores, they'll do something as boneheaded as this. Alcohol is a heavily regulated business and that may be why house brand beer dis...

http://www.avclub.com/article/walmart-being-sued-inventing-fake-craft-brewery-250375 Walmart announced last year that it had begun selling its own line of craft beers, claiming it was ”working in ‘collaboration’ with Trouble Brewing to brew four styles of craft beer.” Which would be a smart business...

WF already competes with Gelson's, Heinen's, etc. and their mastery of local markets would make it easy for them to fend off a less "organic" business model. My guess is that they kept or opened some of these small market stores because they need the volume to prop-up the ability to make a...