The Power of Retail

Over the years, fashion has continued to change, but the one segment of the clothing industry that has seen a radical shift is the swimwear industry. Thanks to new technologies, the kind of swimwear we are now seeing in the market is quite different than what was available a generation ago. There are lots of different segments within the swimwear segment, since a lot of people who wear swimming costumes are not actually going to do any swimming. These lounge or poolside swimwear are made more for looking good and glamorous instead of taking the vigors of the water. With the resort season continuing all year round, there is always perfect swimming available somewhere or the other!

There are a whole lot of interesting ways that people are coming up with to save some money these days, and not all are in their best interest actually. There has been a rise in visitors to Amish stores, which stock expired cans and bottles of food, dented boxes of cereal and crumbled bars of candy. For a lot of American’s looking to save money, these are a way out of higher prices for just about everything.

According to Ray Marvin, the manager of B.B’s Grocery Outlet, the range of customers varies from those coming in Mercedes to those coming in horse and buggies. Prices are often dirt cheap at these stores, such as 10cents for a bottle of salad dressing, and 50 cents for a roll of paper towels. The Food and Drug Administration prohibits the sale of expired baby food, but all other items, including food and medicine are good enough to be sold, even though they might be expired.

Amish expert Don Kraybill of Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa., calls the popularity of salvage stores a “mini Amish industrial revolution.” He says it is a natural outgrowth of booming Amish micro-enterprises, a result of the decline in farming. “Their businesses frequently succeed because they have low overhead, they work very hard, they’re creative,” Kraybill says. “And they have an ample pool of labor within their extended families.”

The Amish are scattered across 28 states, with the highest populations in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. A deeply religious group, they traditionally live off the land and without electricity, among other modern amenities.

Everyone knows that golfers are quite mad when it comes to their love of the game. Nothing should get in the way of their game, or else hell breaks loose! I used to play a lot of golf several years ago, daily in fact, but have not played for a while now. It’s a time consuming sport, not to forget an expensive one too, especially if you go for top of the line products such as these Callaway irons which are sure to give you a better game, but will set you back a bit as well. Golf is all about the swing, an effortless swing at that. The harder you try to swing and play a better game, the more the chances are of bungling it up. So one should forget about it all and just have a fun time, unless of course you are aiming to play with Tiger Woods!

Ikea has always gone all out to make things comfortable and easy for their customers and it will be no different when it opens it’s new store in Brooklyn, where it will offer a free ferry service to the store. The ferry will be run by New York Water Taxi and will shuttle between lower Manhattan’s Pier 11 and the Ikea dock in the Red Hook neighborhood. According to Joseph Roth, this service will be available to everyone, and not just customers of the store. In the future, the company will be offering shuttles from the subway lines and expanding its bus routes to bring customers to its 346,000 sq ft store. The new store will be opening on June 18th, 2008.

I’ve been taking lots of architectural shots lately, but I didn’t even realize the trend until one of my flickr friends pointed it out to me in a comment. The thing is that I take photographs of interesting sights and objects so it all depends on what looks more appealing to you. At one time, it might just be flowers and fruits while at other times, it might be modern and abstract stuff. I really like this shot, since the light was quite magical, even though the shot is not perfect I think it has something different.

Enjoy!

With the slow economy, everyone is looking for a way to be stylish without spending too much money, and Steve & Barry’s might just be the answer. The store is the only place where you can find Sarah Jessica Parker’s Bitten line of clothing and is getting noticed after being featured on the Oprah show and in Glamour magazine. With 264 stores at present, this 23 year old retail chain does not spend any money on advertising and selects locations where rents are low, mostly under performing malls.

According to Howard Schacter, chief partnership officer for Steve & Barry’s, the company competes directly with Wal-Mart and several other discounters. It keeps its expenses low on everything besides the clothes as well, so there are no lavish offices and business trips are done using low budget fares. Says Schacter, “We look at 1,000 points along the production line and cut out the fat. We also are producing at a very, very high volume. But notice I did not talk about cutting back when it comes to the fabric or the cut. It’s about all the other aspects of the business.”

What is it about books that makes some people just melt? Some might react that way with chocolate or ice cream, but for me it’s books that are irresistible. Well, most of the time at least. I keep buying books, but can barely keep up with reading them. In fact, I have yet to read some books that I bought way back in 2003, novels not reference books. A lot of my books from 3-4 years back are hard cover and larger ones, so they’re not the easiest to carry them around. I often do a lot of reading while I am traveling and end up carrying smaller, lighter paperbacks with me, so these books usually get sidelined. In any way, with the way I keep buying books, I will at least be able to build up a nice well stocked library!

Tesco’s Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market has lots of reasons to celebrate. The company has been seeing a growing demand for its in-house brand of food which the company will be expanding to over 250 new products, such as ready meals, juices and teas, specialized yogurts and meats that are ready to be grilled, which sells for $9.99 and contains four sausages, four chicken thighs, four beef patties and four chicken drumsticks.

The company opened in November and has been gathering customer feedback from a variety of sources, including comment cards, surveys, online surveys etc on how to improve the shopping experience. It was thanks to this initiative that the company started accepting American Express credit cards, which has been widely appreciated by shoppers.

Customers have also commented on the ease of shopping at Fresh & Easy stores, with brighter signs making it easier to find products and read the information regarding the in-house brand.

According to Tim Mason, CEO of Fresh & Easy, “We developed Fresh & Easy by listening to what consumers wanted in a grocery market. We are delighted customers have responded so well to our own-brand foods. We know our popular ready meals — such as our mango chicken and beef lasagna — give families a great value alternative to take-out, and now there will be plenty more for customers to choose from.”

JCPenney is shaking things up! A couple of decades ago, you could only get old-fashioned clothes that even employees might not have bought. Walk into a store now, and you will be able to pick up the latest of styles for teenagers, along with stylish clothes for working women, lip gloss by Dior and Sephora cosmetics. Quite a change for a stogy old company!

While the company might still not be at the cutting edge of fashion, it has found its target market with great accuracy. For the average middle class women, between the ages of 35-54 having an annual income ranging between $35,000 and $100,000, this is ‘the’ store to shop at. For younger customers as well, there is lots in store at JCPenney, who will be introducing new labels for dorm room furnishings and a back-to-school wear line called Fabulosity designed by Kimora Lee Simmons.

The company has seen a setback with consumers cutting back on spending, but that has occurred across the board with all retailers. According to Steven Hoch, marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says that JCPenney’s current turnaround is a great success story of recent times. Adding that, “J.C. Penney had to retrench and reposition. It was long and painful. The stores are significantly smaller than they used to be. But it has succeeded in becoming a moderately priced department store that offers good value.”

J.C. Penney had planned to open 50 new stores nationally this year but has scaled back to 36. The company’s 2007 annual profit was $1.11 billion, down 3.5 percent from the $1.15 billion the stores earned in 2006. Yearly same-store sales were flat when compared with those of 2006. And company officials say they do not expect sales to pick up during the rest of this year.

“I don’t think I’ve seen an environment as unpredictable as the current environment,” said company Chief Executive Officer Myron “Mike” Ullman III at a meeting with investment analysts last month.Two things J.C. Penney won’t cut back on, officials said, are the development of new labels and customer service.

By year’s end, the stores are expected to roll out several new brands. J.C. Penney also has started a new “customer first” service program that, among other things, allows employees to drop whatever they are doing to assist customers who need help in finding what they came to buy.

Photographs are a great way to express creativity, as I have only recently learned. I am simply hooked on finding interesting subjects to photographs and figuring out how to create the perfect shot. Since I don’t know any of the technical stuff about photography, I rely simply on what looks good and what looks interesting. I also like photographs that tell as story and these days, a lot of my photographs are a pictorial telling of my life.

Here’s one I took in March, when I was on vacation, but only recently uploaded on to Flickr.