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Personal accessories are set to decrease by 1% in 2015 to $527 billion. Fashion trends are driving stronger growth for jewelry, but other personal accessories categories are seeing a slow growth rate in 2015. Factors in this slow growth are a decline in consumer spending, heavy reliance on European markets and unfavorable US dollar exchange… Read more »

The US Consumer Spending Index increased 0.4 points in June. The percentage of consumers who rate the economy as excellent or good has continued to increase each month, at 30.9%, though is much lower than the 68% who felt the economy is fair or poor. When asked if personal finances were getting better or worse,… Read more »

A Consumer Pulse survey of parents of K-12 and college students found that 56% of respondents plan to spend more money per child this year on back-to-school supplies. K-12 parents plan to spend an average of $873 per student, while parents of college students plan to spend more than $1,100 per student. 38% of parents… Read more »

With an improvement in housing and overall economic activity in Southeastern states, Lowe’s is expected to witness accelerating sales and potentially narrow its comp store sales with Home Depot in the region. A report this week forecasts a 4% growth at Lowe’s following disappointing Q1 2015 sales of $14.1 billion versus $14.26 billion. However, Lowe’s… Read more »

Amazon successfully launched its Mexican Kindle store in 2013. Now, the online retailer has launched a Spanish-language Mexican website and mobile app with millions of unique items. “Our mission at Amazon is to be Earth’s most customer centric company, and we strive to be the destination where people can find anything they want to buy… Read more »

Inventory shrink, or the loss of product due to shoplifting, employee and vendor theft and administrative errors, costs retailers billions of dollars. The NRF and the University of Florida provided survey results this week stating that in 2014 inventory shrink averaged 1.38% of retail sales, or $44 billion. Shoplifting accounted for 38% of the loss,… Read more »

CVS Health and Target announced a $1.9 billion sale of Target’s pharmacy business to CVS. CVH will rebrand Target’s 1,700 prescriptions departments as CVS and CVS will acquire Target’s 80 clinic locations and rebrand them as MinuteClinic. Both companies also announced plans to develop 5-10 small format stores in the next 2 years that will… Read more »

The Home Depot discussed this week its IT investment and strategy that focuses on the customer buying experience. The company’s Common Order Management system, or COM, is the largest IT project in the history of The Home Depot. COM is an inventory visibility platform that looks at millions of deliveries through small and large delivery… Read more »

Within the designer luxury brands market, some brands have seen increased sales while others showed decreases. While the overall market for luxury goods has grown steadily since the end of the recession, the trend for wealthy shoppers is to purchase their products in a subtle way, steering away from flashy logos.  Gucci sales were down… Read more »

May 2015 showed a drop in retail sales by 7.6% versus May 2014. Driving the sales decline was a 9.8% decrease in store traffic and an 8.3% decrease in number of transactions. Some metrics did show year-over-year improvement. Average transaction value rose 0.8% and sales per shopper increased 2.5%. The highest day of selling in… Read more »