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Shopping Centers Today -> September 2004
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Back
in business
Service Merchandise is back — at least in name. The catalog chain closed down in 2001, but Raymond Zimmerman, its former chairman and CEO, bought the name through a bankruptcy court and has set up a site — www.servicemerchandise.com — that sells jewelry, appliances, accessories and other gear. The 71-year-old Zimmerman, son of the company’s founders, originally bought the name for purely sentimental reasons, with no intention of doing anything with it, he told the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch. But he sensed a demand for this merchandise. Will he open some stores? Perhaps, he says.
Try this at home, but ...
Though footwear retailer Stride Rite touts a printable chart that allows customers
at its new online store — www.striderite.com
— to measure their feet, the site nevertheless recommends getting the job
done at a local store to get the fit right.
Wal-mart.com
has new clothes
Three years ago the ever-thrifty Wal-Mart pulled apparel from its Web site — www.walmart.com — after determining that it couldn’t do it cheaply enough. Now it’s selling more than 15 clothing brands on the site, reporting that it has figured out a way to do it more cheaply after all, CNN reports.
A big hole
Online retail tax evasion deprived state and local governments of as much as $16.1 billion, last year, and they’ll forgo more than twice that — up to $33.7 billion — by 2008, say new reports sponsored by the National Governors Association and the National Conference of State Legislatures. Online sales topped $104 billion last year, according to a University of Tennessee study, and a Forrester Research survey says sales will leap to nearly $230 billion by 2008. “These studies show how absolutely critical it is for states to collectively simplify their antiquated sales tax laws,” said NGA Executive Director Raymond C. Scheppach in a press release.
Not just
a prettier site
An overhaul of Home Depot’s site (www.homedepot.com) last fall has paid off, say groups that monitor Internet retailing. Some 6.7 million visitors went to the site in May, up from 4 million a year ago, says ComScore Networks, a consumer behavior consulting firm. The site’s turnaround is even more dramatic in terms of customer satisfaction. By that criterion, it has risen to No. 1 on Customer Respect Group’s ranking of 52 retailers, up from 24th in October. Home Depot made the site easier to navigate and pared down the number of items for sale there, from 50,000 in 2000 to about 12,000 today.
Flipping lids
High school students Kyle Schroeder and Kyle Heldman, both 16, opened a hat store in an Indianapolis-area strip center this summer to complement an online business at www.hatdome.com that they’ve operated since last September. “We wanted a job that would allow us not to work in fast food or a grocery store,” Schroeder told SCT.
Movies by
mail
Movie rental chain Blockbuster has launched a new Internet-based service —
Blockbuster Online — that allows customers to order the delivery by mail
of an unlimited number of movies per month. This is in response to a similar DVD
rental service offered by NetFlix. Blockbuster will also offer online subscribers
two free movie rentals per month at its stores, noting that 40 percent of subscribers
still use the stores as well.
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