RPW 7-15-08

Retail Paradox Weekly

Retail News Analysis by RSR Research

7/15/2008

The Danger of Going Down Market in a Down Economy: You Can't Win

By Brian Kilcourse, Managing Partner
7/15/2008

For the month of June, discount retailers Wal-Mart, Costco, and Target all reported better than expected same store sales. This should hardly be a surprise given the U.S. “stimulus” checks hitting consumers’ mailboxes and the soaring price of energy that is eating into consumers’ discretionary spending. One of the unusual aspects of this economic downturn is that no one can claim that they didn’t see it coming, and the stimulus checks were also no surprise. But regardless of the sense of wonder and foreboding on Wall Street that these results generated, the fact remains that consumers are definitely trading down to low price operators.

At RSR, we frequently use a “model” to point out how a retailer positions itself in the marketplace. Here it is... More

Steve and Barry's Files Chapter 11: Fashion Goes Back to Basics

By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner
7/15/2008

Sometimes you just want to believe. In the late 1990’s investors believed that if they just threw enough money at dot-com companies, someday, somehow, those companies would make a profit. I remember the CFO of the retailer I worked for at the time saying, “Sooner or later you have to get back to basic business rules. Someone is going to expect a profit. These dot-coms have no business model.” While his delivery may not always have been easy to swallow, he understood business (and retail especially), and in this case, he was 100% right on. Dot-coms fell by the wayside, the money dried up and the bubble burst.

Here it is, a decade later, and I watched Steve & Barry’s explode onto the retail landscape. I started to believe... More

Early Findings from an RSR Benchmark Report: eCommerce

By Steve Rowen, Partner
7/15/2008

It perhaps goes without saying that this has not been a great year for retail sales. Yet even though it has become clear that early predictions of 3.5% overall retail growth for 2008 will not come to fruition, the fact that experts sources were calling for 21% growth of online sales caused many to preemptively reevaluate the efficacy of online channel even before more traditional retail sales took a serious dive.

Going back a bit... More

Is Back to School Make or Break for 2008?

By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
7/15/2008

The stimulus checks are out and apparently spent, according to the latest comp store sales figures – June sales are up, but mostly at retailers that sell basics or bargains, according to Bernard Sands and Ad Age. So the question, as politicians call for another round of handouts to consumers, is what is going to happen next?

While comp store sales have not been stellar at all this year, our research has shown that a lot of retailers... More

RSR Featured FastFact: Business Application Delivery

Does technology architecture itslef create differences in performance, or are there other germane business issues driving business success? From our recent The Future of Application Delivery in Retail Report, the answer is yes. Winners do a better job of ensuring that the technology architecture itself enables IT responsiveness to business needs. For example, Retail Winners are more focused than others on enabling business applications that utilize the network to deliver "loosely coupled" business rules and data via web-like interfaces. What's the goal?

In a word: Flexibility. Architecting applications as a set of services rather than tightly vertically-integrated stacks of code and data would enable retailers to re-deploy those services quickly and cost-effectively as the business changes, improving the speed of implementation and the simplicity of integration. Winners are transforming their application portfolios to achieve more flexible solutions.

To read the full report, click here.