The latest news for every retail supply chain nerd Attention shoppers and all you retail supply chain nerds. Welcome to Point of Sale: The Newsletter! Here you’ll find all the latest industry deals, tech developments and everything in between regarding shoppers’ interests. I’m Sydney Edwards, the voice in your head and the writer before you. […]
The latest news for every retail supply chain nerd Attention shoppers and all you retail supply chain nerds. Welcome to Point of Sale: The Newsletter! Here you’ll find all the latest industry deals, tech developments and everything in between regarding shoppers’ interests. I’m Sydney Edwards, the voice in your head and the writer before you. […]
At the market The year for beauty Some Dollar General stores are expanding their beauty products and that just seems like the right move to me. Supermarket News says the retail giant will add beauty aisles to nearly 300 stores this year. They would include more skin care products, hair care and makeup options under […]
At the market What’s going on here? It seems every week some company is laying off more and more of its staff. Last week, Walmart announced layoffs of 200 people, Amazon said it’s cutting 9,000 jobs and Retail Dive reports more layoffs from Bed Bath & Beyond. FreightWaves’ JP Hampstead gets into the thick of […]
The latest news for every retail supply chain nerd Attention shoppers and all you retail supply chain nerds. Welcome to Point of Sale: The Newsletter! Here you’ll find all the latest industry deals, tech developments and everything in between regarding shoppers’ interests. I’m Sydney Edwards, the voice in your head and the writer before you. […]
The latest news for every retail supply chain nerd Attention shoppers and all you retail supply chain nerds. Welcome to Point of Sale: The Newsletter! Here you’ll find all the latest industry deals, tech developments and everything in between regarding shoppers’ interests. I’m Sydney Edwards, the voice in your head and the writer before you. […]
The latest news for every retail supply chain nerd Attention shoppers and all you retail supply chain nerds. Welcome to Point of Sale: The Newsletter! Here you’ll find all the latest industry deals, tech developments and everything in between regarding shoppers’ interests. I’m Sydney Edwards, the voice in your head and the writer before you. […]
The latest news for every retail supply chain nerd Attention shoppers and all you retail supply chain nerds. Welcome to Point of Sale: The Newsletter! Here you’ll find all the latest industry deals, tech developments and everything in between regarding shoppers’ interests. I’m Sydney Edwards, the voice in your head and the writer before you. […]
The latest news for every retail supply chain nerd Attention shoppers and all you retail supply chain nerds. Welcome to Point of Sale: The Newsletter! Here you’ll find all the latest industry deals, tech developments and everything in between regarding shoppers’ interests. I’m Sydney Edwards, the voice in your head and the writer before you. […]
The latest news for every retail supply chain nerd Attention shoppers and all you retail supply chain nerds. Welcome to Point of Sale: The Newsletter! Here you’ll find all the latest industry deals, tech developments and everything in between regarding shoppers’ interests. I’m Sydney Edwards, the voice in your head and the writer before you. […]
Hello, retail supply chain nerds. Happy Tuesday! Just wanted to remind everyone that we will not have a new episode of Point of Sale this week. INSTEAD, we have a dynamic webinar with our sponsor, ArcBest, on Wednesday so you can ask them all of your retail-related questions as they share their outlook on logistics […]
It will take assassins accuracy, but Amazon has all the data to make aiming an afterthought.
The financial and strategic benefits of shifting toward more direct-to-consumer sales is becoming apparent at Nike.
Offering speed enables retailers to build scale and density, but only if expectations are appropriately set and delivered on as promised.
Trips that once took three to four weeks are often taking three to four months, and shipments will undoubtedly miss their season for some retailers.
Petco leverages its stores to fulfill 83% of online sales. That’s much higher than Target’s %, which has the best omnichannel operation in retail.
FedEx remains inundated with elevated parcel volume stemming from continued online shopping resulting in longer delivery times, service blunders and upset customers.
Ralph Lauren, with this offering, won’t generate the scale needed to make the model work at this price.
It seems that centralized buying and local product discovery are polar opposites. How can Whole Foods centralize buying and get better at the local level?
Amazon confirmed its annual Prime Day event will be held in Q2 (likely June), as it seeks to improve on a record Q2 2020, when revenue grew 40%. But there’s also major supply chain reasoning behind the decision.
The headlines are touting Target’s store fulfillment numbers, but Home Depot’s right behind, fulfilling 55% of online orders from stores. This is particularly advantageous for Home Depot, which sells goods that are more often heavier and bulkier than its retail counterparts.
The best-in-class retailers navigated well, and managed to grow inventory considerably in the first months of the year.
This is an excerpt from Monday’s (5/13) Point of Sale retail supply chain newsletter sponsored by ArcBest. There’s a startup that was first created to deliver essentials to college kids but is quietly capturing the imagination (and venture capital) of the tech world, and it’s time the logistics world took notice. Gopuff, founded by two friends at Drexel […]
Consumers reversion to services has not come at the detriment of durable goods spending. Over the past four weeks, the mix of durable goods-to-services spending has remained stable.
In addition to improving margins and boosting brand image, cutting ties with retailers simplifies Under Armour’s supply chain at a time when its needed most.
Peloton stated it expects to incur $50 million in refund expenses from its treadmill recall. What will the logistics costs be?
The biggest changes Bed Bath & Beyond must make are in the supply chain, which has been referred to as “noncompetitive” by management.
The best-in-class retailers are aggressively pursuing logistical control over their products while trying to avoid patchwork responses to final-mile delivery.
In 2020, Amazon nearly doubled: its workforce, its number of facilities and its logistics square footage. In 2021, it plans to double its truckload fleet.
Improvements will come in the form of more ship-from-store, but mainly more ship-from-dark-store as retailers realize the unnecessary complexity of the method and seek to transform more stores into localized fulfillment centers.
This clever twist on micro-fulfillment centers offers a futuristic model for urban retailing and fulfillment. And it comes as companies test out a bevy of automated, unmanned service models, from dark stores to drones and autonomous delivery fleets.
It’s not that companies can’t operate without China, it’s just that for now, said companies will not grow as fast as they could with it, and will likely do so with lower margins. In a retail world constantly balancing sales and profit, avoiding China is giving up both for many Western brands.
The battle between brands and retailers is not new, but it’s more acute than ever because of the options each side has. For brands, it’s never been easier to own and operate sales channels both online and IRL. For retailers, there’s never been more digitally native brands seeking out offline homes than there are right now. And giants like Target, Walmart and Amazon have proven that consumers are willing to purchase and even be very loyal to private label brands.
This is an excerpt from Monday’s (3/29) Point of Sale retail supply chain newsletter sponsored by ArcBest. Yee-HAW, people. The third round of fiscal stimulus is causing an immediate and significant boost to the consumer economy. Due to the sharp contraction in spending this time last year from COVID-related lockdowns, the one-year change is distorted and not as […]
Volatility in trucking markets has prompted shippers to assess different ways of securing reliable capacity. For DG, that means more reliance on in-house transportation, but that’s certainly not the only option. Some retailers are looking to diversify their transportation partners to avoid delays and secure truck space. Others are debating streamlining their transportation needs by signing over their private fleets to logistics specialists.
Add Nike (NYSE: NKE) to the growing list of retailers being severely hampered by port congestion and supply chain bottlenecks. The congestion at West Coast ports in particular strained Nike’s supply chain and negatively impacted revenue, which declined 11% yoy in the quarter ending Feb. 28.
COVID-19 forced dramatic change at the end of the supply chain seemingly overnight. Retailers had to adjust quickly to succeed, and those that did are looking at a recovering consumer economy with the best balance sheet in decades on top of a real estate market reeling from store closures. Pair this with an e-commerce acceleration of five years and a movement to DTC and you have a market ripe for innovative physical expansion.
As the number of places where product flows increases, naturally, smaller, more frequent inventory replenishment runs are created. Whether it’s middle-mile solutions from DC to store or DC to DC or it’s home delivery, the location of endpoints is dispersing and the size of shipments is decreasing.
Brands big and small want more control over the customer experience, including data and service, and technology firms and logistics providers can now offer brands an Amazon alternative. The tension between retailers and brands is nothing new, but the battle between them has never been this acute thanks to the likes of Shopify, ShipBob, XPO and others.
Retailers are stuck between playing the waiting game and risking delays that wreck quarterly results or ponying up and taking to the skies. The goods will arrive quickly, but at what cost?
By some accounts, Instacart owns 50% of the online grocery market. With an IPO upcoming, I wanted to look back at how Instacart has gone from niche to necessity and question whether it can maintain this dominant position in a highly competitive, highly sought-after market post-COVID.
This week, President Biden announced we will have enough vaccinations for every American by the end of May. For the American people, this is fantastic news. For apparel retailers, it’s euphoric news that complicates an already extremely uncertain environment. In this edition of Point of Sale, we’ll take a look at apparel inventory management through the lens of Nordstrom’s recent woes.
There is no definitive end for this freight bull market in sight. Consumers continue to spend on goods, driving freight and diminishing already depleted inventories. Even if consumer spending diverged from its current trajectory (which I see as unlikely, especially given the additional stimulus, accelerating vaccine rollout and strong consumer balance sheet), the mass inventory restocking ahead will be sufficient to keep freight flowing from a consumer perspective.
There has been a consumer flight to reliability throughout COVID, and Walmart benefited from this shift as much as any retailer. But with the end of the pandemic now in sight and Americans poised for the reopening of services, Walmart is expecting growth to moderate considerably. Walmart announced plans to invest heavily in its supply chain, namely fulfillment capacity and automation, to front-run the deceleration and claw toward e-commerce profitability.
A former Jet.com co-founder is rethinking the way e-commerce orders are delivered — specifically, when orders are delivered and in what vessel they arrive at their destination. Nate Faust believes after 25 years of e-commerce, it’s time for a new way of imagining delivery.
The Container Store’s (NYSE: TCS) most recent earnings call details the reality of shifting to a greater mix of e-commerce sales at a time when transportation capacity is extremely tight.
Peloton is riding a wave for the history books right now. It has grown revenues by triple digits year-over-year for three consecutive quarters while building one of the most recognizable brands in not just fitness, but all consumer segments. If it should continue this meteoric rise, it must sort its supply chain issues before either the vaccines or competition prematurely puts out its flame.
Amazon so often does everything seemingly right, so it’s important to talk about its shortfalls. I’m confident Amazon will right the Whole Foods ship, but it’s clear the boat has been sailing against the wind since COVID hit.
We’ve long touted retail inventory restocking as a primary growth driver for the freight bull run, but apparel brands aren’t aligning with this thesis. Rather than reverting back to habitual overordering and year-end discounting, retailers are sticking with the conservative ordering tactics that helped them win the holiday season.
According to recent survey data from Bringg, same-day delivery will become a status quo offering from retailers in 2021. But is it the right move? Not for the vast majority of retailers. Here’s why:
Grocery is the only retail segment that has maintained (and even grown) its e-commerce penetration since peak levels in March, indicating the new normal is already here. The new normal is a much higher level of online demand, and grocers are getting wise about their fulfillment methods.
Retailers with physical footprints have been able to leverage new modes of fulfillment to pass increased costs associated with online delivery to consumers and their suppliers. But for digitally-native brands without access to physical stores, this could be painful should it become the new normal. If you ask FedEx, it already has.
The past 12 to 18 months have been nothing short of spectacular for Peloton. It has cemented itself as a prominent fitness brand with a base of fiercely loyal customers while growing revenues 233% yoy in Q3. But the company has outkicked its coverage and capped potential growth due to its supply chain constraints and lack of visibility.
Despite losing momentum sequentially for the last three months of the year, holiday sales grew 8.3% year-over-year. The surprising data is further evidence of the resilience of the American consumer, and the ability for retailers to influence how and when people shop.
The Trump Administration announced an import ban on all cotton and tomato products originating in China’s Xinjiang region citing evidence of forced labor. This ban is much bigger than just cotton and tomatoes. It is a call to action for all retailers to better understand their sourcing practices.
Recent analysis from Gartner shows retailers with more than 50% of revenue from the online channel have logistics costs as a percentage of sales that are almost double those of their store-focused counterparts.
This is an excerpt from Monday’s Point of Sale retail supply chain newsletter. The UK grocery supermarket sector was once highly oligopolistic, but in recent years, European brands have expanded in the UK and have created a much fiercer competitive landscape. There are 4 primary British supermarket chains dubbed ‘The Big Four’: Tesco, Sainsbury’s, ASDA, […]
Bed, Bath & Beyond reported EPS of less than half consensus estimates. CEO Mark Tritton pointed to tight shipping capacity and elevated freight costs for the miss. Get used to hearing this.
COVID induced demand for goods and spending in the home. How will spending behavior change when vaccines are widespread? Retail Analyst Andrew Cox believes consumer spending will be “A Tale of Two Halves”. See what he means:
Retail analyst Andrew Cox makes five predictions for retail supply chains in 2021. First and foremost: An inventory correction.
