U.S. brick-and-mortar retail is in crisis. This sentiment has been expressed to varying degrees in recent years as store closures and bankruptcies have piled up, but the current threat is much more immediate and pressing: The coronavirus outbreak has closed much of U.S. brick-and-mortar retail, and almost half the country has been told to stay
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” To the extent that Emerson’s insight is applicable to the grocery business, retailers vying for a share of the nation’s $800 billion a year in food and beverage sales, a contingent that includes
Two months remain in 2016, and the news out of the chain drug industry remains relatively scanty. Industry gatherings are few and far between — indeed, three months have passed since the NACDS Total Store Expo gathered the industry together in Boston. Against that background, the NACDS year-end meetings, scheduled for New York City following
It feels like “The boomers are coming! The boomers are coming!” has been a corporate rallying cry for a number of years now as a range of industries have worked to prepare for the aging of the population. But successfully targeting the baby boomer generation has proven elusive for many. A careful examination reveals that
The retailing business in the United States may have reached an inflection point during the period around Black Friday, traditionally seen as the start of the holiday selling season. While reports from different sources about retailers’ performance during the last week of November don’t neatly align, the consensus is that e-commerce continues to gain ground
Modernizing the traditional store circular often stirs debate in marketing circles. Circulars offer value to customers, saving them money and building loyalty. They lift sales of promoted products, although true measurement is difficult, if not impossible, to attribute to the circular. Moreover, they help drive shoppers into more store aisles, expanding the range of products
NEW YORK — Drug chains are leveraging their strengths of accessibility and convenience as they extend their core prescription drug business further into the health care realm and diversify their front-end mix. Industry observers say many of the people newly insured under the Affordable Care Act will turn to chain drug stores for their scripts
A small group of chain drug industry veterans met recently in Cleveland to discuss the lamentable state of innovative and creative merchandising in chain drug retailing these days. The group, consisting of some dozen retailers, suppliers and association executives, concluded that a variety of factors — most notably industry consolidation and the tendency among retailers
NEW YORK — A late shopping rush on the weekend before Christmas helped put some twinkle in holiday retail sales, but the final results for the season seemed to fall short of the optimistic projections retailers had set back in early November. Drug chains, however, may have fared slightly better during the holidays than the
A late shopping rush on the weekend before Christmas helped put some twinkle in holiday retail sales, but the final results for the season seemed to fall short of the optimistic projections retailers had set back in early November.NEW YORK — A late shopping rush on the weekend before Christmas helped put some twinkle in
As if the obvious needed to be stated, the period of slow, evolutionary change in the retailing environment for drug, food and convenience items is long over. The arrival of pure-play e-commerce companies to food, drug and beauty retailing marked the end of evolutionary and the beginning of truly explosive revolutionary change. The battlefield is
