Michael Gracie 

After personally mulling around Friday and finding shops in general dead, dead, dead (as well as not buying a single gift myself knowing everything will be marked down another 50% two weeks hence), the National Retail Federation is claiming traffic was up big time. Some ‘analytics firm’ called ShopperTrak is complicit in the claim, along [...]

Tidbits are small, until they grow up Roubini on bank losses: “If people were not spending their rebate checks in June, what will happen when there are no more checks?” Yep…retail is next. Trout are unwelcome in South Africa. Check for whirling disease, and then send ‘em on over? You mean subprime lending wasn’t the [...]

Singlebarbed opines that fly shops are being taken over by internet retail (h/t to Tom Chandler). The hypothesis is manufacturers are too quick to get new products out the door, and when clearance time becomes eBay time, shops are taking a whacking as a result. An impending recession is driving bargain hunters away from the [...]

That is what prognosticators will now try doing, as holiday sales have plummeted: Consumers who picked up bargains in the days after Thanksgiving may feel disinclined to return to shops this year, adding pressure on retailers including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Cincinnati-based Macy’s Inc. to discount more as the traditional gift-giving of Christmas approaches. Last [...]

Not by creating yet another online outlet, but by making the retail distribution channel obsolete: The store is also expected to handle the single reason why Threadless is not available in major retailers: stores can’t simply keep up with a weekly turnover of new designs. Remember, they offer new designs each week– something that can [...]

The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania recently released a study entitled Open to Exploitation: American Shoppers Online and Offline which you may want to take a look at. The report lead by Joseph Turow, Ph.D. contains a plethora of data taken from polls on issues such as the percentage of folks [...]