Retail’s Ups And Downs: lululemon, Walmart And Canadian Convenience Stores

The life of a retailer can be a tough one.

Just ask lululemon.

The trendy yoga pants and athleisure retailer recently announced that it plans to open a series of smaller, “local” stores after a disappointing quarterly earnings report.

Lululemon is hoping the smaller stores, which will be about 1,000–2,000 square feet, will help boosts its earnings.

Lululemon operated a total of 379 stores as of July 31 and plans to open up 42 new stores in FY2016.

Here are some of the other big winners and losers of the retail game at the moment.

UP

Aéropostale will live to sell another day after being purchased by a consortium of several property companies in a $243.3 million auction.

The plan, which still must be approved by a Manhattan bankruptcy judge, will see Aéropostale survive as a 229-store chain, along with an eCommerce site and an international licensing business.

It’s also a good time to be Amazon or just Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, as shares of the eCommerce giant hit an all-time high in trading on Tuesday (Sept. 6), with the price of the company’s stock jumping about 2 percent.

Shares rose to about $787.15 per on Tuesday, bringing the total value of Amazon to a staggering $373 billion. Since Bezos owns so much of the company, he also enjoys a big bump in his net worth as well. Bezos is now worth more than $67 billion, according to CNNMoney.

Canada’s Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. continues its U.S. expansion as it’s just entered into an agreement to buy 53 stores in Louisiana, primarily in the Baton Rouge market, from American General Investments and North American Financial Group.

The 53 stores currently operate as Cracker Barrels and include 12 quick-service restaurants.

Couche-Tard is the leader in the Canadian convenience store sector and is quickly becoming one of the largest independent convenience store operators in the U.S. as well. Last week, the company announced that it had reached a $3.8 billion agreement to acquire CST Brands and take over its more than 2,000 stores in the U.S. and Canada.

DOWN

It’s not a good time right now to be a Walmart employee, as The Wall Street Journal reports that America’s largest retailer cut some 7,000 jobs this summer, primarily back-office positions in the company’s accounting and invoicing divisions.

Auto sales also had a bad month in August, dropping 4.1 percent to 1,512,556 total sales for the month, leaving many to believe that the booming market of late may be starting to cool off.

GM, the market leader, saw a dip of 5 percent on sales of 256,429 vehicles; Ford was down 8 percent in August, selling 214,482 vehicles; Volkswagen, possibly because of an emissions scandal, saw the largest decline out of all the major auto retailers, down 9.1 percent to 29,384 vehicles.

Of all the major automakers, only Fiat Chrysler saw positive numbers in the month of August, increasing sales by 3 percent to 197,000.

It was also a bad week for jobs data, as the U.S. created far fewer jobs in the month of August than expected. There were 151,000 new jobs created in August, down significantly from the 255,000 created in July and one of the smaller increases in recent months.

The lagging jobs numbers and the slowdown in auto sales is leading many economic experts to predict that the Federal Reserve will hold off on any interest rate hikes until at least December so as to not further dampen or hinder the fragile economy.