Kohl’s Digital Signage

I was shoping at Kohl’s this morning and was somewhat surprised to see they are using digital price signs on all thier fixtures and racks.  I haven’t been into a Kohl’s for at least a year so I’m not sure if these are new or have been around a while.  Although the geek in me… Read more »

OfficeMax and Office Depot Merge

Office Depot and OfficeMax officially ended industry speculation today confirming they will merge into a single company.  OfficeMax shareholdersw will receive 2.69 Office Depot common shares for each share of OfficeMax common stock. “In the past decade, with the growth of the internet, our industry has changed dramatically. Combining our two companies will enhance our… Read more »

LIRA Indicates Home Improvement Spending to Rise

CAMBRIDGE, MA – All signs point to a strong rebound for home improvement activity in 2013, according to the Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity (LIRA) released today by the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.  Robust spending in the second half of 2012 suggests the remodeling recovery is already underway, and the… Read more »

Unnecessarily difficult

The objective of sharing POS data with vendors should be to make it as easy to access as possible and above all convenient.  To our dismay a significant retailer in the home improvement space charges vendors a significant sum of money to purchase a secure ID and then has the following availability “Normal hours of… Read more »

Five Files that Will Enhance your EDI 852 Reporting

After your company has EDI 852 reporting setup and you are able to analyze sales efficiently there are five additional source data files that can be added to your reporting to enhance your ability to understand sales.  Let’s spend a few minutes talking about each file. Plan-o-gram assignment.  A plan-o-gram (POG) file identifies the SKU… Read more »

Comparison of Christmas holiday selling period TY vs. LY

We spent some time reviewing Christmas comps and here are some data points and observations.   Sample Group 38 vendors in the sample selling various product departments including paint, tools, cleaning, lawn and garden, storage, electrical, and lumber.  Sales numbers for Home Depot, Sears, Wal-Mart, Lowes, Target, CVS. Results All vendors as a group were… Read more »

Demand Driven Planning in 2013

The availability of retail point of sale data over the past several years has created the opportunity for vendors to gain a detailed understanding of consumer demand at the retail point of sale.  Actual consumer demand at the retail point of sale presents a more accurate and timely picture of how your SKU’s are selling… Read more »

Home Depot Beats Estimates

Home Depot Inc.’s (HD) fiscal third-quarter earnings edged up 1.4% as the home-improvement-products retailer recorded strong revenue growth and slightly wider margins.   Tuesday, Mr. Blake said results for the quarter “were better than we expected and reflected, in part, what we believe is the start of the path toward the healing of the housing… Read more »

JDA and RedPrairie to merge

RedPrairie and JDA Software announced a definitive merger agreement today.  Many of our vendors use JDA plan o gram software for managing their store modulars so this is an interesting development.  The “merger” sounds more like a RedPrairie acquisition of JDA based on the language in the PR.  Home Depot in particular, but other large… Read more »

YTD Comps at Home Depot and Lowe’s looking good

As a group our Home Depot vendors are up 9% YTD over the prior year comp for US stores, Canadian stores are up 96%. (the Canadian sample is smaller)   Lowe’s stores are up 2% YTD over the prior year comp for US stores.   Home Depot will be releasing Q3 2012 earnings results on November 13… Read more »