storewanderer wrote: ↑December 18th, 2019, 10:10 pm
Both JCP and Macy's appear to be having a pretty miserable holiday season here in Nevada. I think in general the retailers are not doing well this year. The Wal Mart near me, the Christmas seasonal set looks about like it did a month ago... I cannot believe how much they have... as in, not much stuff is moving and I will look forward to the 75% off and 90% off sales in a few weeks.
Macy's looks pretty good, it is well stocked and has a lot of appealing promotions on clothing. The store seems more orderly and organized than it has the past couple of years (maybe because business is down so much). Traffic in men's clothing seems very low, but in women's it seems higher traffic, but there is a noticeable concentration of customers in the cosmetics and shoes areas and the clothing areas are not very busy. Staffing seems very low (like, they didn't even add any extra staff for the holidays, or maybe could not recruit due to the labor shortage). Conversely, the Macy's home department looks like it has sort of given up, from a traffic perspective and staffing perspective. They have cut out a lot of merchandise and what they do have is on lower shelves/racks and just does not come off as anything above the quality of Wal Mart or Target, but at much higher prices. Their bedding category has what is obviously above average product, but again, nobody seems to be buying. There is like one employee on the entire floor every time I have been there this past 3 weeks, and hardly any customers. I don't know what happened as home used to be a strong category for Macy's in this particular location.
But Macy's has a good online presence and strong buy online pick up in store offering with the RFID tracking used on many items so the store can pick these orders very efficiently. So even if Macy's physical stores are not doing well, they have a lot of online options.
The JCP Store on the other hand is a joke. The racks are a mess. About 25% of the sales floor space in women's is clearance and product is not moving and overflowing off the shelves. The men's area (which is larger than the women's area) has a lot of clearance also, but it does not dominate the department in the same way. That area also seems much more orderly and more attractively merchandised (maybe since the manager's office is up next to it). They have marked prices up so high on everything they sell, 70% off is still too high of a price. What was also funny the one night I was there, in the second floor they had 3 employees and only a couple customers up there. But then down on the first floor which is women's/kid's/jewelry/Sephora/shoes at the register near the mall entrance they had one clerk and 5 people waiting in line and that line moved so slow that when I walked out of the store 15-20 minutes later, 2 of the people who were waiting when I walked in, were still there. I haven't bought anything from JCP in years so I don't know what their process is but their point of sale must be painfully slow.
JCP's online presence is particularly poor and a few items I looked up online were priced higher online than in the store (already too high in the store).
Not sure what will come of JCP. The local Sears converted into a noisy/musty/stinky arcade/bowling alley with absolutely awful video game pricing. I think I miss Sears, compared to what replaced it.
Most people I talk to are doing their shopping online, some who say they have never done "all of it" online before like they are this year. I am hearing some negative comments about shipping speed, but in general people seem to not mind waiting a while for shipping, if they don't have to go to the physical store.
I haven't been to Dillard's yet but it doesn't matter much what is going on over at Dillard's; they make their money on January 1 with their well published extra percent off all clearance items sale.
I think these malls and physical stores are, in a word, screwed.