Online 2010 holiday winners emerge - Walmart, Target, Best Buy

December 22, 2010

Walmart, Target and Best Buy attracted record levels of customers to their websites during November, according to data released this week by the online measurement firm comScore. Retailers have come to expect a surge in traffic to their sites as the holiday approach and during November that proved to be the case and then some.

Walmart and Target both experienced a 44% increase in the number of unique visitors to their sites during November when compared with October. The surge pushed Walmart to the 20th spot on comScore’s ranking of the top 50 U.S. online properties with a total of nearly 52 million unique visitors, while Target landed in the 27th position with nearly 40 million unique visitors. The number of visitors to Best Buy’s website grew at an even faster 75% when comparing November to October, which gave the company 28 million unique visitors and a 41st ranking on the comScore top 50 list.

“As the holiday season kicked off in November, Americans were quick to take advantage of retailers’ early promotions and saving in crossing a few items off their shopping list,” said Jeff Hackett, EVP comScore Media Metrix. “Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, came in as the heaviest online spending day on record in the U.S. which contributed a strong portion of traffic growth at retail and coupon sites.”

While Walmart, Target and Best Buy advanced their position on comScore’s top 50 list dominated by the likes of Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Facebook, Amazon.com remains king of the retail hill. It attracted roughly 84 million unique visitors during November, placing it 10th on the top properties list.

The November figures are impressive when compared with October, but less so when compared with November 2009. In fact, unique visitor growth on a year-over-year basis has moderated somewhat, with Walmart, Target and Best Buy posting increases of 5%, 2% and 7%, respectively. Amazon.com’s unique visitor growth increased 8% when compared with November 2009.

For more information, visit: http://www.retailingtoday.com/article/online-2010-holiday-winners-emerge?ad=apparel-accessories

Wal-Mart to aggressively roll out smaller stores

September 21, 2010

NEW YORK  — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is planning an aggressive push into urban markets with a new small format that’s a fraction of the size of its supercenters.

The expansion, expected to be spelled out next month at the retailer’s meeting with analysts at its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., is aimed to pump up sluggish U.S. sales.

Real estate executives said that over this past summer, the world’s largest retailer has been scouring for small locations, around 20,000 square feet, in urban areas including New York City, San Francisco and other cities. That size is larger than a typical drugstore but smaller than a supermarket.

“I see this as a smart move, instead of coming into a market as a 900-pound gorilla,” said Faith Consolo, chairman of real estate firm Prudential Douglas Elliman’s retail leasing division. She noted that Wal-Mart has been talking to landlords and brokers.

“They’re on an aggressive roll,” she added. “This is a creative time. Everyone is thinking out of the box.”

She noted that in New York City, Wal-Mart has been looking in Queens and the lower part of Manhattan.

Since 2008, Wal-Mart has been testing smaller stores called Marketside. They now total four and average 15,000 square feet. The format focuses on fresh food. And the discounter now has almost 200 Neighborhood Market by Walmart stores, which offer a mix of fresh food, pharmacy, beauty, stationary and pet supplies and are about 42,000 square feet.

Wal-Mart has been shrinking its supercenters, which carry a wide assortment of food and general merchandise, to about 150,000 square feet from 195,000 square feet. But the company has maintained that it plans to use smaller formats in urban markets.

In a note to investors Monday, Brian Sozzi, analyst with Wall Street Strategies, said he believes the new 20,000-square-foot stores would likely fuse the Marketside and Neighborhood Markets formats.

“Wal-Mart needs to have a store concept that brings in customers more than once every two weeks when paychecks are distributed,” he wrote. He added that using the Marketside Stores as a vehicle for growth is too limiting, and that Neighborhood Markets are too big to enter cities.

Wal-Mart spokesman Steven Restivo said Monday that “while we have not shared an exact size of the small format … we continue to evaluate a wide range of stores sizes across the country and will consider any format that puts us closer to our customers.”

Bill Simon, the new president and CEO of Wal-Mart’s U.S. business, told investors last week at a Goldman Sachs retail conference, said that “we will have a healthy mix of supercenters and small formats, including our grocery format, Neighborhood Market and smaller formats,” he continued. He added that in particular, Wal-Mart is looking to open stores that are similar to the formats in Mexico, Central America, and Latin America.

“We are going to beg, borrow, steal and learn from them as quickly as we can, because it is important for our urban strategy,” he added.

Wal-Mart, which now has more than 4,000 stores in the U.S. has hit a wall in the U.S. The company just reported its fifth straight quarterly decline in revenue at stores opened at least a year, considered a key indicator of a retailer’s health.

Wal-Mart benefited during the recession as affluent shoppers traded down to cheaper stores. But stubbornly high unemployment and tight credit are still squeezing its main U.S. customers, lower-income workers who are having even more trouble stretching dollars to the next payday because of tight credit and an unemployment rate stuck at almost 10 percent. The discounter’s own merchandising gaffes have also contributed to the company’s revenue figure’s decline.

Wal-Mart’s rival Target Corp. is set to spell out more details of its urban strategy on Friday to the media at its headquarters in Minneapolis. Target had told analysts in January that it plans to open in the next few years smaller stores of 60,000 to 100,000 square feet. That compares with its current average of 125,000 square feet. But real estate executives including John Bemis, head of Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.’s retail leasing team, say Target also is looking at 20,000-square-foot locations.

“I think 20,000 makes more sense than 80,000 square feet,” Sozzi said.

For further information, visit: http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2010/09/wal-mart_to_aggressively_roll.html

What Works? Wal-Mart’s Roll-back Prices

July 24, 2009

With the recession in its 18th month and unemployment now topping 9 percent, even semi-conspicuous consumption is a distant memory. Consumers are hunkered down. But when they do venture out, chances are they’re on their way to places like Wal-Mart and other big discount chains.

“Our sales — it’s like holding up a mirror to our society,” said John E. Fleming, the chief merchandising officer for Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer.

So what are Wal-Mart, with 4,100 stores across the country, and other major retailers seeing?

Less browsing in the aisles, for one thing. Consumers now are “very disciplined in terms of making sure that they don’t go beyond what they have on their lists,” Kathryn A. Tesija, Target’s executive vice president of merchandising, told investors recently.

Food, of course, is high on those lists (discretionary items like clothes and furniture are not). But consumers are cracking their wallets only so far. Many are trading down to private label groceries. At Wal-Mart, sales of refrigerated pizza were up last month compared with a year ago. Lower grades of meat are outselling the higher-grade, pricier cuts. A recession protein hierarchy has emerged, with ground beef trumping steak, and chicken trumping beef. Some consumers are forgoing protein altogether, opting for pasta.

“We’re seeing a movement away from protein into carbohydrates,” Mr. Fleming said. “It stretches the dollar a lot further.”

Retailers generally don’t divulge details of their sales by category of goods. But they were willing to discuss trends. One stood out: consumers are discovering there’s no place like home.

“This whole idea of staying home and entertaining at home, we’re seeing that everywhere,” Mr. Fleming said, “from the ‘take and bake’ pizza to the $5 movies.” Ms. Tesija noted that “sales of popcorn poppers and microwave poppers are very strong.”

Retailers say consumers are trying to make being cooped up as painless as possible. Mr. Fleming said that would explain why even in this economy, sales of flat-panel and high-definition televisions at Wal-Mart are strong. After all, the retailer’s $378, 32-inch RCA LCD television is more affordable than a vacation. (Which may be why retailers like Macy’s say luggage sales are among their weakest categories.)

Home Depot’s Craig Menear, executive vice president for merchandising, told investors recently that vegetable and herb sales were thriving because “more customers are opting to grow their own vegetable gardens.”

Car maintenance and repair is also big. Sales of motor oil, filters and tires are among Wal-Mart’s top sellers. “Anything that helps their car last longer is doing well because they’re not buying new cars,” Mr. Fleming said.

Consumers are spending to keep themselves in good health too, for fear of having to miss work. Wal-Mart said sales of vitamins are robust. So are sales of over-the-counter medications. Sales of sleep aids, pain relievers and antacids have spiked.

Home repair projects are also a priority. Home Depot’s basic repair and maintenance products — plumbing items, roofing materials, caulk — have sold better than other items.

At Wal-Mart, sales of baby formula and clothing are up. Still, Mr. Fleming said Wal-Mart could tell when parents were strapped: in the first weeks of the month they buy packs of 88 diapers; by the end of the month they’re buying the 40-pack. And at Sam’s Club, sales of pull-ups — that intermediate step between diapers and underwear — are down, suggesting parents are moving their children directly to underwear to save money.

The bottom, apparently, has met the bottom.

For further information, visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/weekinreview/07rosenbloom.html

How Is Walmart Keeping Up With Their Consumers?

June 25, 2009

The recession steered a new type of customer to Wal-Mart — deeper in the pockets and suddenly looking for bargains. Now the world’s largest retailer has to figure out how to keep that customer when the economy recovers.

So Wal-Mart is bringing in more brand names, ditching scores of other products and even redesigning hundreds of stores to give them wider aisles, better lighting and better sight lines.

It’s more than just a cosmetic upgrade. That new breed of customer also spends about 40 percent more than the traditional Wal-Mart shopper, and the retailer senses an opportunity to accelerate its growth.

Take Aditya Krishnan, a 42-year-old lawyer from San Jose, Calif. He used to buy only light bulbs at Wal-Mart but now finds himself spending $150 a month there, including buying workout clothes he used to get at Macy’s.

“If I am able to get good stuff at Wal-Mart, and I am able to save money, why would I change?” Krishnan asked. “I am seeing better brands, and the shopping experience is better” than before.

Wal-Mart says that’s no accident. It’s placing a big bet on the redesign of most of its 3,600 stores, started last fall. This fiscal year, it plans to redo up to 600 at a cost from $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion.

The prototype for the remodeling includes lower shelves to make it easier to see across the store, better lighting and wider aisles. Expanded electronics areas will include interactive displays to test video games and portable gadgets.

The store now carries brands like Danskin and Better Homes and Gardens, and its electronics section now stocks pricier products like Palm Inc.’s well-received new Pre smartphone.

Whether it all works, Wall Street analysts say, depends in part on how quickly the behemoth retailer can remodel and keep shoppers satisfied. Concerns about how Wal-Mart will keep its momentum have sent its stock down 13 percent this year.

The early signs are positive, putting pressure on the rest of the industry. Target Corp., whose sales have been hampered by its emphasis on nonessentials like trendy jeans, is expanding its fresh food offerings. Best Buy Co. is beefing up customer service.

“I believe a lot of what (Wal-Mart) is doing is working,” said Joseph Feldman, a retail analyst at Telsey Advisory Group. “They are a threat to everyone.”

Other discounters, including TJX Cos. Inc., which sells name-brand fashions and home furnishings, Costco Wholesale Corp. and BJ’s Wholesale Club Inc., are focusing on how to hold on to new customers lured by low prices during the recession.

But Wal-Mart, which only three years ago struggled with cluttered stores, long lines, stiff towels and unattractive clothing, has a bigger hurdle to climb. And it has to move fast to win over people who still have negative feelings about shopping there.

“The service still needs to be improved, and the stores are a little sloppy,” said Daniel Chou, 35, of Warren, N.J., who was at a local Wal-Mart to pick up a bungee cord but who says he rarely shops there.

Stock in Wal-Mart and a few other discounters such as Costco Wholesale Corp. have fallen this year as investors turn to beaten-down shares of more upscale companies like Macy’s Inc. and Williams Sonoma Inc., which investors believe don’t have much further to fall.

Wal-Mart, which topped $400 billion in sales last year, attracts more than 140 million customers per week. But to get them to buy more than just groceries, which account for about half of annual sales, it’s paring its product lineup and making room for better brands.

Consultant Burt P. Flickinger III estimates the remodeled stores are carrying 10 to 15 percent less inventory, particularly getting rid of no-name labels.

The shift risks turning off longtime customers who are looking for only the cheapest products. It’s happened before: The company had to dump Metro 7, its in-house clothing line launched in 2005, because it turned out to be too trendy for its general clientele.

Wal-Mart executives say 17 percent of the chain’s traffic growth in February came from new customers, and they’re spending 40 percent more per trip. More than half of those shoppers living in households that take in more than $50,000 a year.

While that may not be considered affluent, it’s a big departure from Wal-Mart’s core customers, of whom one in five does not have a bank account or has limited access to financial services.

To keep prices low while offering better products, Wal-Mart is slashing its own costs in little ways. The Angus ribeye steak being sold at Sam’s Club at 25 percent below competitors’ prices is paid for in part by a switch to shorter straws at its cafe, saving $52,000 a year, says spokeswoman Susan Koehler.

A recently converted customer is Judy Safern, a 42-year-old public relations executive from Dallas who used to buy her children’s clothing at Galleria mall and groceries at Tom Thumb supermarket.

She now says she hasn’t been to the mall in a year and figures she saves several hundred dollars a month by buying most clothing and food at Wal-Mart. “I basically buy everything there,” she said.

For further information, visit: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-us-new-frugality-upgrading-wal-mart,0,6108830.story

Recession On Wal-Mart

June 22, 2009

The world is going soft on Wal-Mart. From 2005 to 2007, two union-funded organizations—employing more than 50 activists—dedicated significant time and resources to attacking the company, especially for its abuses of workers’ rights, which included low wages, sex discrimination, and theft of overtime pay. Journalists shared the animus, and negative stories about the company appeared several times a week throughout 2005. But we’ve all eased up on the Bentonville, Ark., discount giant. Wal-Mart has been born again as a chapter of the Sierra Club, improving its reputation among elites. More importantly, during the election of 2008, union members and other liberal activists had another priority: winning the presidency. Now, anti-Wal-Mart organizing is on hiatus, as most labor groups hope to address the company’s problems through legislative means, especially health care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act. It seems fitting that in this less-feverish environment, with fewer press releases flying, more scholarly work on the company should emerge.

Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise views the company as product of its region, showing that its success has depended on a bizarre reconciliation of Northwest Arkansas’s uneasy cocktail of anti-corporate populism, racial homogeneity, evangelical Christianity, and free enterprise. Nelson Lichtenstein’s The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business situates the company in its national context, especially the rise of laissez-faire economics and the decline of organized labor. Activists and journalists criticizing Wal-Mart’s business practices—from child labor to violations of organizing rights—are often asked, Why pick on Wal-Mart when so many other businesses also engage in these unattractive behaviors? The usual answer is that as an industry leader, Wal-Mart has the power to set standards—or drag them down. But Moreton and Lichtenstein show that this is not the only reason Wal-Mart matters. The mega-retailer is significant not only as a business success story but as an ideological triumph for the right.

Bethany Moreton charts this triumph brilliantly. While liberal observers have, in recent years, wondered why people of modest means would ever embrace anti-government, pro-business politics—What’s the Matter With Kansas?, as Tom Frank demanded—Moreton shows that it’s not because they’re hoodwinked. Just like Kansas, Northwest Arkansas, ground zero for the movement against chain stores in the early 20th century, used to harbor populist hostility to big business. How, then, did this region become home to the largest and most rapaciously exploitive retailer on earth? It was not a purely top-down political achievement. Rather, women of the Sun Belt, entering the service-economy work force, coped with profound upheavals in family and work life by creating a new ideology for themselves, and Wal-Mart followed their lead. Over the course of the 20th century, these women left subsistence farming behind and reinvented rural populism into a new worldview that could embrace both evangelical religion and a devout faith in the market: Christian free enterprise. Critical to this fusion was the idea of the “servant leader,” an ideal that exalted service-sector labor into a calling despite meager compensation and poor opportunities for advancement. When female hourly Wal-Mart workers talk about their work, they tend to emphasize their relationships with customers, how good it feels to help people.

Equally astute is Moreton’s assessment of how Wal-Mart customers in the region learned to love consumerism despite cultural antipathies. As Moreton points out, Protestantism, with all its prohibitions on sensual pleasure and, indeed, on leisure itself, has had an uneasy relationship to consumer capitalism. Sam Walton needed to convince “his notably underconsuming Ozark neighbors to buy in abundance,” Moreton explains. “Ideologically, the challenge was to find a form of purchasing that did not suggest sensual self-indulgence.” While the department store—as Theodore Dreiser describes it in his 1900 novel Sister Carrie, a tale of a country girl’s fall from innocence—was viewed as a site of sinful desire and greed, Wal-Mart was the opposite. It was—and is—all about frugality, which renders shopping at Wal-Mart not just acceptable but a genuine Protestant virtue. As Moreton points out, the store’s interiors “were ostentatiously stripped-down, no-frills places entirely lacking in sensual ambience.” Even better, Wal-Mart made shopping into an expression of “family values,” where mostly women customers came—unlike wantonly selfish consumers like Sister Carrie or Carrie Bradshaw—to provide for their children.

Lichtenstein’s book is less analytically groundbreaking than Moreton’s, but The Retail Revolution is usefully comprehensive and offers the best account yet of the myriad problems that Wal-Mart employees endure, including the elaborate measures the company has taken to avoid paying workers’ compensation to employees injured on the job. Lichtenstein agrees with Moreton that, as impressive as Wal-Mart may be as a business phenomenon, some of the company’s greatest feats have been political: resisting government regulation, lobbying against labor law reform, fighting unionization in its stores, and maintaining a corporate culture of remarkable consensus (or even, as anyone knows after witnessing the Wal-Mart cheer, fervor). Unlike any other retailer, Wal-Mart has, when criticized for its low wages and anti-union extremism, made political and economic arguments in its own defense: arguing that Wal-Mart’s prices are so low that they’ve offered, in CEO Lee Scott’s words, “a lifeline for millions of middle and lower-income families who live payday to payday. In effect, [Wal-Mart] gives them a raise every time they shop with us.” Lichtenstein, to his credit, is willing to shed academic objectivity and intervene in such bogus arguments, pointing out that consumer goods now represent only 18 percent of a family’s budget, while the costs of housing, health care, and education have skyrocketed. None of these expensive things can be purchased at Wal-Mart, he notes, but they can be bought with higher wages, which Wal-Mart has always done everything in its political power—fighting EFCA, quashing efforts to raise the minimum wage—to oppose.

It’s still unclear whether the recent political misfortunes of the right will significantly affect Wal-Mart; certainly the company’s domestic sales are holding up remarkably well in the recession. Lichtenstein thinks the Obama presidency will surely be bad news for the Wal-Mart business model. True, Obama’s labor secretary, Hilda Solis, may do a better job of enforcing of wage-and-hour laws than her predecessor did, but the larger question of whether Wal-Mart workers will be able to join a union depends at least partly on labor law reform, whose future is wildly uncertain. We may be, as Lichtenstein suggests, approaching the end of “the age of Wal-Mart,” but can we create an economic order in which the generosity and dedication of Bethany Moreton’s “servant leaders” might find a better outlet than wild cheers for abusive masters? Too soon to predict, but let’s hope so.

For further information, visit: http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/judgments/2009/06/22/church-wal-mart

Some Big Chains Reconstruct to Accomodate Consumers During This Recession

June 22, 2009

Shopping as we know it is on the brink of major change.

Hammered by the recession, some of the nation’s biggest retailers are seizing the moment to reinvent their business strategies. And the impact will mean both sweeping changes in the merchandise on their shelves and subtler alterations, like how many pantyhose to keep in stock.

High-end stores like Neiman Marcus, Saks and Coach will offer more midpriced merchandise. Many chains, including Wal-Mart, will carry less inventory and fewer brands. The likes of Sears and J. C. Penney will put self-service computers in stores so customers can browse collections or buy out-of-stock items. And retailers of all stripes will offer more exclusive merchandise and more attentive customer service.

One of the biggest changes consumers are likely to see is greater personalization and regionalization of merchandise.

An initiative known as “My Macy’s” requires the retailer’s merchandisers and other planners to go into stores each week to learn from the sales staff — who keep logs at the cash registers — what shoppers are requesting, snapping up or complaining about.

For instance, when strapless and bare-shouldered dresses were selling well everywhere except Salt Lake City and Pittsburgh, Macy’s employees in those stores knew the problem was that their customers wanted more modest dresses. So they passed that information on to the merchandisers. Out went the strapless dresses; in came dresses with cap sleeves. And sales went from lackluster to robust.

Under the new system it will not be unusual for a local Macy’s to stock the merchandise customers request, be it wide-width shoes or Sean John suits, and for those offerings to be different from the ones in a Macy’s store 100 miles away.

“I think what Macy’s is embarking on is perhaps the largest transformation in our company in a couple of decades,” said Terry J. Lundgren, president and chief executive.

The Macy’s change is just one example of a wide range of initiatives retailers are pursuing as they struggle to cope with an economy where sales are lower than they were just a few years ago.

At high-end stores, the era of ever-escalating prices on luxury goods appears to be over. In the future, consumers will still be able to buy chic brand names, but at a wider range of prices.

“Our customer loves our brands,” said Stephen I. Sadove, chairman and chief executive of Saks. “They don’t want to trade down to lower brands. But they want more of a range in price within the brands that they love.”

And that is what retailers intend to give them. Burton M. Tansky, president and chief executive of Neiman Marcus Group, told investors on a conference call last week that “we’re working with the designers to try and ease a portion of their collections into a new price range.”

Prices will also be lower at some “affordable luxury” chains, like Coach, which is increasing the proportion of handbags it sells for less than $300. About 50 percent of the company’s handbags will cost $200 to $300, in contrast to about 30 percent of handbags last year.

Another change is that consumers will have fewer brands from which to choose. Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, and PetSmart are just a few of the chains winnowing their brands. As Home Depot’s executive vice president for merchandising, Craig Menear, put it: consumers are “time-starved” and “looking for simplification in the entire shopping experience.”

That may delight minimalists, because it will be easier to find items on the shelves. But it also limits choice.

Another potential drawback for consumers is that stores may run out of stock more quickly than in the past because, as Mr. Lundgren of Macy’s explained, “retailers learned that you can’t get out of the merchandise that you ordered months before.”

“Instead,” he said, “you’re more likely to see retailers ordering fewer of each individual size and taking that risk that they’ll sell out and not capture every sale, rather than the risk of having too much inventory left over to mark down.”

Another trend is on the horizon: seasonal transitions for apparel will probably have shorter lead times. With strapped consumers buying only what they need when they need it, it has occurred to retailers that selling swimsuits to New Yorkers in early March is not necessarily a winning strategy. And so chains are beginning to work with suppliers to shorten the time between ordering and delivering merchandise.

Consumers will also see even more of the exclusive collaborations between retailers and prominent designers that are so prevalent today. That will help distinguish stores as well as avoid price wars because the same items will not be sold at multiple chains.

Yet another change will be the obliteration of any remaining divide between online and in-store shopping.

In Sears stores, “appliance research centers” with computers are enabling customers to compare local competitors’ prices. (If Sears does not offer the best price, it will match the lowest offer and hand over 10 percent of the difference.) Four J. C. Penney stores in Dallas are testing “FindMore” machines the size of arcade games, letting customers see every item J. C. Penney sells and find out if the item they want is in the store or online.

Shopping by cellphone will also become widespread.

“Everything we are developing is with a mind-set that it’s going to be running on a handset,” said J. C. Penney’s chief information officer, Thomas M. Nealon.

Despite all the new technology, consumers will be getting more attention from sales staff. During the last few years, retailers did not have to work hard to separate consumers from their dollars.

But those days are over. More middle-market chains are striving for Nordstrom-quality service to win customers. Even Home Depot has adopted its “most extensive customer service training ever,” its chairman and chief executive, Frank Blake, told investors and retailing analysts last week.

Of course, luxury chains have always featured a high level of attentiveness. But the chains say that in this economy, customers have heightened expectations. Saks, for one, has invested tens of millions of dollars in the last year on software that provides its sales staff easy access to information about client purchases and preferences, so that a returning customer might be greeted by a sales representative who recalls the shopper’s suit size and penchant for Christian Louboutin heels.

Economists and analysts forecast that it will take up to 10 years to return to 2007 levels of consumer spending — which makes now a good time for retailers to re-imagine the future. Paul A. Laudicina, chairman and managing officer of A. T. Kearney, the management consulting firm, noted that major consumer innovations like Neoprene and Teflon came out of the Depression.

Mr. Lundgren pointed out that if consumers were still throwing money around, stores might not want to alter strategies that were still working.

But with today’s recession, he said, “now is the time to aggressively rock the boat.”

For further information, visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/business/20retail.html