Saturday December 31, 2011
It's no surprise that customer satisfaction with Amazon.com (AMZN) is high. It's also no surprise that when asked to score the largest online Internet retail shopping websites, customers gave the highest marks to Amazon.com based on their Internet shopping experiences during the 2011 holiday shopping season.
There were very few surprises in the annual 2011 Holiday E-Retail Satisfaction Index published by research firm Foresee. Besides Amazon, the Internet shopping websites of jcpenney (JCP), Apple (AAPL), Barnes and Noble (BKS) and Victoria's Secret ranked high. These companies have a good reputation for customer relationships to begin with, and they've just extended their customer satisfaction acumen to a virtual platform.
Of course for every "best" ranking, there are corresponding "worst" rankings. According to the Internet shopping customers surveyed, Target (TGT), Blockbuster (BBI), Sears (SHLD), and The Gap (GPS) provided the worst online retail customer dissatisfaction during the 2011 holiday shopping season. Not surprisingly, these "worst" Internet retailers have also had a fair bit of trouble with customer satisfaction in their physical store as well in 2011.
The exception to the expected worst rankings is Target, which is generally known for having good customer relationships. Targets website challenges in 2011 were mostly functional, or more accurately, dysfunctional. When blockbuster marketing results drove more traffic to the Target.com website than it could handle, highly publicized complete crashes of its retail website occurred.
The first full site Target.com crash actually created a "Wow!" response. The second crash created more of a "Huh?" response. And subsequent website dysfunctions drew more of a "Grrrr" response from customers. The second-to-last reputation that an Internet shopping website wants to get is "unstable" (which is just slightly better than the reputation of "untrustworthy"). So it seems fairly obvious that stability is priority #1 for the Target e-commerce team in 2012.
To see the best of the best and the worst of the worst rankings for Internet shopping websites, click here. To BE the best of the best of Internet shopping websites (or at least not among the worst of the worst), read the full Foresee Customer Satisfaction Index report here.
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Saturday December 31, 2011
Deeply discounted year-end clearance sales are giving U.S. consumers both a happy year-end and happy New Year gift reminiscent of the Great Recession retail inventory dump of 2008. After-Christmas shoppers won't have to look very hard to find merchandise discounted up to 90% at major U.S. retail chains like Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, Kohl's, and Barnes and Noble on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, and on the bonus last last-minute shopping day of the holiday season on Monday, January 2nd, an official work holiday on the 2012 calendar.
But the question is whether shoppers will have the stamina and the willingness to go the distance with retailers who are eager to sustain the record-breaking holiday sales activity through the day after New Year's Eve. It may be that U.S. consumers will drop from their record-breaking holiday shopping before retailers are finished deal-wrestling for the last and first sales of the year.
Consumers definitely won the game of consuming chicken this year by keeping their wallets shut between Cyber Monday and the last week before Christmas. And it may be that shoppers will ignore the mundane after-Christmas year-end 50% discounts to see if they can extract even deeper discounts from retailers again.
Some retailers, however, are not playing the after-Christmas graduated discount game this year. Barnes and Noble immediately filled their bins with the 90% off books. Nordstrom Rack has had its 75% sales racks filled since Christmas Eve. Shoppers can get discounts on top of clearance prices at Macy's, Saks and Nieman Marcus - both online and in the stores.
Everyday low prices at Wal-Mart are even everyday lower on 2,003 clearance items on Walmart.com. You can get 65% off deals at Target.com and "thousands of deals" in Target stores. Even discount-averse Abercrombie & Fitch is giving their too-cool-for-clearance customers a 40% discount on everything. Poor Mike Jeffries must either be out of the country or heavily sedated.
The shoppers who ignore the "final" warning on sale advertisements this New Year's Eve, New Year's Day and Why-Am-I-the-Only-One-Working Monday, though, may lose in the year-end consuming standoff and miss the best year-end clearance deals. For many retailers, the only way they could discount their clearance merchandise any more than it already is would be to give it away in exchange for a Facebook like.
For those who still have the energy to consume this New Year's weekend, remember that unlike the rest of the holiday shopping season, store hours aren't extended this weekend, but rather they're shortened. Stores will close early on New Year's Even and open late on New Year's Day, so make sure to check the list of New Year's store hours so you can strategically plan your last shopping marathon. You may be surprised at the unaccommodating store hours on New Year's weekend after the round-the-clock retailing in the past month. It's hard to believe that Costco will dare to keep its doors closed completely on New Year's Day.
Shoppers will also want to check out the list of New Year's Year-End Clearance Sales to bag the best discounts first. It's still possible that the shortsighted retailers will reconsider those stingy half-off offerings and succumb to some serious slashing. After the aggressively competitive 2011 holiday shopping season, it's hardly worth booting up your computer for less than 60% off.
More About New Year's Year-end Clearance Sales and Deals:
Friday December 30, 2011
The U.S. retail industry would have preferred to bask in the glow of its own record-breaking Christmas retail sales results for the 2011 holiday season a little longer before getting yanked back to post-holiday reality by the Sears (SHLD) and Kmart store closing announcement. Immediately after the Sears and Kmart store closings were announced, analysts and journalists began concluding that ending an old year and starting a new year with major closings by a major U.S. retailer signals trouble for Sears Holdings (SHLD), trouble for the economy, and a generally unhappy New Year.
All three of those conditions might be true in 2012, but the outlook for the economy, the Sears business, and the New Year are not necessarily related, connected or causative. Considering the behavior and performance of both Sears and Kmart in the past few years, the closing of Sears and Kmart stores is not a surprise, and not an economic indicator. It's an inevitability that just happened to unfold at a time that broke the spell of Christmas retail magic.
Sears has been running Hail Mary marketing plays for at least the past two years. Ever since the Selena-Gomez-Air-Band-Casting-Call-Lands-End-Pack-Pal-Facebook-Campus-Ready-Senior-Day-Christmas-in-July marketing mish mash in July, 2009, it's been hard not to notice the desperation that's apparently been driving Sears leadership decisions and running the Sears and Kmart operations.
The decisions of the Sears leadership team to pimp out their brands, drastically reduce their inventory, and literally give away the store one subsection of real estate at a time wreaks of desperation. That's a vibe that everybody can feel. It's not attractive, it's not particularly fun to be around, and at some point it starts to be a little pathetic. Consciously or unconsciously people don't really like to be associated with pathetic.
Unfortunately my June, 2010 assessment of the Sears identity crisis and its crippling effect on the ability of the Sears retail business to function effectively in a rapidly shifting retail environment still seems to be correct. Sears can only hope that this is a mid-life identity crisis because that would mean that there is at least another 118 years in its future. Sears investors can only hope that Sears leaders figure it all out before another one of the great American retail brands proves that there is no such thing as too-big-to-fail in the U.S. retail industry.
Closing 120 stores is busy business, and hopefully Sears Holdings leaders won't get distracted by the details of all of that in 2012. If the occupants in the Sears boardroom give all their attention to short-term "doing," they won't have any time or focus on their long-term "being." It is a certainty that if Sears and Kmart leaders can get crystal clear about what they want their retail business to "be," then what they need to "do" to regain their balance and reclaim their retail territory will also become crystal clear.
If the 120 store closings aren't dramatic enough to change the trajectory of the Sears leadership strategies, perhaps the recent 27% drop in stock prices are. Nothing is quite so motivating to most retail industry leaders as portfolio shrinkage. That's when things get personal.
More About Sears, Kmart, and Store Closings:
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Saturday December 24, 2011
All U.S. retail stores are open on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2011 for last-minute shopping and last-minute shoppers. For a complete list of Christmas Eve store opening and closing times at Wal-Mart , Target , Macy's Best Buy, and all retail stores, click here.
What happens when Christmas Eve, the last Saturday before Christmas, the day before Christmas, and the last day for last-minute shopping are all the same day? U.S. retail industry experts have ho-ho-hopeful predictions for a blockbuster finish to the 2011 Christmas holiday shopping season, as long as the unusually mild winter weather cooperates, which it's expected to do.
I always find it humorous when retail industry pundits conclude that weather conditions have authority over the resourcefulness of shoppers who want to spend money. When U.S. consumers have a desire to consume, they'll find a way to do it, especially when a purchase is just a computer click or smartphone tap away.
Many predicted that last-minute Christmas Eve shopping would be a day without last-minute deals, but the 159 discounts at Wal-Mart, the "thousands of deals" at Target, the "last minute gift sale" at Macy's, the "Day After Christmas Prices Now" at Kmart, the "Nick of Time" sales ad at jcpenney, and the Two-Day Flash-Marketplace-Real Deals at Sears are final proof that consumer deep discount desires trump retail plans and logic every time.
Click here for links to all Christmas Eve Deals of the Day >>
And, thanks to the technology that is transforming the very nature of the U.S. retail industry, if you need to shop on Christmas Eve 2011 but you want to avoid most of the last-minute shopping drama, you can do the looking and paying part online, and the picking up part in the physical store, as long as you're doing your shopping and spending on a website with a ship-to-store option.
Despite the Super-Saturday-Christmas-Eve-Last-Minute-Day-Before-Christmas-Eve deals, the purchase of choice for most last-minute shoppers is gift cards. Retailers who are aggressively pursuing a respectable share of the $28 billion Christmas season gift card market are offering freebies and bonuses with gift card purchases until their physical store doors close today.
Even after the last shopping day is done in physical stores and restaurant chains, the last-minute purchase of virtual gift cards will never end. In 2011 the sale of e-gift cards and e-gift certificates is expected to be $1 billion, which is aided by the increased number of retail and restaurant chains who have e-gift card and e-gift certificate offerings this year.
The fastest-growing gift card product in 2011 and beyond, though, is in mobile gift cards. When you can find, buy, and send a Christmas gift from smartphone to smartphone while the previews are playing in the movie theater, its easy to procrastinate and difficult to remember why you'd want to participate in the last-minute mall frenzy instead of enjoying a newly released Christmas Eve flick.
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