Retail

Bloomberg Inflation might be the Grinch that steals Christmas in Britain this year. UK household expenditure is set to fall 0.1 percent from a year earlier during the holidays, according to a report by Visa and IHS Markit published on Monday. The slump will likely emerge as a result of faster price growth and the resulting pinch on incomes. The ...

Bloomberg The market is buzzing with speculation that Amazon.com Inc. will enter the pharmacy business. Some drugmakers are just fine with changes the tech retail giant might bring to the complex market. Drug companies say getting medicine into patients’ hands is complicated and costly. Some have pointed to the multiple layers of middlemen including insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, distributors and ...

Bloomberg Gap Inc. and Ross Stores Inc. are showing that growth is possible for apparel retailers. You just have to offer cut-rate prices. Both apparel companies saw their shares spike after posting comparable sales that exceeded analyst estimates. Gap relied on its budget-minded Old Navy chain for growth. Ross, meanwhile, used its off-price strategy to outperform expectations despite the hurricanes ...

Bloomberg Coca-Cola Co., facing a world where consumers fill up Amazon baskets instead of grocery carts, is trying to raise its tech game. The 131-year-old beverage company is taking its understanding of driving real-life traffic to the world of e-commerce. That includes upping the appearance of its “digital shelf,” integrating with voice products like Amazon’s Echo, and adding impulse buy ...

Bloomberg For the past year, Amazon employees have been test driving Amazon Go, an experimental convenience store in downtown Seattle. The idea is to let consumers walk in, pick up items and then pay for them without ever standing in line at a cashier. Amazon is vague on the mechanics, but the store relies on a mobile app and some ...

Bloomberg Home Depot Inc. saw sales surge in the wake of this year’s barrage of hurricanes, but the storms still took a toll on the Atlanta-based retailer’s bottom line. Even as cleanup and rebuilding efforts helped the chain’s sales top analysts’ estimates, expenses related to the storms reduced operating profit by $51 million. Customers stocked up on less profitable plywood ...

Bloomberg Ikea, the Swedish flat-pack furniture empire, has become one of the few retailers to quantify the financial effects of Brexit. Costs at Ikea UK, which is heavily reliant on imports, jumped by 13.7 percent in the year through August, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. That increase was driven by the drop in sterling after last year’s ...

Bloomberg JD.com Inc., the operator of China’s second-biggest online mall, reported a surprise quarterly profit as investments in logistics and new arenas such as fashion attracted shoppers. Net income was $152 million in the three months ended in September, the Beijing-based company said on Monday. That compares with the 114.1 million yuan loss expected by analysts. Sales for the quarter ...

Bloomberg UK shoppers are in a sorry state. Visa’s UK consumer spending index fell 2 percent last month, a decline that was the quickest since September 2013 and “driven by a sustained reduction in high street expenditure.” A separate report from the British Retail Consortium showed shoppers’ footfall decreased 2 percent on an annual basis in the month, the biggest ...

Bloomberg As brick-and-mortar retailers struggle to remain relevant in the new world of e-commerce, they’re hiring fewer seasonal workers. That’s according to a report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., which shows October employment gains fell 8 percent from last year—a result of fewer hiring announcements from companies like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. The report shows that seasonal retail hiring has ...