Warren Shoulberg

Few individual retail stores have had the ups and downs of the Bed Bath & Beyond store on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. And with its grand reopening in July as the flagship for the rapidly changing home furnishings retailer, the store has taken on yet another persona, as the future of the Big Box chain. And in this renovation process, a case can be made that it may be the most dramatic transformation of an existing physical store in recent retail history…perhaps all of retail history. That’s how transformed the store is. Bed Bath & …

Why the New Bed Bath & Beyond Store is the Best Retail Redo…EverRead More

As much as the pandemic turned so many retail industries upside down it can be argued that one sector of retailing is coming out of this as the most changed of all. The airlines, the restaurants, the hotels and the entertainment businesses all were devastated by Covid, but as they return, they look remarkably similar to what they were pre-pandemic. But not the grocery business. In so many ways and at so many companies, the aftershocks of the past 15 months have profoundly --and perhaps permanently -- changed the way supermarkets go …

The Grocery Business Is Anything But, in the BagRead More

OK, consider this situation: You’re going to the supermarket to pick up a few things but there are problems. You can’t find your car keys and when you do, the car is blocked in by a large truck on the street and you can’t move. You finally get to the store but there are no shopping carts. However, an enterprising fellow at the entrance is raffling off the few carts that show up to the highest bidder. You eventually pay him through the nose to get one and fill it up to the brim. But the checkout lanes are stacked up to the back of the store and …

Uncontainable: The Great Supply Chain MeltdownRead More

Walmart has fallen into The Gap. It no doubt hopes it’s a successful journey…even if history suggests otherwise. Last month the biggest of the big, Walmart, said it was partnering up with casual apparel retailer Gap to bring a line of home furnishings products to, at least initially, its online business and potentially its stores. Gap had announced earlier that it was looking for a home for…well, home, but the Walmart connection didn’t seem to be the obvious choice at first glance. After all, Gap was the store of choice for the …

Walmart and Gap Go HomeRead More

Conventional retailers are increasingly deciding they don’t want to let TJX and its off-price brethren have all the close-out fun Way back in the bad old days of retailing, every store in the country had a bargain basement…or at least some sort of a close-out area where the outcasts and leftovers from the main selling area ended up. Over the generations, these areas gradually went away, replaced by a whole new channel of distribution called off-price where overruns, never-runs and the runts of the litter were disposed of. It has gone on to …

Why Outlet Stores Are a Big Boom for Unexpected RetailersRead More

Somewhere, in that great classroom in the sky, Adam Smith is standing there behind his lectern, saying “I told you so.” As you probably may not remember from your high school Economics 101 course, Smith -- pretty much considered the father of the field -- was the one who came up with the fabled Law of Supply and Demand. And if you ever needed a practical example of how the law works, all you need do is look at the current state of the home furnishings business. In perhaps the greatest boom period in generations for its products as people …

What Do You Do If Your Big Box is Empty?Read More