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  • How Amazon Web Services outage impacted retailers

    A good number of retailers were impacted when Amazon Web Services — the company’s most profitable division — experienced a four-hour outage on Tuesday.      The outage caused major headaches for millions of AWS customers, according to web monitoring and optimization firm Apica, which monitored the top 100 Internet retailer sites during the outage.       

  • Quincy Mall works with town to land Slumberland

    With just over 50 stores, Quincy Mall is hardly the biggest regional center in the nation, but it’s a big deal in the rural Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois, just a skiff’s ride from Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. And it was big news in Quincy when the J.C. Penney in the Cullinan-owned property closed shop.  

  • Brand Activation

    I’ve seen the future of retail. And it’s not all online, not by a long shot.

    First, let’s deal with the elephant in the room. Yes, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are confronted with challenges on multiple fronts. Adapting stores to accommodate today’s digitally savvy and demanding customers is no easy feat.

  • Analysis: Target needs to balance online growth with store growth

    The holidays did not bring much cheer for Target, which saw both sales and profit decline during the golden quarter. Worryingly, comparable sales fell at an accelerated pace, ending up at their most negative point for of the fiscal year. The one bit of sparkle in an otherwise dreary set of figures came from digital where sales grew by a stellar 34%, a pace of expansion well above online growth in the whole U.S. market.  

  • Woodbury’s Anything but Common

    In the course of interviewing experts for this month’s open-air report, I heard two admiring references to Woodbury Common. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the Simon Premium Outlet center used as an exemplar of traits modern retail should strive for — things like great customer experience, well-curated stores, and good food. I thought it time that I take a drive up to Orange County, N.Y., and see what all the fuss was about.

  • Open-Air, Three Ways

    Three different centers, three different owner/managers, three different recipes for shaping open-air centers to local tastes

    Chris Ressa does not put a lot of stock in the word “experiential.” Though it’s become a companion to the word “retail” in the real estate industry, DLC Management Corp.’s senior VP of leasing finds it not up to the task of describing what’s too often missing at shopping venues.

  • Spotlight on New Formats

    Two big retail names, Dollar General and Abercrombie & Fitch, recently unveiled new store formats that differ dramatically from their traditional concepts. Here’s a look at their new initiatives:


    Dollar General

    One of the nation’s fastest-growing retailers is putting the focus on convenience, targeting a new demographic with a smaller-store concept called DGX.

    Dollar General debuted the new format, which has 3,400 sq. ft. of selling space, in Nashville, Tenn. A second location is set to open in Raleigh, N.C.

  • Survey: America’s favorite stores are…

    A regional department store, a warehouse giant, a discount supermarket and an online powerhouse rank among the nation’s favorite retailers.    That's according to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, which rates consumers’ satisfaction across six retail industries. The report found that satisfaction with the overall retail trade rise 4.7% in 2016 to a score of 78.3 (on a 100-point scale) an all-time high for the sector.  
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