Sales & Marketing

Feeling the heat from an activist inventory, Chico's FAS Inc. will increase its cost-cutting efforts on the heels of a disappointing first quarter.
    
The women’s apparel retailer reported a profit of $31.1 million, or 23 cents a share, for the quarter ended April 30, down from $32.5 million, or 22 cents a share, a year earlier. Excluding restructuring-related charges and other items, adjusted per-share earnings fell to 25 cents from 30 cents.

Guess Inc. swung from profit to net loss in the first quarter of fiscal 2017, missing analyst estimates for both net earnings and revenues.

The apparel retailer reported a net loss of $25.2 million, compared to net earnings of $3.3 million the same quarter a year earlier. Restructuring charges, a negative tax impact, and currency fluctuations helped push the retailer into the red.

Over the last 12 annual trips I’ve made to Las Vegas for ICSC’s RECon real estate convention (which officially makes me a rookie in this industry of 20-, 30- and 40+-year veterans), I have always been able to detect some distinct trends.  

That doesn’t as much make me a trend-watcher as it does a good listener.  The retailers and shopping center operators and brokers who attend RECon each year tend to talk avidly in the aisles about the current events shaping the retail real estate industry.

Two events converged by 2010 that fundamentally changed how consumers shop and how retailers sell.
 
The first was that the world was enmeshed in a deep recession triggered by the collapse of financial markets in 2008. The second was that the world was going through a refresh cycle for consumer mobile phones. What happened next rocked the retail industry.
 

It’s going to take some getting used to. That’s one of retail consultant Neil Stern’s first impressions of the new 365 by Whole Foods Market format, which made its national debut on Wednesday,  in Los Angeles. The store combines elements of a Trader Joe's, Whole Foods and Sports,  Stern said in a report by Forbes.
 

As Sears Holdings Corp. continues to struggle to turn its business around, the chain announced it is exploring ways to expand distribution of its key brands outside its own stores. The troubled retailer also announced its CFO is leaving.

Sears lost $471 million in its first quarter, ended April 30, compared with $303 million in the year-ago period. Loss per share came to $4.41, or $1.86 adjusted for certain items. Analysts estimated a loss of $3.20 per share.

The launch of “buy buttons” in the past year on major social networks like Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter received a lot of attention, but so far they are not catching on with customers.
 
According to Digiday, research firms including Forrester and GlobalWebIndex are finding low consumer usage rates for social buy buttons. Reasons include limited functionality and visibility of the buttons.

The nation’s top two extreme-value discounters aren’t feeling the retail malaise that affected department stores and many specialty retailers in the first quarter.