Word: retailing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Blockbuster's troubles were destroying the synergistic dreams of its parent, media giant Viacom (1997 sales: $13.2 billion), owner of Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon and MTV. Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone bought Blockbuster in 1994 from billionaire Wayne Huizenga for $8 billion, figuring that the retail stores would be a natural outlet for Viacom's films and music. But by mid-1997, with Viacom's stock stuck to the floor, Redstone had to implement drastic measures, including a $323 million charge at Blockbuster. The charge reflected an unsuccessful attempt to expand Blockbuster's sales by emphasizing music, candy and comics and moving...
More important, Redstone had to find someone to fix Blockbuster before it did more damage. He chose John Antioco, a retail veteran who knew the problem firsthand: Antioco could never find the films he wanted either. "The dynamic of going to a video store expecting not to get what I wanted was finally enough for me to stop making the trip," he recalls. "What other business treats you like that?" Perversely, customers got so used to the abuse that it became easy not to give them what they wanted. "Managed dissatisfaction," Antioco called it. He is no stranger to making...
...oversold, though he admits it's growing rapidly. "I question if it'll ever be big." He is right when he notes that e-commerce is no more than 1% of the U.S.'s $8.5 trillion economy; in fact, consumer online sales now account for only .2% of total retail. And e-commerce, Roach argues, is hardly on a par with the Industrial Revolution. "This is an intangible cerebral revolution, which is a lot harder to pull...
Barnes & Noble has been an object lesson to the rest of the retail world, where everyone seems to have a Net commerce story these days. "In many ways this is what we've been doing for nearly 100 years," says Randy Heiple, vice president of advertising production for catalog giant Spiegel Inc., which ventured online in 1995 and has been ravenously growing ever since. Today the Net accounts for less than 5% of the Spiegel catalog's overall sales, but that share has grown fivefold or more in each of the past three years; sales and circulation of Spiegel...
...this mall location, the Granthams say, that gives them an edge over the competition. The Park Fair has a senior center, a post office, a grocery store, retail shops and, most important, the Iowa Department of Transportation...