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Common Sense: A Voice Suggests Door-Busters Can Wait a Day

November 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Anthony Hardwick never thought of himself as an activist or even much of an organizer. He grew up in Kansas City, Mo., graduated from Park University in Missouri in 2009, and looked for a job by scouring the Internet for cities with low unemployment rates. He settled on Omaha, where he found two — as a shopping cart attendant at Target and a printing supervisor for OfficeMax. There he met his fiancée, Denise Holling.

“Basically, I just wanted to pursue the American Dream,” Mr. Hardwick told me this week, as the bearded, burly 29-year-old emerged as the unlikely hero of a nationwide movement to roll back the start of the holiday shopping season to the day after Thanksgiving.

Late last month, Mr. Hardwick’s supervisor at Target told him he would be needed at 11 p.m. Thanksgiving night in order for Target to open its doors at midnight for Black Friday, which the discount retailer was doing for the first time this year.

“I’d have to be at Target from 11 p.m. until 4:30 a.m., then I’d have 30 minutes to scurry down to OfficeMax, where I was starting at 5 a.m.,” he said. Mr. Hardwick makes $8.50 an hour at Target, and between his two jobs earns about $25,000 a year. “I used to be able to pull 24-hour shifts,” he said. “I’d drink Red Bull. But now I’m 29, and I’m starting to feel it. I’d have to nap.”

This didn’t sit well with Mr. Hardwick, who figured he’d be sleeping while his fiancée and future in-laws gathered for the traditional turkey dinner. Although a Target spokeswoman told me the company did its best to accommodate employees who wanted the day off, this often isn’t possible, and Mr. Hardwick said he wasn’t given the option. Mr. Hardwick turned to the Internet and discovered the Web site Change.org, best known for a recent online petition to get banks to roll back debit card fees.

“A midnight opening robs the hourly and in-store salary workers of time off with their families on Thanksgiving Day,” he posted on Nov. 3. “A full holiday with family is not just for the elite of this nation — all Americans should be able to break bread with loved ones and get a good night’s rest on Thanksgiving!” He asked the Web site’s visitors to join him in calling for Target retail stores to restore the 5 a.m. opening time on Black Friday.

But a “full holiday with family” has become increasingly elusive as competition from 24/7, 365-days-a-year Internet shopping has caused retailers to throw open their doors on a day once sacrosanct “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens,” as Abraham Lincoln put it when he established the national holiday in 1863.

Franklin Roosevelt moved the holiday to the fourth Thursday in November (from the last Thursday) in an overt attempt to lengthen the holiday shopping season and bolster retail sales during the Depression. And the holiday’s demise as a no-shopping interlude is the culmination of a steady retreat from pervasive blue laws that once banned shopping not only on Thanksgiving and other major holidays but also on Sundays. Today Massachusetts and Rhode Island are the last states to restrict shopping on Thanksgiving, and Paramus, N.J., the site of several major malls, may be unique in banning shopping on Thanksgiving and Sundays.

“The blue laws began in Massachusetts with the Pilgrims, so I guess it’s fitting that we still have them,” Jon B. Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, said. “Christmas is sacrosanct. But there’s been a bill proposed to permit shopping on Thanksgiving. It hasn’t moved. We endorse it every year, but do I have members beating down my door to push this? No.”

Among national retailers, Target is hardly the worst offender. Although some Target stores are open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thanksgiving before reopening at midnight, Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, has been open all day on Thanksgiving for years, and this year moved up its Black Friday door-buster specials to 10 p.m. Thursday. K-Mart and many Gap and Old Navy stores are also open all day, and a wave of stores, including Macy’s and Best Buy, opened this year at midnight on Friday with special holiday promotions. Some retailers are now talking about “Black Thanksgiving.”

 “For many people Black Friday shopping is now as much a part of the holiday tradition as the turkey,” the Target spokeswoman said. “Black Friday has an exciting, euphoric feeling. A lot of our team members get very excited. Months of hard work have gone into preparing for this.” She said Target moved up its store openings to midnight only after much deliberation, and the move had been “overwhelmingly popular” with both customers and employees.

Mr. Hardwick said he was aware of all this, and had modest expectations for his petition. “I promoted it on Facebook and figured I’d sign up some friends and family,” he said. “At first it just sat there.” But gradually comments piled up on the Change.org Web site.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3947af7d1019955a945d4a7531fc1789

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To Keep Parking Lots Full, Retailers Offer Gas Deals

July 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Publix, the grocery chain in the Southeast, is offering $50 gas cards for $40, with a minimum purchase of $25 in other products. Kellogg’s asks that shoppers send in 10 U.P.C. codes from cereals like Raisin Bran or Corn Flakes for a $10 gas card. At CVS, customers receive a $10 gas card when they spend $30 on certain items.

Even shoppers at Wal-Mart, the country’s largest discount retailer, are gassing up at a savings. The company announced last week that in 18 states, shoppers could save 10 cents a gallon at Wal-Mart and Murphy gas stations if they pay with a Wal-Mart credit, gift or prepaid card.

Though prices for food and clothing are also increasing, gas prices are having the most direct effect on shoppers’ behavior, retail analysts say.

On weekdays, gas sales are down slightly from a year ago. But on weekends, when most people are not commuting and can choose how much to drive — and when retailers want their parking lots full — the declines are much larger, according to MasterCard Advisors Spending Pulse, which issues a weekly gas index.

“When you start to see weekend pumping taking a hit,” said Michael McNamara, the group’s vice president of research and analysis, “retailers want to do something to combat that.”

The gas discounts resonate with many consumers, in part because gasoline is not an optional purchase for most people, who can often recite from memory — and with some agony — what their neighborhood gas station charges per gallon.

“They view it as having an immediate positive effect on their wallet,” Mr. McNamara said of a gas discount. “That’s why so many retailers are turning to it.”

The gas promotions recall the summer 2008, when gas prices were above $4 a gallon. At that time, auto-dependent industries like tourism and car manufacturing itself started running gas-price deals. Chrysler offered guaranteed $2.99-a-gallon gas for three years to get people to buy cars, and Suzuki gave three months’ free gas, while hotel companies like Marriott also offered gas cards.

With gas at about $3.62 on average in late June, according to SpendingPulse, those kinds of deals are also returning. Some Marriotts are bringing back the free-gas promotions, and tourist destinations and even casinos are giving discounts on gas, too.

Last time, however, retailers generally did not get in on the discounts. The spike in prices came before the recession, and spending continued to be strong — even when gas prices peaked in July 2008, retailers’ sales at stores open at least a year rose 2.1 percent, according to Thomson Reuters. But now, with consumers feeling short on cash after the recession, high gas prices are stopping some of them from shopping.

“The increase to gas prices,” Wal-Mart chief financial officer Charles M. Holley said in a call with reporters in May, “certainly does hurt our core customer going to the store, and they’ll consolidate trips.”

Even when the gas deals do not save shoppers that much money — the Wal-Mart promotion pockets about $1.60 per fill-up for an average 16-gallon tank — they can give them a psychological lift.

Cheryl Moore, 35, a mother of three in Spokane, Wash., said that when gas increased to $3.88 a gallon at nearby stations, she cut back on shopping trips. While she used to shop for food and other staples daily, she now goes twice a week.

“Now it’s like, ‘Well, wait a minute, let’s carpool’; or, ‘Maybe we can wait another day and do everything in one day,’ because it’s just so stinking expensive,” she said.

Ms. Moore uses lots of coupons. But she said that somehow saving $10 on gas, as the Kellogg’s promotion offers, for example, seemed much more appealing than saving the equivalent amount on groceries through coupons.

“It’s right there in front of you, and I don’t have to do any of the other math,” said Ms. Moore, who has blogged about some of the gas-saving deals at The Frugal Life of a Mom.

But though retailers are framing the gas discounts as an I-feel-your-pain response to shoppers’ concerns, some are either complicated to qualify for, or not that deep.

At CVS, the qualifying items vary week to week and depend on the location; this week, Pampers and Pantene are among the included items in several cities. At the register, shoppers must use a loyalty card to get credit for the purchases.

Wal-Mart’s deal is restricted to shoppers who have a Wal-Mart credit card, a Wal-Mart Money Card (a prepaid Visa or MasterCard) or a gift card. Those cards are not free — the money card costs $3 to issue, $3 to reload and $3 a month, while the Wal-Mart credit card has a 22.9 percent annual percentage rate, which is quite high.

“These are fun, topical and varying degrees of clever,” Brad Wilson, founder of the deal-hunting site BradsDeals.com, said in an e-mail. “But not great deals.”

Other stores offer deeper discounts. Stop Shop recently expanded its gas program, which lets shoppers accumulate points toward gas discounts with each dollar spent at the grocer, up to a $2.20 discount per gallon.

Kroger, which also has a points-toward-gas program, in May adjusted the rules to reflect how high gas prices are. Before, it capped gas discounts at 10 cents a gallon in many markets; now, it lets shoppers accumulate points that give up to a dollar off per gallon at Kroger-owned gas stations in several states.

“The increase in gas prices is taking a bigger chunk out of family’s wallets,” said Keith Dailey, a Kroger spokesman. “It’s a popular, and increasingly more popular, program.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=5bba47e14bd38744b43b9591c91f55d3

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Where Wal-Mart Failed, Aldi Succeeds

March 30, 2011 by Leave a Comment

In February, with virtually no opposition — a Queens politician even showed up at the grand opening in Rego Park, Queens — a discount retailer called Aldi opened its first store in the city, and plans to open a second one, in the Bronx, later this year.

After decades spent fleeing cities for the strip malls and boulevards of the suburbs, grocers and discount retailers are doing an about-face. Target plans to open its first smaller, city-size store in Seattle next year, and Wal-Mart announced recently that it would build “hundreds” of smaller, mostly urban stores in the coming years.

Meanwhile, Aldi has quietly been setting up its shops in cities around the country.

“They’re not only doing the small format more rapidly, but they’re getting into the urban areas more rapidly than either Wal-Mart Express or the city Targets,” said Craig Johnson, president of the consulting firm Customer Growth Partners. “Even though the company’s headquartered in Germany, they’ve opened up a New York store quicker than Wal-Mart has.”

Even though Aldi, like Wal-Mart, is nonunion, it has faced little resistance, compared with the heated opposition often headed by unions and politicians that Wal-Marts have encountered in larger markets.

“There’s no reason to oppose an Aldi — it’s a small format, and they usually get space from an existing landowner or landlord, a small guy who’s plugged into the community, not a big guy like a Forest City Ratner,” Mr. Johnson said. “Wal-Mart has sort of become a bad guy that there’s a concerted effort against. I’m not sure that Aldi has really gotten on anyone’s radar screen.”

Aldi first came to the United States in 1976, but it opened a relatively small number of stores a year — 25 or so on average. Within the last few years, it has accelerated its expansion by adding more than 250 stores, with plans for 80 more both in 2011 and 2012, said Jason Hart, co-president of Aldi’s United States division, in a recent interview.

The company capitalizes on the bargain hunter, who is not embarrassed to choose frugality over name brands. Aldi’s mainly its own private-label items at cheap prices — a five-ounce bacon-wrapped beef filet costs $1.79 at the Queens store.

“It’s the one format that seems to have increased the most, and has sustained a number of new stores,” during and after the recession, said Jonathan P. Feeney, a grocery analyst with Janney Capital Markets. As “prices are going to go up, it’s going to be a growing opportunity.”

Aldi was founded by the Albrecht brothers, who worked in their mother’s German retail business and took it over in the 1940s. In 1961, they introduced the Aldi name, short for Albrecht Discount.

According to Stores magazine, the Aldi group was the eight-largest retailer in the world in 2009 (the most recent figures available), with an estimated $67.7 billion in revenue. According to estimates by Mr. Johnson, about $6.5 billion of Aldi’s revenue stems from sales in the United States.

Aldi’s model is to sell groceries and basics like dishwasher soap and laundry detergent in drugstore-size spaces — its Queens store is 17,500 square feet, about 16 percent the size of an average Wal-Mart — in urban, suburban and rural areas, though the focus lately has been in cities.

About 95 percent of its goods bear an obscure private label. For example, rather than Skippy, Jiffy, natural, and jam-swirled peanut butter, Aldi sells one kind, which it commissions itself. (It’s similar to the higher-end Trader Joe’s, which is owned by an Albrecht family trust.)

“We carry 1,500 of the most popular grocery items out there,” Mr. Hart said. “You won’t find some exotic spice or exotic produce items in our stores; you won’t find every flavor of every items. When you look at the large supermarkets that may have 20- to 30,000 items, or superstores, with over 100,000 items, it’s surprising to the customers how much of the shopping list we’re able to fit into our smaller store.”

Fewer product lines translate into making even a small, high-rent space quite profitable.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=540fd9684fa2c45298dc1f61d93cffd6

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