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Consumer confidence in February shot up from last month to the highest level since a year ago, according to The Conference Board. The group’s Consumer Confidence Index now stands at 70.8, up from a revised 61.5 in January, buoyed by consumers’ more positive assessment of the job market. “Consumers are considerably less pessimistic about current... Read more »

Tractor Supply announced this week an increase to its long term operating margin target and that it plans to open additional stores.   Tractor Supply Company (NASDAQ: TSCO) has carved out a niche in the market and appears to be exploiting that niche very effectively.  The recent press release included this statement from their Chairman... Read more »

Lowe’s reported a 13% increase in earnings for the fiscal fourth quarter and same store sales were up 3.4%.  The second largest home improvement retailer has been closing stores and reshaping its operations in an effort to increase profits and compete with rival Home Depot.   For 2012, Lowe’s forecasts a total sales increase of... Read more »

Hedge fund manager Edward Lampert announced Thursday he intends to sell off some 1,200 Sears stores in an effort to raise $770 million in cash.   Some are looking at this as the start of a breakup and a reversal on the past seven years spent trying to integrate Kmart and pull the company out of... Read more »

Is it just me or does the economy seem to be inching back?   Retail sales are rising and are significantly up from the recessionary lows.  See details at retailingtoday.com article “U.S. retail sales rise a solid 0.4% in January”.  We have also noticed an increase in the number of new customers signing up for... Read more »

After crunching the numbers, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has found that January 2012 was the fourth warmest January on record across the contiguous United States. This is also the mildest January since 2006, which was the warmest in records dating back to 1895. States with a top 10 warmest January (9 total) –... Read more »

Getting your buyer to agree to push order recommendations, modular changes, SKU assortment changes, etc can be a challenge.  Here is some practical experience on how to make it happen. Running a test with your buyer can be a very effective way to ‘sell them’ on new ideas.  Many times our clients want to use... Read more »

Frequently Asked Questions Vendors are working hard to understand how to best use retail POS and inventory data, which is made available via EDI 852 or a web portal. Here are five very common questions vendors ask as they work with our team to put a data analysis solution in place. What is the difference... Read more »

When vendors think about managing inventory, quite often they immediately think of those stores with insufficient inventory and how to resolve that.  Of course, this is a natural and valuable consideration, and a correspondingly considerable effort is made to eliminate inventory outages and prevent lost sales.    But what of the flip side of that coin? ... Read more »