Retail insight on 4th September 2009

Sep 4, 2009

News and Analysis for the retail industry

News

Infiniti Retail plans 100 Croma stores by FY11 Daily News & Analysis The retail chain is seeing same store sales growth of 14-15% month-on-month. The company's turnover is Rs 1,000 crore and each store roughly contributes Rs 30-35 crore per year. Ajit Joshi, chief operating officer, Infiniti Retail, said that the company is looking at breaking even next year.

Retailers plan to open new stores & hire staff as sales pick up Economic Times Most retailers, including Aditya Birla Retail, Future Group, Spencer's and Bharti, are again firming up expansion plans and expect to hire thousands of employees between them this fiscal, mainly at the store level, as they see improvement in sales.

GFA to roll out 250 outlets worldwide; 100 in India by March 2010 Business Standard Geneva-based food service chain Global Franchise Architects (GFA) aims to open 250 stores around the world by March 2010, of which 100 will be in India. The company, which was initially planning to have these stores by the end of this year, has now postponed its plans to early next year.

Tatas eye functional merger of retail arms Times of India The Tata Group is working towards functional integration of its various retail formats like Westside, Croma, Tanishq and others, but has no immediate plans to merge the various entities.

Barista Lavazza to open Highway Bars mydigitalfc.com We already have one such outlet on the Bangalore-Mysore Expressway. We will be opening one more at Mirthal on the Delhi-Chandigarh Expressway.

CESC to sell 20% stake in Spencer's Hindu Business Line CESC Ltd plans to offload 20 per cent stake in its loss-making subsidiary Spencer's Retail to private equity funds. The money raised would be used to finance Spencer's expansion plans.

Retail Trends

Consumer goods cos tweak business deals with retailers Economic Times With modern retailing slowly picking up steam once again, consumer goods companies are re-evaluating business terms with their retail channels. Instead of adopting a uniform one-for-all strategy, companies, either in the FMCG or consumer electronics space, are now taking things on a case-to-case basis.

Retail Insight

The Retail Store Labor Management Improvement Process Atlanta Retail Consulting With continuous pressure on retailers to improve their financial performance, it is natural that they will aggressively look for ways to control operating costs. Store labor expense, typically second only to the actual cost of inventory, is a natural target for additional scrutiny. CEOs continually challenge their organization to squeeze out excess labor and find ways to operate more efficiently. Less-than-optimal store labor effectiveness can result from this process, like that depicted in the chart below, if the wrong approach is utilized. This unbalanced scenario is more typical than the industry wants to admit and both labor cost and customer service are often compromised.