Offsetting a weak fourth quarter report, department store firm Kohl’s is significantly expanding its store-within-a-store partnership with leading beauty brand Sephora, adding 250 such locations and bringing the total to 850 in 48 states as it pursues a target of $2 billion in sales by the end of 2025.
Amid activist pressure, struggling retailer Kohl’s has been approached by two different private equity firms with buyout offers, the company has acknowledged based on media reports in CNBC and the Associated Press, valuing its stock at up to a 39% premium to Friday’s close.
As expected, Black Friday 2020 saw tremendous success online but was a bust in stores, as shopper behavior has been altered irrevocably by the ongoing pandemic. Adobe Analytics reported $9 billion in ecommerce sales on Black Friday, up 21.6% from $7.4 billion in 2019. Store traffic meanwhile was down 48% to 52%.
After parting ways with Amazon last year, FedEx is now jumping deeper into ecommerce returns, much as Amazon did with Kohl’s, by adding Happy Returns bars to 2,000+ FedEx locations, including 300 inside Walmart stores. Unboxed returns will be accepted from 150 different retailers when the program launches at the end of October.
Shortly after J.C. Penney filed Chapter 11, Amazon reportedly was in talks about possibly picking up the troubled store chain on the cheap. The plan calls closing 242 of 846 stores by 2021, setting up a real estate investment trust (REIT) to handle the balance of its physical assets and receiving $900 million in debtor-in-possession financing.
Amazon is continuing to dominate in apparel sales online, according to a new report from CoreSight, which reports 70% of apparel shoppers bought clothing or footwear on Amazon in the past 12 months, up from 60% a year ago. This compares to 51.2% who said they did so on Walmart, 44.6% at Target and 35.3% at Kohl’s.
Macy’s Inc. announced plans to close 125 stores within three years in an effort to find profitability amid an ongoing shopper flight from malls and department stores, while consolidating its headquarters in New York and cutting 2,000 corporate jobs. This will leave 400 Macy’s stores in place; about 30 will close in 2020.
A seeming disconnect between fewer last-order promise dates and faster holiday delivery times is explained by the rising popularity of buy online, pickup in store, according to an annual survey from Kurt Salmon. This season, 53% of retailers didn’t offer a last order promise date to avoid disappointing customers.
UPS is projecting a 26% increase on “national returns day” on Jan. 2, when 1.9 million inbound packages are expected to hit its network as Q4 ecommerce continues to balloon. Another somewhat smaller returns peak of 1.6 million packages/day will hit the week of Dec. 16; the daily average that month will be 1 million, UPS said.
Prime Day saw 175 million items purchased by Prime members over the two days, according to Amazon, eclipsing its 2018 Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales combined, while analysts pegged total GMV at $6 billion to $6.2 billion. See what other interesting statistics we found to paint a picture of the concocted “Christmas in July.”