Sears Stores Sell Cash To Relieve Pressure On Losses

Statistics show that Sears Co was once the United States and the largest private retailer in the world. It merged with Kmart Corp in March 24, 2005 to form the third largest retail group in the United States. Sears store sales in the US are attracting attention.

To ease the pressure of losses, Sears stores in the United States chose to sell their stores. The US Sears Co said it would sell retail stores to its own real estate investment trusts to raise itself by raising $2 billion 500 million. Financial strength 。

Sears said that the company will raise funds to acquire the property from Sears and Kat Matt through issuing bonds and listing, and the relevant work is expected to be completed in the two quarter. As of January 31, 2015, Sears owned or rented 1725 stores of Sears and Kat Matt.

It is understood that in order to reverse Sears's declining trend in the past 11 quarters, Sears Chief executive Eddie Lamb Pete acts frequently, including cutting costs. Sell assets A series of transformation methods did not allow companies to stop losses. According to Sears's three quarter report last year, Sears's three quarter revenue dropped from US $8 billion 270 million in the same period last year to US $7 billion 210 million. The net loss of the company continued to expand to 548 million US dollars from the US $534 million a year earlier. Sears said that the company plans to shut down a total of 235 businesses in 2014. After shutting down these stores, the company's profit before tax, tax, depreciation and amortization will increase by 50 million dollars.

Related links:

After the technology development, the queuing will be terminated. It can be expected that the salesmen in the future will become more relaxed, and chat with customers can solve some occasional troubles and doubts. But with such a look, the supermarket cashier may face a career crisis.

As a rational online shopping enthusiast, I often buy necessities on the Internet. Not only is the online category more complete, the brand is more, it is more favorable than the supermarket, but more importantly, I hate queuing. Waiting for a car to look at the cashier is always in the dark.

However, online shopping, though eliminating the pain of queuing, still does not solve the problem of waiting. If there is no toilet paper at home, the logistics of any electricity supplier is no faster than finding it on supermarket shelves and getting it home in a shopping basket. And for books, clothes, electronic products and other commodities, offline shopping is still an important part of shopping experience.

In the increasingly developed electricity business future, offline retailers will not disappear, but shopping experience in physical stores needs to be optimized. CISCO has conceived the concept of "The Museum of Lasts" in a series of advertising campaigns, which mentioned that in the more intelligent future, queuing shopping experience will be put into the museum.

CISCO's research suggests that the Internet of things can help people end the "long wait" in offline shopping. It surveyed 1240 consumers in the United States and the United Kingdom on the 19 retailers' views on the retail industry under the Internet of things improvement line. The most popular three items were augmented reality, shop preferences and checkout experience.

The simplest way to connect everything is to use Internet of things in commodity labels. The Guardian reported that Lillian Edwards Edwards, a professor at the University of Stella Clyde, said at a smart city conference in Glasgow that supermarkets had been testing the use of RFID chips in product labels.

RFID (Radio Frenquecy Identification) is a non-contact automatic identification and data acquisition (AIDC) technology, which is mainly composed of tags and readers, and automatically identifies target objects and obtains data through radio frequency signals. RFID tag can store electronic information of goods and be used for identification and tracking. Unlike bar code, it does not need and can be automatically recognized by readers. In practical applications, it can further transmit and manage data through wireless networks. WAL-MART has used it to manage the supply chain, and Macy department store has been widely used in the management of goods in retail stores.

In the supermarket, an application scenario mentioned by Lillian Edwards is that when customers enter the supermarket, they will get a RFID reader with the shopping cart. Whenever they take a product, they will automatically charge the price if they brush it. Before leaving the supermarket, the amount has been calculated and only the final payment is required. If you have a bank card that is paid by wireless, leaving the supermarket is as easy as getting the card out of the subway.

And the idea of Sarah Eccleston, CISCO's UK business network director, is further: she mentioned to The Guardian, that when every book in the bookstore can be identified online and customers carry a smart phone with payment function, you can go out of the bookstore directly with the picked book. At this point, your mobile payment account will automatically deduct money without any contact with the cashier.

Although the Internet of things is not yet popular, simplifying checkout procedures and reducing cashiers are already the trend of offline store development. Apple retail stores do not set up cashiers, only those who help you to pay credit cards. The receipts are also sent by e-mail. Self checkout machines are already popular in mainstream supermarkets abroad. Customers can scan goods, credit cards or coin payments on their machines. There are no shelves in the Argos supermarket in the UK, only warehouses and delivery areas. Customers can go to the physical stores to pick up goods through their website or App.

In the bold vision of Eccleston, we don't even need to go shopping in the future: the compartment of the smart refrigerator will find out which food you have eaten, then automatically notify the supermarket, the supermarket can start to stock up for you, and connect your network account to automated payment. All you have to do is go to the supermarket to get things home on weekends.

However, where are the boundaries of the Internet of things? How about the accuracy of automated ordering and payment? And how to solve the inevitable data privacy and security problems? Amazon's newly launched WiFi button module Dash Button provides a good solution. At the same time, it also brings more competition pressure to supermarkets and retail stores under the line.

In addition to using the Internet of things, offline stores can also attract customers through virtual reality and real-time push notification using Beacon technology. CISCO's data show that for all retailers with a size of 200 billion yuan, using all the concept of Internet of things can increase more than 200 million of net profit and increase profits by 15.6%. The offline stores that have improved the checkout process and shopping experience are more likely to achieve "counterattack" to the electricity supplier.