Nordstrom family to take company private
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Hard to imagine such a customer friendly company drastically changing when the founders retake control.
They're supposedly rolling them out nationwide - JCP does gamify shopping in a way that almost makes it fun.
https://fortworth.culturemap.com/news/fashion/11-01-19-j-c-p...
Stores used to rely on other mall properties to do the 2nd part but as the concept of the Mall starts fading, they need to start doing this themselves.
I know Penny's has opened new stores, it looks like they learned the right lessons from this store though, better merchandising, more lighting, etc.
My experience in Europe has been that the men’s clothing department is, at most, 20% of the store space. Alongside multiple floors dedicated to women’s clothing.
They’ve closed all Canadian operations, despite their Vancouver store being one of their highest earning stores in North America. They’ve closed several west coast stores in the US as well, citing crime but insiders had said it was because they want to move into lower cost areas instead.
Basically they’re trying to move into the market that JC Penny and Macy are leaving open, which has been slowly making Nordstrom itself much lower quality as a shopping experience.
Over the last few years they’ve turned their shopping experience into more of a dumping ground of random clutter
Perhaps going private will let them focus on treating their experience as part of the product.
Sales are down, so they cut costs by cutting staff and presentation. That ultimately turns the store into a warehouse of goods which in turn discourages shopping further. With that decline they often resort into cutting store operating hours which further kills off shopping.
One of my local malls is open from like 11am to 6pm on the weekdays and 8pm on the weekends. Even if I wanted to shop there, it's hard because they are closed during normal work hours. The shops and stores are all manned with a skeleton crew. I've seen Macy's have a single employee manning the entire store.
I worry that the corporate quarter to quarter mentality is ruining American corporation that is taking American capitalism to a new low.
Maybe Nordstrom has a chance if they are private in the long run.
I guess you haven't looked at INTC stock price recently? As of yesterday's close on 2024-12-23 it's essentially unchanged from where it was 30 years ago. If you factor in inflation (which you should) it's actually lost 50% of its value over that time period.
Apple, Microsoft and Google are different animals.
I bought the suit that I wore to my wedding form Nordstrom. The sales associate that helped me out did a fantastic job.
You do realize that all the best maintained malls are in the middle of the country right? :)
Mall of America is about as middle as it gets.
This isn't the bound you seem to think it is. SoCal is quite wealthy, but the workers aren't exactly motivated or caring. I remember going keyboard shopping at Fry's well before any talk of bankruptcy and the whole aisle was basically a pile of scattered keycaps and nearly-empty keyboards. And I was just in a Macy's the other day (not in SoCal), and actually remarked how nice the store was set up compared to the overall trend of everywhere else going down hill. So as usual, YMMV.
> As part of the transaction, the family will acquire all of the outstanding common shares of Nordstrom not already beneficially owned by the Nordstrom Family and Mexican department store chain El Puerto de Liverpool SAB.
> Under the terms of the agreement, Nordstrom common shareholders will receive $24.25 in cash for each share of Nordstrom common stock they hold. The Nordstrom Family will have a majority ownership stake in the company.
If you don’t want to sell your shares, prepare to convince a majority of the shareholders otherwise.
This will be very hard since 45% of the company is owned by the people making the buyout offer.
The TL;DR of it is that your shares will be sold for you, and money will be deposited into your account. As a "common" shareholder, you don't get a choice in the matter (I mean, you can "vote", but common share votes aren't worth the email they're printed on).
Index funds for the win, I guess.
Also, their online shopping is pretty solid as well. I always use them for gifts. I think they buffed it up during the pandemic and its paid dividends.
I have come to absolutely detest online shopping. I have to return so much stuff, live with so many things that I don't actually love, generate sooooo much trash, and spend hours on hours researching everything because I can't hold it in my hand.
Then I walk into REI and ask them if I can try on a size 9 wide of a running shoe. They tell me they don't have it, so I ask them if they have any wide... they don't have a single wide shoe. Then I ask what they have and they say "Ohh we have 200 of the exact same shoe in the exact same size in stock"
And then I go order 5 different 9-wide shoes on amazon and return 4....
I hate the research part, especially Amazon hasn't improved their system since the late 2000s. I'm sure lots of great improvements on the logistics and business-development side, but the store feels like hobby project and "we couldn't make filtering work, so whatever".
But on the trash part: you generate visible trash. But if you frame it slightly differently: the mall you'd go to needs to be built and heated and fully staffed, and thousands of cars need to drive there etc etc, and that consumes a lot of resources. It's just not visible, and with online-shopping it is. But I'm pretty sure online-shopping is more efficient even if you have to return 4 out of 5 shoes.
Amazon is actively killing the usefulness of their store in a race to beat ali express and temu to the bottom
Pretty sure it's regressed. I think there used to be a bunch more filters you could do based on a product category that I think went away as they added more products.
Real annoying when you want like a 4 GB memory card and it splits up your input of "4 GB" into "4", "GB" and then shows you everything with a "4" or a "GB" in it...
I'm still not convinced it's not a social experiment to find out just how much it will take to make users give up and go away.
Or the size filter on clothes. Great, I can filter by size to only see pants that'll fit me. Wow, nice selection, let's open this one. Ohh... it has that size in general but it isn't available. I've come this to just writing a scraper, getting all the data and then filtering it properly just so I can buy some pants.
They actively _do not_ want you to be able to find what you need, that would mean you don't look at their ads.
And that isn't the case with the logistics for fulfilment centers and storage scattered all over the place? Just not visible to you, but as per your example times 4, which wouldn't be the case if you get something that fits at the first try.
My daughter had a speech impediment and other issues that caused her to not feel great about herself. Little girls can be scarily mean and self organize pecking orders of meanness in some way based on self confidence which my daughter didn't have. The women at Nordstroms made her feel like a princess and made her feel good about/have confidence in herself in a way that overruled the meanness from the girls in her class (sorry small town little miss, the fancy ladies at Nordstroms in the nearest big city overruled your opinions).
Nordies then every season called and let my wife know when new things came in, and held back items in my daughter's size and the next up for her to come try on, and then would just go get them when we came in. No 'oh we don't have that size'. When they know you daughters taste and name, have brought smiles to her face, and made her confident when running into other kids from her school when out and about where before she would want to run away, well, it makes you a customer for life (or until your life falls apart and finances no longer work).
Shopping therapy probably isn't the healthiest mentally, but Nordstroms was way cheaper than what we were already spending on speech therapy a year and 1000% better for my daughters opinion of herself. I would (and did) pay anything for that. Again, maybe not healthy and it wasn't intentional (we just went in originally to get her something fancy to wear on our fancy Christmas night out to dinner and The Nutcracker) but it was shockingly life changing for my little girl. I'll add that this endorsement of (probably gross) classist/capitalism consumer therapy is brought to you by someone raised by hippie parents in Santa Cruz.
You cannot go there and get bad service in my experience. Other department stores you will have to wait around, or go hunting for a sales associate who is likely so overwhelmed they can't really help you anyway.
Nordstroms keeps enough people around that you can frequently have what amounts to personal shopper service. Of course, you pay for it, but there are clearly consumers that are happy to pay that premium (myself included.
aside: I dated a girl who was missing one foot, and Nordstroms was rather famous in the amputee community for giving 50% discounts. Pretty slick PR move really.
i’ve basically stopped shopping online for these exact reasons. including my entire Christmas shopping list, all bought in actual stores.
- the amount of time researching what i was buying online was beyond ridiculous
- the colors or size or material was just plain wrong or misleading more than it was correct
- after all of the research, i would still end up returning so much of it.
over the past year i just save all that time and frustration and just go to the store, hold the thing, and buy it. done. so much easier.
i can’t stress how much i detest the dishonesty and misleading garbage of online stores.
Your personal experience not withstanding: Nordstroms most recent financial statements indicates that they pulled in ~$150mm on $15b in sales for the past few years. That seems like a pretty healthy business to me.
Essentially, it's arbitrage. "Can be arbitraged" is not the same as failing. You can talk about things like "efficiency", but the problem with that is that the metric being used to measure efficiency is laughably simplistic - deliberately so, it's just a way to justify socially irresponsible behavior.
They don’t seem to care about the customer at all and there stores are very rundown and not well maintained. It doesn’t feel like a luxury. They seem focused on selling premium fashion brands on their distribution network with location numbers. They don’t care about anything else.
Thinking you can make more money in the short term (for example, by selling real estate) routinely kills the ability to earn a profit long term (which is now eaten by rent on land you used to own).
I think you are confusing cause and effect at least the case I know of, Sears. Because Sears' core business was dying, because of Amazon, the best way to get value out of it was to raid its real-estate assets. It may have hastened Sears' demise, but it probably was the smartest thing to do from a business standpoint.
I don't need a physical store to compare two different 6-foot USB cables. I do need a physical store for a suit, or a nice pair of shoes, or cologne.
i’ve had the opposite experience. the number of times i’ve received knockoff usb cables is crazy. or misleading specs from their amazon “store” pages, cables that just die in a week, usb charging bricks that don’t have the charging power they claim, etc…
sure, amazon exchanged them, but at that point the convenience of ordering online has gone up in smoke.
haven’t had the same problem if i just buy a cable from the local camera shops where they’ve vetted which cables they carry. buy it and it just works.
Of the 13 stores they opened in canada, 7 were the "nordstrom rack" discount brand, which is really not nordstrom. IIRC they were actually some of the old stores from the failed Target expansion, and they felt like failed Target stores. It's not a surprise that they failed.
Though it's not like these all served different geographic markets - e.g. My local Nordstrom Rack was a 10 minute drive from my local Nordstrom.
FWIW my local Nordstrom Rack was an old Future Shop location. Now it's a Marshalls.
Revenue: ~$15B
Profit: ~$0.3B
E.g. How do existing shareholders get paid out? What happens to shorts? Treasury shares? Options? RSUs?
It seems like it would be extremely complex.
One of two things happen: a stock-for-stock exchange at a ratio (like 2 Blizzard becomes 1 ATVI stock), or a complete buyout and liquidation of the acquired company's stock.
In the latter, you are basically sent a check based on the sale price agreed upon by the two companies. In the case of Nordstrom, shareholders receive $24.25 for each unit of stock they hold. The downside is you pay capital gains on it. In the case of my friend at Splunk, she is left with a horrifying tax bill that'll be in the upper-5 to lower-6 figures.
What also happens is once the share price is agreed upon, the stock is priced in. As a result there is little point in shorting as the stock's price moves very little.
Isn't that because she was written a check well into the 6-figures?
Will be interesting to see how they do privately, good luck to them!