Given the ice and snow all over, my wife and I have begun taking our regular walks at a nearby enclosed mall. Since the beginning of December, more and more and now nearly all of the clothing stores (by actual count, over 2/3 of the hundred or so stores in the mall sell woman’s (and maybe men’s) clothing are advertising sales, some 60 or 70%. I find this amazing. On the other hand, I have read that online sales are doing very well and are an increasing portion of the market. So I am thinking that maybe within five years, there may be very few retail clothing stores.
I have read that Sears in the US is in trouble, mainly because it cannot digest K-mart. It is ironic that they closed their mail order business (in the US, not in Canada, but see below). This has to be monumentally bad timing. Just as online catalog sales are heating up, Sears gets out of the business. On the other hand, their catalog sales dept. in Canada is lame, lame lame. My wife says that their order site is essentially unusable and their phone clerks are surly and unhelpful. She went through all the effort of ordering something, even arranging a delivery date. When she called to find out why it wasn’t delivered, they informed her the order “hadn’t gone through” for some reason. No one called her to tell her, to try again, to warn her not to stay home for a whole day expecting delivery. She reordered, it did go through that time and we now have it (a vacuum, an excellent vacuum in fact).
While I too wonder about the health of physical retail outlets, don’t you think the stores in the mall are having sales because of, you know, the holiday season?
I’ve read some articles about the “long tail”, both pro and con. I have to say that I do enjoy remembering a book that I read years and years ago, and looking it up online, and being able to buy it. I also enjoy Amazon’s recommendations. Sometimes they’re hilariously wrong, but sometimes they’re right.
On the other hand, if I’m shopping for clothes, I’d really prefer to be able to buy stuff in a B&M. Most online stores don’t show all angles, and there’s no way (as technology is now) for me to feel the fabric and try on the clothes. Sure, I can always send stuff back, but it’s easier for me to just try to find something locally in the first place. Oddly enough, it’s easiest for me to buy swimsuits and underwear online…I guess because the garments are measured more exactly. I’ve never had to return bras or panties or swimsuits that I’ve bought online.
It used to be pretty common for clothing retailers to buy up a lot of stuff specifically for the holiday season. They’d have it on the floor for a while, at a huge markup, and then heavily discount that price. However, the “discounted” price was no more or less than their regular non-holiday markup. This is probably still a way of doing business for a lot of retail stores.
Clothing stores are being hurt much less than other stores from online sales. (Look at bookstores, music stores, video rentals, for example.) There is a lot of variation in sizes, so trying on clothes for fit is still important. And lots of details like the weight & feel of the fabric, etc. need to be seen/felt in person. It’s mainly some stock items (blue jeans, underwear, socks, etc. that are standard enough to be losing to online sales. And those are not high-profit items for a clothing store, anyway.)
And clothing stores aren’t really suffering from 40% off sales. Clothing typically has a high markup, like a list price of 200% to 300% of wholesale cost. So an item that costs $30 is originally priced at $90, and sells some. Than it is put on sale at 40% off – $54. That is still $24 profit on a $30 item. Any left unsold will go on even bigger ‘closeout’ sales, at 60-70% off. But even that is pretty much a breakeven sale. And successful stores have people who carefully figure this all out, even before they order the items. They know approximately how many will sell at the original price, on regular sales, and on closeout sales. All of that is figured in when setting the original price.
And ‘fashion’ or ‘designer’ items will start out with an even higher markup (because they are higher risk – they go out of fashion quicker).
I’ve bought cycling clothes online and, really, it sucks when something doesn’t fit exactly right. “Small, Medium, and Large” can mean different things to different manufacturers. Even measurements can be way off - there was an article I saw via Fark wherein some journalist actually measured the waist line of pants and found that most major retailers were out by 2". At 34" was really a 36" etc.
I ordered some bike shorts that should have been my size, but that were enormous. Return them? No thanks. I bought the shorts for $60 and paid for shipping. To return them I would have to pay to ship them back, then pay the shipping costs for the right size to come back to me. My $60 would suddenly turn into $120 shorts.
Same thing happened with a green cycling jersey that was really not the green that appeared on my screen. In both cases, I either gave it away or tried to re-sell it at a loss on Craig’s List because the clothes were useless to me and the shipping cost of “exchanging” them were prohibitive.
I never buy clothes online unless I can try it on somewhere first, and I need a brick-and-mortar joint to do that.
Actually, if your waist measures 34", your pants/skirt/shorts should measure about 36", because if they didn’t, you’d have no room to move. It’s called ease.
The online places I order from have liberal return policies. Everything comes with an ARS label packed with it. If it doesn’t fit, just seal it back into the box, slap the ARS label on, and give it to a UPS guy. Some online places don’t do that, but people like me don’t buy from them. Of course, if I want to replace the item in a different size, I’ll have to pay to re-ship like a new order.
I think the OP has been suckered into the retail mark-up and “discount” scheme.
I thought the sales were after Christmas while they tried to get full price during the Christmas shopping season. The sale season is supposed to start on Boxing Day (Dec. 26). I saw in the past couple days a store empty its display windows. I assume it is is about to go belly-up. Boxing Day here is a bit like Black Friday in the US in terms of shopping frenzy.
At least in the U.S., that hasn’t been the case for a very long time. If you go into any department store, most items will be at some level of discount over the entire holiday shopping season. That doesn’t mean that the store is necessarily losing money on that item; it means that their “full price” would yield an extremely high profit. (We could get into a completely separate discussion about crazy pricing at department stores; their retail model seems to be to have sales going on, pretty much year-round.)
During the holidays, what retailers need is for the shoppers to choose to shop there, as opposed to somewhere else (including online). Yes, many “mall stores” are hurting, but that’s been the case for a number of years. The “big box” retailers (Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Best Buy, etc.), as well as the big online retailers, have both served to reduce traffic to mall stores.
Sears is hurting for a number of reasons (but, again, most of these have been going on for years):
Many Americans no longer find the clothing at Sears to be stylish / attractive
Middle-class Americans (who were Sears’ core consumer) have shifted to mass merchandisers (Wal-Mart, Target) for many of the purchase for which they would have gone to Sears in the past
Buying KMart probably was a mistake. KMart has been getting killed by Wal-Mart and Target for years (better / more stylish products, better prices, better store design and customer service). While KMart has been trying to turn things around for a number of years (such as offering Martha Stewart home design products), most consumers perceive that KMart is the bottom of the barrel.
I would assume if it was a news article demonstrating “vanity sizing”, it was a comparison of actual sizes of different brands similar to the comparisson Esquire did several months ago. So pants size 34" may really be a size 36" or 38". I can’t speaker for the article seen on Fark, but the one I’m more familiar with is for womens dress sizes. Both the Daily Mail and Telegraph covered the same report if I’m remember right. A quick Google shows the DM article saying at Marks & Spencer, a size 16 dress was 38 bust / 31.5 waist / 41 hips in 2003. In 2010 a Marks & Spencer size 16 is 39.5/33/43.
