Word: stores
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Walk into Steve & Barry's sprawling New York City store, and a perplexing sign greets you: DUE TO LIMITED SUPPLY AND TO BE FAIR TO ALL CUSTOMERS, STARBURY FOOTWEAR IS LIMITED TO TEN PAIRS PER PERSON, PER DAY. Yeah, right. Ten pairs of quality, star-endorsed basketball shoes? Don't you need a second mortgage for that...
...buffet. In the two months after their August 2006 debut, Steve & Barry's sold over 3 million pairs. And the cheap-shoe love has lasted. "C'mon, this is the best thing that has happened in a long time," says Curtis Washington, 44, before bouncing out of a store with five Starbury boxes...
Eduardo Castro-Wright could see the problem instantly. One of his first exercises as the newly appointed president of Division No. 1, the highfalutin internal designation for Wal-Mart's 3,500-unit domestic discount chain, was to map every underperforming store in the country. Most of the worst were clustered around big coastal cities like Boston and Los Angeles. As he toured those stores, Castro-Wright could sense they weren't connecting with their neighborhoods. And neither were the managers--they weren't in Arkansas anymore. "You'd talk to managers and they...
...company's 45-year-old business model--based on a continuously improving supply-chain loop--is better suited to developing economies like Mexico, Brazil and China, where it is doing well, than to mature markets like the U.S. and Japan, where it isn't. In the U.S., same-store sales increases are bumping along at 1% to 2% a month, while rival Target, the fashion-forward, design-centric glamour girl of discounting, runs up 2% to 4% monthly increases. Wall Street complains that Wal-Mart spends too much money opening the same old big boxes, so much so that...
...know what? So has Wal-Mart. Under Castro-Wright's prodding, Wal-Mart is trying to become a local merchant again. It is moving managers away from the all-powerful Bentonville, Ark., headquarters and closer to the customers. It is developing snazzier and highly efficient store designs to entice existing customers to shop more broadly across the store rather than just for groceries and health- and beauty-care products. "We have enough customers," insists Scott, 57, who can boast that nearly 20 million Americans shop at a Wal-Mart every day. But while they're happily buying toys, toothpaste...