Consumer Attitudes & Behavior

Crate and Barrel is going to try its luck in Nevada.

The home furnishings retailer has signed a lease to open a store at Downtown Summerlin, Summerlin, Nevada, a Howard Hughes Corp. development. The 106-acre retail and entertainment center is located in the Summerlin master planned community.

Sleek. Minimalist. Innovative. Modern.

Those were among the words used most often by mystery shoppers to describe Apple’s next-generation store, located at Shops of Saddle Creek South in Germantown, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis.

The shoppers are part of Field Agent, which provides on-location auditing and research via a network of 650,000 “agents” who collect data that can be monitored in real time by its clients. The company deployed several agents to visit and then review the store. The majority of the comments were glowing:

In a move that will directly impact retail and fast-food chains, California legislatures approved a plan to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022, which will give the state the highest minimum wage in the nation. The measure will be signed into law on Monday by California Gov. Jerry Brown.

Consumers are shopping online more than ever before, and are especially fond of one particular platform to support the activity.

According to the comScore “2016 U.S. Cross-Platform Future in Focus” report from comScore, desktop and mobile digital commerce accounted for 15% of U.S. consumer spending in fourth quarter 2015. This was up from 12.5% the same quarter a year earlier and also represented an all-time high percentage.

Macy’s CEO and other top executives are feeling the pain of the chain’s disappointment financial performance in 2015.
   
The board decided to award no bonuses after the chain fell short of its sales, cash flow and earnings goals, Macy’s said in a regulatory filing, according to Bloomberg.

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The plus-size market is being reenergized by a new demographic.

Teenage females in the United States are changing when it comes to the types of clothing sizes they are purchasing, according to the 2015 Women’s Special Sizes Study from The NPD Group.

“Now Trending” is an exclusive online series to chainstoreage.com, featuring trending topics that impact the retail real estate landscape.

For retail analysts and consumers alike, what’s going on in the apparel sector is fascinating and, in fact, confounding. While the root causes may not seem exactly crystal clear, the implications will be clear and unambiguous.

A few months after Whole Foods Market and The Fresh Market initiated price-cutting strategies to lure more shoppers, Trader Joe's has apparently followed suit, according to a new report.

New data from Deutsche Bank indicates that prices on 77 similar items at a New York-based Trader Joe's store and nearby Whole Foods found that Trader Joe's was about 26% cheaper, a decrease from a similar analysis Deutsche Bank did in 2013.