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Retailers sacrificing profit for more sales
Photo
Jill Courtney, right, shops for school supplies for her sons, Will, left, and Reid, not seen, at a Target store in St. Joseph, Mo.
Associated Press
NEW YORK
The back-to-school shopping season is off to a promising start, but retailers may be sacrificing profit for sales.
The National Retail Federation expects the average family with school-age children to spend $669.28 for back-to-school items, up 5 percent from last year. That would be the second-highest amount since the industry trade group started tracking spending in 2004.
But major retailers such as Wal-Mart and Macy’s are discounting merchandise and increasing spending to upgrade their stores and websites just to grab the attention of U.S. shoppers during the second-biggest shopping period of the year. All that discounting and investing has worked to start the season off strong, they say, but it also hurts their bottom lines.
“Stores are going to have to invest in price and e-commerce aggressively in order to be competitive,” said Ken Perkins, president of RetailMetrics LLC, a retail research firm. “The pie is not growing, and they’ve got to do everything they can to keep them from losing market share.”
Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, says it’s been investing in several ways to attract shoppers this season. The company cut prices on 10 percent more back-to-school items compared with last year. It also increased the number of back-to-school products sold on its website by 30 percent to 75,000 this year from last year.
The company also has made some long-term investments. Wal-Mart said earlier this year it plans to open 270 to 300 small stores during the current fiscal year — double its initial forecast— to compete with dollar chains.
But all that investing has hurt its results. On Thursday, Wal-Mart reported that its profit in the latest quarter was virtually flat during the latest quarter.
Kohl’s Corp. also reported flat profit in its latest fiscal quarter Thursday, as it cut prices and spent on services such as one that enables it to ship online orders directly to shoppers from its stores.