Hudson's Bay has become a mediocre seller of everything. One of many that just ignored Amazon as it rose.
It is unbelievable to me how little challenge Amazon has faced as all their competitors just quietly lie down and die.
It is unbelievable to me how little challenge Amazon has faced as all their competitors just quietly lie down and die.
The company best positioned to handle Amazon, Sears, was parted out and gutted by its chairman and CEO Eddie Lampert. Toys "R" Us had a working business model and were gutted by VC's. So I wouldn't say they were quietly laying down, they were actively raided for their accumulated wealth and this left them unable to compete.
Best Buy is probably best example of a company that figured out how to pivot and survive. They basically turned into consumer electronics consultants that tell people what to buy to solve their problem (at a gigantic markup). Amazon.com can't compete with that model as it's not built for the consumer that doesn't know what they want/need to solve a problem (or are afraid of knockoffs).
This section in particular:
> Based on their feedback, Joly (the new CEO):
> - fixed broken systems, like an internal search engine that gave bad data about which products were in stock;
> - restored a beloved employee discount program; and
> - invested heavily into regular employee training.
I would bet money that fixing the search engine cost in the order of <$100Ks of engineer time and led to $1M+ in revenue. That's why the whole argument of "well, the profit margins are tiny so that's why retailers are dying" doesn't hold water with me. Just like every company there are critical systems that are obviously broken and are relatively easy to fix but are not correctly prioritized.
If they are prioritized, they tend to have ripple effects through the rest of the company.
0 - https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/amazon-almost-killed-best-...
fast forward to this year and when one of my ram modules died, i was able to get the specific model i needed next day pickup in store, and their return policy is excellent. they also have basically been the exclusive seller of nvidia 3070/3080/3090's in the US. really impressed by their turnaround
I doubt (with complete speculation) that this was just an engineering problem (ie, the tech was why the product inventory data was wrong).
Inventory management is the biggest competitive advantage retailers can have, and often when it's wrong and messy, a full rework is needed to implement best practices and change the operational processes of the business. The unsexy logistics part of the business is the real cash cow, once the demand question has been solved.
I'd be interested to learn more about what Best Buy did to rework their processes, but I doubt it will become public because operational improvements like this can be a real advantage over competitors.
It might be simpler than you think. I've noticed that Best Buy's product listings consistently offer more product information (weight, dimensions, model numbers, and especially UPC) than the counterparts at Amazon, Target, and Walmart. All searchable, too; Amazon has the data but a) as mentioned, doesn't always make it visible, and b) doesn't always make it searchable.
What most people fail to recognize is that when PE is in the picture, the company is already circling the drain. If it was a sure thing to fix, then the company wouldn’t be cheap. Generally speaking, PE doesn’t kill a company: Management did, but PE is the triage doc with bloody hands. They make for a nice comic book villain, but it comes down to “don’t fuck up”
There’s another class of PE activity, which is “my company is only mildly fucked but I can’t fix it while answering to shareholders.” So PE helps the owner go private to fix it. Examples are Dell and TIBCO. I don’t care enough about the latter to even look, but I think we can agree that Dell isn’t being stripped by PE bandits.
It’s an article glorifying the CEO. Fake. The real reasons for their success or failure is much deeper.
Amazon doesn't have buyers. Which worked out okay because they were under cutting the products the brick mortar stores buyers vetted. Except now 30-90% of the stuff on Amazon is crap. That's an opportunity for Best Buy.
In my region, Target is dead last in maintaining inventory and their supply chain. I have given up on them completely for paper products, as they never had any for months and months and...I'm not even sure if they've ever gotten any by this point.
It's been a real eye-opener about the Goliaths among us, that however Target is organized, operationally, there's something about them that has absolutely failed over the past 9 months. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, but Walmart is their main competition and they've become, regrettably, my go-to for household supplies. Because they have some.
Apologies if this is irrelevant, I've been champing to spell out this rant for a long time.
> Prior to the announcement, Target and Amazon had extended their partnership until 2011.[41] In January 2010, Target announced their vendor partners for the re-platforming project. These partners include Sapient, IBM, Oracle, Endeca, Autonomy, Sterling Commerce and Huge, among others.
I have likewise been impressed with the blue-shirts in the stores. They seem generally on par with Microcenter employees nowadays, with more than enough technical knowledge to help me make buying decisions.
Both are currently being sued due to their role in the downfall of the company.
The VC model is invest in a ton of growth companies in the hope of getting a 100X winner.
The PE model is to buy stable cash flows using mostly debt. That works until the cash flows aren’t stable any more. That’s why so many PE funded retailers are going under.
If you have a gift card, you should be prepared to wait 1h+ for them to figure it out.
Prices are not at all competitive, their products are awful. They deserve to die.
I bought a $220 sheet set there that the "expert" told me it fit larger beds and that would not shrink. I wash it from the box, and then when I try to put it on, the fitted sheet doesn't is like 2' from fitting.
No refunds since I washed it. Complete BS.
One other funny thing is if there are two promotions you want to combine, and an employee tells you they can’t be combined - just go to another cash. 50/50 odds the second one will let you do it!
We had our wedding registry at HBC - some items we received three of while the website said nobody had purchased, others showed as purchased - by nobody? A strange experience all around.
Looks more like an AS/400 interface to me.
But some retailers seem determined to be worse than Amazon in everything, which is quite the feat. It probably is a result from being locked into a race to the bottom against other brick-and-mortar retailers, as you mentioned.
edit: Seriously, retailers have something like 0.5-1.0% profit margin, it's abysmal, they don't have the leeway to compete with on anything that costs them more.
At this point being bad at technology is just incompetence/laziness/refusal to invest.
There are a lot of soft targets in Canadian retail. The Hudson's Bay Company is one of them.
https://gaiser.io/amazon-is-winning-as-everyone-else-isnt-tr...
I need wide shoes. I could not find a place to buy wide running shoes besides Amazon at the usual places. My typical shoe buying places did not have a way to search for wides online.
I admit that I didn't really check all that exhaustively, but past experience has taught me that other retailers besides Amazon are not worth the clicks.
1. he couldn't refund me because it was two separate computer systems (a lawyer would have told him tough sh*t - you're still the same company), and
2. I should do a credit-card charge-back to get my money back!
It's been years since, and I'm trying them again now. I ordered a set of dumbbells yesterday and ... still no email to come pick up my in-stock dumbbells.
BTW - I have wide feet too. If you're looking for running shoes, ASICS is good (this is the brand I always wear), and I've heard New Balance is pretty wide too. I can't wear Nike or Reebok for this reason.
Canadian retail is still such a cluster-f*ck.
I could not find one larger than a size 38 without going to Mr. Big and Tall, where the blazers would fit my size 48 chest but had enough extra room around the waist to store a couple of toddlers.
I had the same experience with width of glasses frames, with shirts, and with any good that fell outside of a single standard deviation from the average.
There's a paper where researchers compare the "average" sizes for human factors to individual people and discover that people who fit all the averages are vanishingly rare. Almost everybody is outside a deviation for at least one characteristic. I wish I'd bookmarked it.
Canadian retailers just stock within the one deviation and shrug. I specifically went to the Bay for that blazer.
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.thestar.com/amp/news/insight...
Target didn't stay very long in Canada.
It seems every store has a "Canadian alternative" that's just pricier and has less product. I always hear about cross border shopping being done in the US to bring back goods in Canada but never the other way around. Even for cars it seems the same car will sell for way much north of the border.
edit: Also, e-commerce was only 16% of retail sales pre-covid. And that took 30 years to achieve. So traditional retailers saw it more of a long term problem than something to worry about right now.
For somebody like Walmart, 0.5% of $500B is $2.5B. That's more than a little outside of SF.
In 20+ years. An investor in a retail company would prefer stable guaranteed returns for the next 10 years rather than lower returns for the next 10 years with a chance of higher return afterwards.
Companies are not people, they do not act like people and their rational goals are not the same as those of people.
edit: And, btw, Walmart HAS invested untold billions into e-commerce. They spent $3.3 BILLION on Jet.com alone.
Large retailers can easily afford to to build good technology. The problem for them is not one of financing, it's culture. Most retailers, even "luxury retailers", have a deeply engrained culture of being extremely frugal. I once worked servicing that sector and recall visiting a higher end jewelry retailer. The store area that customers can see was very posh and slick. But step into the back office and everything was dingy and run down. This sort of thing is a conscious decision on their part.
Most of these firms will NOT pay top dollar to hire the best talent even if they could afford it. Most do not understand software development even a little bit. Most do not understand the role of technology for anything other than record keeping (at best). But (usually) they're not run by idiots either. So when they recognize these issues and try to isolate the "online" retail from the rest of the firm (e.g. Walmart), it creates a substantial amount of friction and rivalry. I've seen it first hand and, sadly, there is no simple solution.
It's a bit of a shame since for smaller town in Canada, the Bay is often an anchor store for a mall. There aren't great "department stores" left, so when the Bay goes away, smaller towns are going to be a bit stuck (outside of ordering online).