Word: fasts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Through its Allnighter program, Denny's is trying to give members of the late-night crowd a social experience they can't get at fast-food drive-throughs, which are now staying open later and eating into the chain's graveyard-shift revenues. Denny's has instructed its servers to chat up tipsy customers. "We want them to say, 'Looks like you guys were having some fun tonight--who wants coffee now?'" says Michael Polydoroff, director of sales promotion and licensing at Denny...
...competing for wardrobe space within a few hundred meters of one another. Expensive Japanese boutique stores are receding to the backstreets. Retail analysts say that Japanese consumers are continuing to spend in the recession, but have gone considerably down-market to less costly items. As a result, fast fashion "is a hot issue in Japan's fashion industry, especially after the entry of H&M," says Dairo Murata, a retail analyst at Credit Suisse in Tokyo. Luxury-brand sales in Japan are expected to decline 10% in the first half of the year compared with sales in the same period...
Tokyo's Harajuku district is where to find Japan's fashion-forward youth. Every weekend, sidewalks disappear under a frenzy of shoppers looking for new trends. The latest: fast-fashion retailing. During the Golden Week holiday in early May, typically a shopping extravaganza, Los Angeles-based chain Forever 21 debuted its flagship store in Japan. Harajuku girls lined up on five floors full of clothes, shoes and accessories in enough of a dizzying array to make any young woman swoon. It wasn't the first time the giants of cheap chic had stormed Tokyo. Last November about 2,500 shoppers...
...though branded luxury may be out, style is still in, and sales at inexpensive fast-fashion and casual-clothing stores have picked up. That's the kind of market that Forever 21 expects will help it reach $2.4 billion in global sales this year, up 40% over 2008's figure. The company thinks that its retail offering, where $100 buys an outfit, a bag, shoes and accessories, fits the Japanese mood right...
...point: Uniqlo, the local entry in the segment, seems to be doing just fine. Tadashi Yanai, a cheap-chic guru and head of Fast Retailing, which owns Uniqlo, is now Japan's richest man, according to Forbes magazine. While most retailers are seeing same-store sales drop between 5% and 15%, Uniqlo's same-store sales rose 2.9% for fiscal year 2008 and 12.9% in the six months to February this year. "Uniqlo is the only big winner so far," says Murata of Credit Suisse, who thinks that for non-Japanese fast-fashion companies such as Forever...