Mass Merchant

By Dave Weinberger, CBX

Have you read any 2015 retail trend forecasts lately? Let’s face it, many so-called trends for the year ahead — the need to focus on things like mobile payment, customization, foodservice, smaller formats or millennial shoppers, to name a few — are at this point just the cost of doing business.

Minneapolis – Target Corp. enjoyed many digital returns during the 2014 holiday season, as the retailer broke seasonal digital sales records. Target.com sales on the all-important Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping days were up 40% from 2013.

Costco showed again in December why it’s the cream of the crop among warehouse club stores.

The Wash.-based retailer reported an increase of 8% in same store sales in the United States, excluding gasoline sales and foreign exchange. Same-store sales at international stores rose by 1%.

Net sales for the retailer rose 5% to $12.12 billion in December from $11.53 billion a year earlier.

Philadelphia -- Teen value retailer Five Below has named Michael Romanko as its executive VP of merchandising, charged with overseeing merchandising strategy and operations. Romanko, who officially assumes the role on Jan. 19, will report to president Joel Anderson.

Hers may not be a household name among Walmart suppliers, but few of the retailer’s executives have as much of an impact on the daily lives of trading partners as Suja Chandrasekaran.

As Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Walmart, Chandrasekaran leads the technology and data transformation underway at Walmart that is referred to as Retail Link 2.0. The information sharing system known as Retail Link was pioneered by Walmart more than two decades ago and today is used extensively by suppliers for all manner of supply chain applications.

Foothill Ranch, Calif. -- The Wet Seal announced it would 338 stores, or about 66% of its total portfolio, “on or about” Jan. 7, resulting in the termination of some 3,695 full and part-time employees. The struggling teen apparel retailer said the decision to close the stores was based on its overall financial condition and an inability to negotiate meaningful concessions from its landlords.   

Washington, D.C. – The holidays were at least moderately happy for in-store retailers. According to the Applied Predictive Technologies (APT) Index, in-store sales for the 2014 holiday shopping season were up 0.7% although sales decreased on Black Friday and Super Saturday weekends.

The number of transactions: actually declined 0.4%, but this was more than offset by a 1.1% increase in average purchase amount. Black Friday weekend retail sales were down -3.5%, while Super Saturday weekend retail sales were down -1.7%.

Reston, Va. -- Retail e-commerce spending from desktop computers for the entire November-December 2014 holiday season totaled $53.3 billion, up 15% from the corresponding days last year.