With holiday shopping in full swing, Sears decided it was time to host a “grand reopening” for its department store at Fair Oaks Mall in Northern Virginia, complete with magic shows, jugglers, face painting and free cotton candy.
United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp. delivered almost all of people’s presents by Christmas Day, with the former company finishing strong after a bruising late November.
Kristina Nicolas will proudly tell you that she’s been doing practically all her shopping online for years now. She will also tell you, in a more exasperated voice, that this has not remotely abbreviated the amount of time she spends going to stores.
The growth of e-commerce around peak shopping season is no longer a new story, and this year was no exception. But 2017’s peak season did raise some eyebrows for getting off to an unusually early start, with sales from Nov. 1 to Nov. 22 up 17.9 percent, year-over-year, according to Internet Retailer’s report on the peak shopping season.
The scene at the East Coast’s largest mall on a recent Friday morning would seem to fly in the face of the doomsday narrative surrounding U.S. retail centers. A steady stream of holiday shoppers walked the lacquered halls, browsing stores from Gap to Gucci. By noon, a line was snaking out of an outpost of the Shake Shack burger chain.
The millennial generation's embrace of renting rather than owning has spread far beyond housing and ride-sharing, and even some traditional major retailers are taking notice.
There are a lot ways to judge retailers during the holiday season. Is store inventory overflowing, as it was a couple of years ago? Are chains discounting like crazy? But what really matters for most retailers is whether they are successfully fighting off Amazon.com Inc.
The latest supply-chain news, analysis, trends and tools for executives in the consumer packaged goods industry. Learn how consumer packaged goods companies and their suppliers around the world are managing the flow of products across all channels of the enterprise. Experts sound off on forecasting and demand planning, supply-chain visibility, logistics outsourcing, inventory optimization, transportation management, warehouse management, supply-chain security, corporate social responsibility and more.
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