Retail Watchers

Amazon and Walmart are fundamentally two different animals--Walmart explicitly seeks to limits customer choices--few items in any category. Amazon's the opposite. Amazon is a tech based animal and has exploited that. Walmart's DNA is small town variety stores and not very predisposed toward tech out...

Given the consolidation of retail and the improvements in supply chains management by retailers and manufacturers, there really isn't enough high quality "closeout" merchandise to go around. Most outlet mall merchandise is either made for outlets or sold at the similar price as regular sto...

The couple times I've been to their stores, I was impressed at the limited selection and their failure to capitalize more on popular brands they carry like Carharrt. Perhaps their commitment to firearms was a problem--it's a cyclical business that does well when Democrats become president or a mass ...

The list is based on credit card sales data. They don't say if it reflects volume or something like sales/square foot. Some fairly weak stores I can think of didn't make the list, while at least one store with decent floor traffic (Wheaton) does. The store that seemed off-base to me has a lot of imm...

That they're exiting the DC area which has had a relatively strong economy speaks to a basic problem with their business mode--they can't really find a place where they can compete in a relatively new market even when the fundamentals seem strong. Simply put, they may be able to survive in in some o...

They have an odd business model. They're mostly in small markets but they're also in some suburban areas--in the Atlanta area, they're in relatively not well-off places that either have little retail (Riverdale) or quite a bit (Conyers). In terms of the small rural markets, do they concentrate on pl...

JCP's left their small town roots 2-3 generations ago and weren't totally w/o large market locations before WWII. Their small market stores, main street and mall are largely gone from the East & Midwest, so I'm guessing the remaining stores are more of a Western phenomenon and a small part of th...

Giant operated a wide variety of stores in its pre-Ahold days. I lived in DC during the 90s and Giant ran relatively few clunkers, but they had other stores that didn't necessarily do huge volumes. The Van Ness store, despite being cheaper than Safeway was not what I'd consider a big volume store. T...

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...