Retailers Stumble Adjusting to More Selective Shoppers & More Latest News Here – Up Jobs

This hasn’t been the year retailers planned for.

After two years of navigating the pandemic — which brought record online sales and shoppers willing to buy all manners of items, to the point that the global supply chain became strained — executives knew a new normal would take shape.

Sales might slow, the thinking went, but people would still want TVs, fashionable dresses and throw pillows. So, with supply chain issues in mind, companies stocked up. But this spring it became clear that those items weren’t selling quickly enough. As people watched the prices of food and gas rise, their spending became more selective, leaving retailers with shelves of inventory they couldn’t get rid of.

The magnitude of the miscalculation was crystallized this week in a batch of quarterly earnings from major retailers like Walmart and Target, which showed a mix of declining sales of discretionary goods and lower profits. A number revised their guidance, lowering expectations for both sales and profits for the rest of the year. A glut of inventory weighed on companies’ balance sheets: Inventory at Walmart rose 25 percent from this time last year. At Target, it increased 36 percent. And Kohl’s said inventory was up 48 percent.

“Since our last earnings call in May, a weakening environment, high inflation and dampened consumer spending are having broad implications across much of retail, especially in discretionary categories like apparel,” Michelle Gass, the chief executive of Kohl’s, said on a call with analysts. “Given our penetration in these categories, this is disproportionately impacting Kohl’s.”

Taken together, the results show that the robust sales retailers grew accustomed to during the course of the pandemic have ceased — and the consumer landscape that awaits may be more austere than what they prepared for. (There were exceptions. Home Depot, for instance, said sales were still strong, driven by home improvement projects.) On earnings calls, executives said lower- to middle-income consumers were the most hesitant to spend. Stores are responding by pushing more discounts and highlighting private-label brand to shoppers, and, in some cases, canceling billions of dollars’ worth of orders with vendors. It remains to be seen which strategies will be most effective.

“The last two years was great for retailers because consumers were buying everything they had to offer,” Liza Amlani, founder of Retail Strategy Group, which works with brands on their merchandising and planning strategies. “They just can’t do that anymore. You have to understand what the consumer wants more now than ever.”

In July, U.S. retail sales were virtually unchanged, according to data from the Commerce Department released Wednesday. Excluding the sales of gas and cars, retail sales actually increased 0.7 percent. But 85 percent of U.S. consumers said that inflation is altering the way they shop, according to a survey released this week from Morning Consult.

Most retailers are hoping this pullback period is only temporary. In the meantime, companies are trying to signal to customers that it’s worth doing what spending they do in their stores. Kohl’s, for instance, said that its private-label brands outperformed the national ones it carries last quarter, and that shoppers gravitated toward buying more basic apparel that could be worn with many different outfits.