America’s Most Popular Stores

By Michael B. Sauter, Alexander E. M. Hess and Samuel Weigley | 24/7 Wall St – Fri, May 10, 2013 3:58 PM ED
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  Reuters - A McDonald's restaurant sign is seen at a McDonald's restaurant in Del Mar, California April 16, 2013. REUTERS/Mike Blake

One half of Americans went to McDonald’s at least once in March, according to location analytics group Placed Insights. Nearly four in ten Americans visited Walmart, the next most popular business in March.

Placed Insights, a consumer habits data service provider, monitors the consumption behavior of more than 70,000 Americans ages 14 and older on a monthly basis. The data show that a handful of companies are visited by at more than one in 10 Americans each month. The companies are primarily in the fast food, discount retail and pharmacy sectors. Based on a review of Placed’s data for March 2013, these are the most visited stores in America.

The type of businesses these companies are in plays a big part in the kind of foot traffic they get each month. According to Placed Insights, less than 40% of Americans visited a bank or clothing fashion store in March. At the same time, an estimated 60% visited a department store, and more than two-thirds went to a fast food restaurant at least once.

Placed Insights founder and CEO David Shim explained that the type of goods being sold at a business is the difference between Americans going once a year, or once a week. “People go to fast food at a high frequency. They don’t necessarily go shopping for a sweater every day, but they eat food every day.”

It should come as no surprise that most of these companies have made concerted effort to expand their products, with varying degrees of success. Walmart, for example, has expanded its business to offer groceries, and even has fast food restaurants in the store. Starbucks has expanded its menu options to include breakfast sandwiches and other meals. McDonald’s new McCafe coffee brand has been very successful. These are all new services devised to make more money on existing customers, bring in a new set of customers, and to bring them in more often.

While the type of goods and services being offered by these companies is critical, the other is their dominant national presence. These companies have thousands of locations all over the country. Rare is the American town without a McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Subway, or some combination of the three. McDonald’s had more than 14,000 locations in the U.S. in 2012, while Subway had more than 25,000 stores.

Using figures recently published by Placed Insights, 24/7 Wall St. compiled a list of the most visited stores in America. To assess how profitable and popular these stores were, we also consulted companies’ financial statements. Same-store sales growth, systemwide sales, and other measures of store performance were provided by research firms RetailSails and Technomic. Stock prices are for the parent company that owns the store.

These are America’s most popular stores.

10. Target
REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque> Percent visited: 14.2%
> Revenue: $73.3 billion
> 1-yr. stock price change: 27.56%
> Store category: Discount & variety stores

Target was the second most-visited discount retailer in the U.S. during March, behind only Walmart. One reason was the number of Target stores. The company has been attempting to take on Walmart by adding grocery sections to more of its stores and by offering food at competitive prices. This has helped Target maintain strong financial performance despite the weak economy and its additional spending on its launch in Canada. Most Americans surveyed by the American Customer Satisfaction Index rated Target well. It finished in a three-way tie for the second-highest rated discount store behind Nordstrom.

9. Taco Bell
REUTERS/Fred Prouser> Percent visited: 18.2%
> Revenue: $13.6 billion
> 1-yr. stock price change: -3.89%
> Store category: Fast food

As recently as 2011, Taco Bell was struggling to keep competitor Chipotle from taking its customers, with flat or negative same-store sales growth in each quarter that year. This changed in early 2012, when Taco Bell released the “Doritos Locos” taco, a hard taco with a shell made of Doritos nacho chips. The taco help the company increase comparable sales in every quarter of 2012, as the company sold over 1 million such tacos per day. In March, Taco Bell operator Yum! Brands executive Greg Creed told The Daily Beast the company hired 15,000 workers just to meet demand for the taco in 2012. Last year, the company’s sales increased by $1 billion to $11.8 billion, and net income rose by roughly $300 million to $1.6 billion.

8. CVS
AP Photo/M. Spencer Green> Percent visited: 18.9%
> Revenue: $123.1 billion
> 1-yr. stock price change: 27.56%
> Store category: Drugstore

CVS dominates the pharmacy market. According to the company, it is the top provider of prescriptions in the country, filling or managing more than 1 billion prescriptions a year. With stores located in 45 states, one of the company’s 7,400 retail stores are within three miles of 75% of the people who live in the markets it serves. Last year, CVS estimated it gained millions of new customers following a dispute between Walgreens and Express Scripts, the prescription management service. Even after the dispute was resolved, CVS was able to retain customers who used to fill prescriptions at Walgreens. In the first quarter of 2013, the company’s revenue grew 5%, as same-store sales grew 4%.

7. Walgreens
REUTERS/Andrew Kelly> Percent visited: 22.7%
> Revenue: $71.6 billion
> 1-yr. stock price change: 42.17%
> Store category: Drugstore

Walgreens was by far the most visited drugstore in the country in March for those 14 and older. Some 22.7% of consumers shopped there, compared to the 18.9% for main competitor CVS. According to RetailSails, the company has the most stores, at 7,890, and the largest average store, at 14,400 square feet, among all drugstore chains. The company’s first place spot may not last, however. The company lost significant business to CVS over a now-resolved dispute with Express Scripts. The company spent nearly nine months without using Express Scripts, the largest prescription management service in the country, losing an estimated 60 million prescriptions to rivals. CVS estimates that it will retain roughly half of the Walgreen’s customers it gained as a result of the dispute.

6. Wendy’s
AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar> Percent visited: 22.8%
> Revenue: $2.5 billion
> 1-Yr. stock price change: 11.84%
> Store category: Fast food

In 2011, Wendy’s systemwide sales surpassed Burger King’s, making it the second largest burger chain in the U.S. But Wendy’s growth has actually been quite modest as of late, with same-store sales in North America growing just 1.6% from 2011 to 2012. Wendy’s is currently in the process of remodeling many of its restaurants to have more comfortable seating arrangements and flat-screen televisions. However, not all of the stores are getting upgraded, some will be closed. The company announced in March it was going to shutter as many as 130 underperforming stores throughout the country. Last year, the company also underwent considerable changes in its marketing strategy and menu in order to lure customers who have been tempted to eat at places such as Panera, which promotes healthier food for slightly higher prices.

5. Starbucks
REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth> Percent visited: 23.9%
> Revenue: $13.3 billion
> 1-yr. stock price change: 12.46%
> Store category: Coffee

There is a reason Starbucks is number one in the coffee category: sales in the U.S. grew by nearly 346% between 2001 and 2012, and the number of stores grew by 195%. The company has struggled in the U.S. in the past several years, but SBUX stock has continued to rise as global sales have helped to pick up the slack. Worldwide, Starbucks revenue grew by 7% in 2012 compared to 2011. This included a 15% growth in the Asia/Pacific region. In its early years, the company did not place great emphasis on its food items, focusing mostly on its coffee business. However, that has changed in recent years, especially following the purchase of Bay Area pastry chain La Boulangerie. The success of this acquisition is still in the air. Some industry analysts remain skeptical of Starbucks’ ability to compete for customers’ breakfast purchases.

4. Burger King
REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier> Percent visited: 24.3%
> Revenue: $2.0 billion
> 1-yr. stock price change: N/A
> Store category: Fast food

Rival Wendy’s overtook Burger King in 2011 as America’s second largest burger chain, behind McDonald’s. The last decade or so has been especially tumultuous for Burger King, being taken private in two separate instances, in 2002 and in 2010. Just last June, Burger King became a public company yet again. The company has not performed well in years, with an average growth rate of -0.1% between 2001 and 2013. A restructuring that began after the second buyout in 2010, in which stores were sold to franchisees rather than being owned by the company, has cut deeply into the company’s sales. But not all news for Burger King is bad news as nearly one quarter of Americans visited Burger King in March.

3. Subway
Casey Rodgers/Invision for SUBWAY/AP Images> Percent visited: 37.8%
> Revenue: N/A
> 1-yr. stock price change: N/A
> Store category: Fast food

Between 2001 and 2012, Subway’s systemwide sales in the U.S. grew nearly 169%, while the number of stores grew nearly 93%. Subway is by far the largest fast-food chain in the U.S., with almost 26,000 restaurants. The company has been able to fuel its large growth through both international expansion and a domestic focus on healthy eating, most notably using Jared Fogle — a man who lost weight while regularly eating the company’s sandwiches — in its ad campaigns. In 2013, for the ninth year in a row, Subway received the highest score in the country in a Harris Poll EquiTrend study for the “quick service restaurants” category and was named brand of the year by that group.

2. Walmart
REUTERS/John Gress> Percent visited: 38.8%
> Revenue: $469.2 billion
> 1-yr. stock price change: 34.29%
> Store category: Discount & variety stores

Walmart is by far the number one discount retailer in the U.S. and in many parts of the world. It was recently ranked No. 1 in the Fortune 500 after it reported more than $469 billion in worldwide revenue in 2012. While international markets are critical to growth, the U.S. market represents the majority of revenue: U.S. sales comprise 62% of the company’s sales. In the last five years, Walmart has added 450 U.S. stores, a 13% increase overall. However, according to Bloomberg, the company’s U.S. workforce has dropped 1.4% in that time frame, leading to customers’ complaints about a lack of inventory and longer check-out lines. Some customers began to shop at places such as Target and Costco. In February, the American Customer Service Index ranked Walmart the lowest of all discount retailers, the sixth year in a row the chain has ranked the lowest or tied for the position.

1. McDonald’s
AP Photo/Ng Han Guan> Percent visited: 49.0%
> Revenue: $27.6 billion
> 1-yr. stock price change: 6.92%
> Store category: Fast food

Almost half of all Americans visited McDonald’s in March, making it by far the most-visited store in the nation. Despite this, U.S. sales of $8.8 billion were not the company’s largest revenue segment last year, rather it was the company’s sales in Europe of $10.8 billion. It remains to be seen if McDonald’s can grow any further. According to Technomic,  systemwide sales grew at an annualized rate of nearly 5% from 2001 through 2012. However, this has slowed recently. The company’s same-store sales in the United States rose by just 0.3% from the year before in the final quarter of 2012. The company is already so large that its bottom line is highly affected by global economic conditions, leaving it currently unable to raise prices. In order to boost sales, McDonald’s CEO told CNBC the company may look to boost sales by allowing U.S. stores to serve breakfast all day.

Hyundai unveils the future of personal mobility, because walking doesn’t cut it

By Alex Lloyd | Motoramic – Tue, Apr 9, 2013 11:07 AM EDT

Despite modern advancements in sneaker technology, walking remains a slow way to go. Running, however, achieves acceptable velocity, but even with a smoothie made by Lance Armstrong, we tire quickly. The Segway never truly caught on for those not on government payrolls and, let’s face it, skateboards went out of fashion shortly after the first "Back to the Future."

Hyundai decided it’s time to change all this, and at the Seoul Motor Show, its engineers unveiled a moveable egg concept that promises speeds faster than a Segway, and a strange helmet that makes you look far cooler than any skateboarder could ever dream.

The egg is entitled the E4U – standing for Egg, Evolution, Electricity and Eco-friendliness. The result of an annual invention contest among Hyundai engineers in South Korea, the odd-egg was designed as a potential future of personal mobility: It can travel up to speeds just shy of 20 mph, weighs 176 lbs. (sounds mobile to me), and boasts a 24V battery attached to a 500W electric motor.

The steering appears to be controlled somewhat akin to the Segway, with an abundance of tilting, pivoting, and other unnatural behaviors required to induce motion.

According to tech site Nikkei Tech-On, who witnessed a demonstration in Seoul, the E4U stands on semispherical balls. The driver (rider?) must tilt the egg to move, but it appears to be in a rather counterintuitive way: you move forward by putting weight on your left foot, backwards by transferring the weight to your right foot, and left and right by tilting backwards and forwards respectively. Tech-Onmentioned the driver stated, “Without some practice, it does not move in the desired direction.”

Hyundai make a point of emphasizing the streamlined stance of the E4U, because, you know, aerodynamics play a large role at speeds as high as 18 mph. Perhaps the best feature is the helmet, however. It appears to be your regular bicycle helmet with a clear plastic screen draped over the driver’s face; presumably to prevent bug splatter while maximizing operator shame.

While I appreciate the sentiment in trying to make personal mobility easier, I can’t imagine nipping to the shops aboard an E4U; my legs may be inferior to the propulsion generated by the world’s largest egg, but the humility of wearing that helmet would be too much to bear. What was wrong with the bicycle, again?

Lessons from the List of Most Valuable Companies

By Allan Roth | CBS MoneyWatch – Mon, Apr 8, 2013 11:17 AM EDT

RELATED QUOTES

Symbol	Price	Change
AAPL	423.35	-2.86
XOM	89.19	0.59

You've probably heard that two corporate heavyweights, Apple (AAPL) and ExxonMobil (XOM), are fighting for the distinction of being the most valuable company on the planet. That made me curious about who the top ten are, and what lessons could be learned.

To determine the top ten, I used market capitalization to measure the value of the companies. That's simply a matter of multiplying the number of shares they have outstanding by the price of their stock, and here they are:

Courtesy CBS MoneyWatch

It turns out that the top ten produced some interesting statistics:

• Their combined value is over $2.1 trillion, or about 12 percent of the U.S. national debt.
• Nine are based in the United States while one is based in China.
• Apple and ExxonMobil have large leads on the others.
• Four are tech, three energy, and one each are retail, diversified, and a holding company.

Will Apple or ExxonMobil still be number one at the end of the decade? Will one of the next eight take over? Perhaps the new champ won't even be a top ten today.

I went back to the beginning of 2000, when Microsoft and GE were fighting for the top slot and Apple wasn't a contender. Hard as it is to imagine now, you may not have even heard of Google at that time. In fact, half of today's top ten weren't in the top ten back then.  Further, Intel was number seven on the charts in 1999 -- today, it barely breaks the top 50 at #48.

The lesson here is that the future is very uncertain. For those who might want to put all their eggs in one of these corporate heavy hitter's' basket, it's important to consider that some of these top ten will fall from grace by the end of the decade, and other companies we've barely heard of today will become household names.

Which ones do I bet on? All of them. By owning a total U.S. and total international index fund, I know I'm going to own tomorrow's top ten.

Warning: Smoking Is Hazardous to Your Employment

By Leslie Kwoh | The Wall Street Journal – 22 hours ago

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• Yahoo! Finance/Getty Images -

Companies aren't just singling out overweight employees. Staffers who smoke are under fire too.

In small but growing numbers, employers in recent years have been refusing to hire smokers, arguing that coaxing tobacco users to quit with free cessation programs or cash incentives hasn't worked. Some medical experts back the bans, saying the end result of reducing smoking is worth it. But other health-care experts say the policy crosses an ethical line by singling out poorer and less educated groups who, federal data shows, smoke more often.

In all, about four out of 10 employers reward or penalize employees based on tobacco use. But hiring bans, which are legal in 21 states, are gaining traction, with about 4% adopting the policy and an additional 2% planning to do so next year, according to a recent study by the National Business Group on Health and consulting firm Towers Watson (TW). Most firms simply ask job candidates if they smoke, but a few require candidates to take urine tests to be screened for nicotine, as part of a broader drug test.

To date, along with some casinos, the bans have been most commonly followed by health-care employers, including Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger Health System and Baylor Health Care System, based in Dallas. Not surprisingly, that has prompted a debate within the medical community. Two groups of health researchers, for example, wrote dueling articles on the topic that were recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine after the University of Pennsylvania Health System recently said it would no longer hire smokers starting this July.

Ezekiel Emanuel, who co-wrote one of the papers, argues that the practice discriminates against poorer and less-educated populations, where smoking is more prevalent. Rates are also higher for those who live below the federal poverty line and who have received less than a high school education.

"It's unethical," says Mr. Emanuel, chair of medical ethics and health policy at UPenn's Perelman School of Medicine. Employers' main motivation isn't employee health, he says, but "to get the smoker off their health bill and pass on the costs to someone else." (A spokeswoman for the school says the new policy isn't intended to be "discriminatory in any way" and is just aimed at reducing smoking.)

But proponents say employers have given other methods a fair shake and need a tougher approach. David Asch, who co-wrote the academic paper in support of the ban, says that with hiring bans, smokers face a social consequence that is potentially more painful than nicotine withdrawal. "We've tried a lot of things to quit smoking," says Mr. Asch, a professor of health care management at UPenn's Wharton business school.

To be sure, employers say they have tried gentler measures, only to have poor results. At Cleveland Clinic, which imposed a hiring ban on smokers in 2007, CEO Delos "Toby" Cosgrove says he first tried banning smoking on the property and offering free cessation treatment—but that as long as the company continued to hire smokers, it was like "a doctor smoking a cigarette and telling you to stop smoking," he says. After the initial skepticism, he says, "I've gotten a lot of thanks for this, actually."

Bitcoin: Cyprus Sparks Scramble for Digital Dollars

By Jeff Cox | CNBC – 22 hours ago

They won't make a sound no matter how many of them you try to toss in a bucket, and you can't pitch them in a fountain and wish for good luck. But make no mistake, bitcoins are getting big.

The online alternative currency, previously little more than a curiosity in financial markets since its 2009 inception, has zoomed in trading value since the Cyprus banking crisis erupted two weeks ago.

With fears spreading that even insured deposits might not be safe in similar nations hit by banking crises, those looking for a haven to store their wealth have fled to the complicated world of digital cash.

"Incremental demand for bitcoin is coming from the geographic areas most affected by the Cypriot financial crisis-individuals in countries like Greece or Spain, worried that they will be next to feel the threat of deposit taxes," Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx, said in a report on the startling trend.

Bitcoins operate on a network that, at least on the surface, resembles a typical exchange on the capital markets. Buyers can exchange their paper currencies for bitcoins and use them wherever they are accepted. Sellers can exchange their bitcoins back for their original currency.

But the value of the currency has been anything but typical.

Bitcoincharts.com lists the value of bitcoins compared to other currencies, including U.S. and Canadian dollars, euros and pounds.

On one of the U.S. currency exchanges, labeled "Mt. Gox," the bitcoin value has zoomed to more than $87 in Wednesday trade. That represents close to a 20 percent gain over just the past week, a one-month gain of 41 percent and nearly a quintupling of value in the past year.

The "Mt. Gox" euro trading has seen numbers nearly identical to the dollar pairing.

A more sober perspective might suggest that bitcoins are at best a momentary bubble and at worst a risky chance to take considering their novelty.

But the trend also exemplifies just how nervous cash-holders are over the European situation.

"This is a clear sign that people are looking for alternative ways to get their money out of the country," said Christopher Vecchio, currency analyst at DailyFX. "If we're going to talk about the stability of the euro and whether or not there are going to be capital controls in place not just in Cyprus but around the euro zone, I think there is some efficacy behind bitcoins as an alternative liquidity vehicle."

The role of alternative currency had been falling largely to gold over the past several years. But the precious metal has been on a pretty aggressive downward path since its most recent peak in October.

Gold advocates, though, continue to stress its importance as a safe haven and store of wealth.

"Why would anyone trust an electronic form of money that could get hacked and then diluted into oblivion?" said Michael Pento, president of Pento Portfolio Strategies. "We already have a form of money that is indestructible and whose supply cannot be increased by any government or individual decree. It's called gold."

Yet currency pros are at least willing to give bitcoins the benefit of the doubt as a legitimate trading vehicle as situations like Cyprus continue to crop up.

The $964 million bitcoin network pales to the $4 trillion a day in total currency trading, but it's clearly growing.

"Right now it seems safe. Personally it wouldn't be my preferred vehicle to trade money because it's unregulated," Vecchio said. "But people are deeming it legitimate even though it's not backed by a sovereign. That could be the attraction behind it. There's no sovereign credit risks to bitcoins." 

Customers Flee Wal-Mart Empty Shelves for Target, Costco

By Renee Dudley | Bloomberg – Tue, Mar 26, 2013 9:47 AM EDT

 

 

Reuters - People walk past a Wal-Mart sign in Rogers, Arkansas June 4, 2009. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi

Margaret Hancock has long considered the local Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) superstore her one- stop shopping destination. No longer.

During recent visits, the retired accountant from Newark, Delaware, says she failed to find more than a dozen basic items, including certain types of face cream, cold medicine, bandages, mouthwash, hangers, lamps and fabrics.

The cosmetics section "looked like someone raided it," said Hancock, 63.

Wal-Mart's loss was a gain for Kohl's Corp. (KSS), Safeway Inc. (SWY), Target Corp. (TGT) and Walgreen Co. (WAG) -- the chains Hancock hit for the items she couldn't find at Wal-Mart.

"If it's not on the shelf, I can't buy it," she said. "You hate to see a company self-destruct, but there are other places to go."

It's not as though the merchandise isn't there. It's piling up in aisles and in the back of stores because Wal-Mart doesn't have enough bodies to restock the shelves, according to interviews with store workers. In the past five years, the world's largest retailer added 455 U.S. Wal-Mart stores, a 13 percent increase, according to filings and the company's website. In the same period, its total U.S. workforce, which includes Sam's Club employees, dropped by about 20,000, or 1.4 percent. Wal-Mart employs about 1.4 million U.S. workers.

Disorganized Stores

A thinly spread workforce has other consequences: Longer check-out lines, less help with electronics and jewelry and more disorganized stores, according to Hancock, other shoppers and store workers. Last month, Wal-Mart placed last among department and discount stores in the American Customer Satisfaction Index, the sixth year in a row the company had either tied or taken the last spot. The dwindling level of customer service comes as Wal-Mart has touted its in-store experience to lure shoppers and counter rival Amazon.com Inc.

Wal-Mart traded at a 1.4 percent discount to Target last week on a price-to-earnings basis after averaging a 5.9 percent premium to its smaller rival in the past two years. Wal-Mart traded as high as a 22 percent premium to Target in January 2012. Wal-Mart rose 0.3 percent to $75.05 at 9:45 a.m. in New York.

"Our in stock levels are up significantly in the last few years, so the premise of this story, which is based on the comments of a handful of people, is inaccurate and not representative of what is happening in our stores across the country," Brooke Buchanan, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement. "Two-thirds of Americans shop in our stores each month because they know they can find the products they are looking for at low prices."

‘Getting Worse'

Last month, Bloomberg News reported that Wal-Mart was "getting worse" at stocking shelves, according to minutes of an officers' meeting. An executive vice president had been appointed to work on the restocking issue, according to the document.

At the supercenter across the street from Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Arkansas, home office, salespeople on March 14 handed out samples of Chobani yogurt and Clif Bars. Thirteen of 20 registers were manned -- with no lines -- and the shelves were fully stocked.

Three days earlier, about 10 people waited in a customer service line at a Wal-Mart in Secaucus, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York, the nation's largest city. Twelve of 30 registers were open and the lines were about five deep. There were empty spaces on shelves large enough for a grown man to lie down, and a woman wandered around vainly seeking a frying pan.

Wal-Mart's restocking challenge coincides with slowing sales growth. Same-store sales in the U.S. for the 13 weeks ending April 26 will be little changed, Bill Simon, the company's U.S. chief executive officer, said in a Feb. 21 earnings call.

Target Premium

"When times were good and people were still shopping, the lack of excellence was OK," said Zeynep Ton, a retail researcher and associate professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Their view has been that they have the lowest prices so customers keep coming anyway. You don't see that so much anymore."

Shoppers are "so sick of this," said Ton, whose research, published in Harvard Business Review, examines how retailers benefit from offering good wages and benefits to all employees. "They're mad about the way they were treated or how much time they wasted looking for items that aren't there."

Retailers consider labor -- usually their largest controllable expense -- an easy cost-cutting target, Ton said. That's what happened at Home Depot Inc. (HD) in the early 2000s, when Robert Nardelli, then chief executive officer, cut staffing levels and increased the percentage of part-time workers to trim expenses and boost profit. Eventually, customer service and customer satisfaction deteriorated and same-store sales growth dropped, Ton said.

‘Too Expensive'

"When you tell retailers they have to invest in people, the typical response is: ‘It's just too expensive,'" Ton said.

Adding five full-time employees to Wal-Mart's U.S. supercenters and discount stores would add about a half- percentage point to selling, general and administrative expenses, according to an analysis by Poonam Goyal, a Bloomberg Industries senior analyst based in Skillman, New Jersey. Assuming the workers earned the federal minimum wage and industry standards for health benefits, the added costs would amount to about $448 million a year, she said. In the year ended Jan. 31, Wal-Mart generated $17 billion in profit on revenue of $469.2 billion.

Barren Landscape

At the Kenosha, Wisconsin, Wal-Mart where Mary Pat Tifft has worked for nearly a quarter-century, merchandise ready for the sales floor remains on pallets and in steel bins lining the floor of the back room -- an area so full that "no passable aisles" remain, she said. Meanwhile, the front of the store is increasingly barren, Tifft said. That landscape has worsened over the past several years as workers who leave aren't replaced, she said.

"There's a lot of voids out there, a lot of voids," said Tifft, 58, who oversees grocery deliveries and is a member of OUR Walmart, a union-backed group seeking to improve working conditions at the discount chain. "Customers come in, they can't find what they're looking for, and they're leaving."

Years ago, supervisors drilled a message into employees' heads: "In the door and to the floor," Tifft said. That mantra now seems impossible to execute.

‘No Manpower'

"There's no manpower in the store to get the merchandise moving," she said.

At the Wal-Mart store in Erie, Pennsylvania, 26-year-old meat and dairy stocker Anthony Falletta faces a similar predicament.

"The merchandise is in the store, it just can't make the jump from the shelf in the back to the one in the front," said Falletta, who works the second shift. "There's not the people to do it."

In both stores, departments have merged, leaving some areas with limited or no staff coverage, they said, and workers rarely have time to finish all their tasks by the end of the day. In the morning, employees scramble to set out new merchandise, put returns back on shelves and handle customer inquires, they said.

"There is definitely some links broken in the chain, and I don't know how long they're going to go on like this," Tifft said.

Vicious Cycle

Wal-Mart is entangled in what Ton calls the "vicious cycle" of under-staffing. Too few workers leads to operational problems. Those problems lead to poor store sales, which lead to lower labor budgets.

"It requires a wake-UNNp call at a higher level," she said of the decision to hire more workers.

Falletta, the meat and dairy stocker in Erie, said his weekly hours are unpredictable. He would like to work a full 40 hours and sometimes gets only 25. Falletta and others interviewed for this story said management bonuses are based partly on minimizing store payroll.

According to Rochelle Jackson, who works at the jewelry counter at a store in Springfield, Missouri, a supervisor recently explained the number of hours available to schedule employees corresponds to sales performance: The worse the sales number, the fewer hours available.

"We're not getting as many sales because there's simply no one to help the customers throughout the stores," said Jackson, 24, who has worked at two Wal-Mart stores since 2009. "I asked, ‘Why can't we have enough hours to make the store work?' They said, ‘It's orders from Home Office,'" she said.

Cutting Hours

Jackson said her store began cutting hours a year ago, adding that "it hasn't been really bad until this year."

Staff shortages at cash registers during peak hours require Jackson and her co-workers on the sales floor to check shoppers out "while we are trying to restock the shelves, help customers and do other assigned projects," she said. The so-called Code 7 to the registers leaves a vacuum across the store's departments, she said.

Customers looking for groceries ask salespeople in the shoe department for help because they can't find what they're looking for, Jackson said.

In the fall, Tim White, a 36-year-old attorney, tried to buy wall paint at the Wal-Mart near his home in Santee, California.

"You wait 20, 25 minutes for someone to help you, then the person was not trained on mixing paint," White said. "It was like, you have to help them help you."

‘Maddening Inability'

White, who has six children, said while long checkout lines irritated him, "the number-one reason we gave up on Wal-Mart was its prolonged, horrible, maddening inability to keep items in stock."

The store would go weeks without products he wanted to buy, such as men's dress shirts, which he found only in very large or small sizes and unpopular colors, he said.

"Pretty soon, they were even out of those," White said. "I would literally check every so often at different Wal-Marts. They would go two or three months with the shelves looking exactly the same."

When Wal-Mart was out of stock of his preferred types of shaving lotion or razors, White would "drive next door to Target where they had it in stock all the time," he said.

The White family's visits to Wal-Mart -- which had been a several times a week occurrence -- became less and less frequent until they stopped this year. The eight-member clan now shops at Target and Costco Wholesale Corp (COST).

"Things might be a little bit more expensive, but not so much so that it would keep me away," he said.

Costco Productivity

Ton's research has centered on retailers that include discount club Costco, whose chief executive officer, Craig Jelinek, offered his support publicly earlier this month for legislation to raise the federal minimum wage.

Costco, which offers a starting hourly wage of $11.50 in all states and employee schedules that are generally predictable, has higher worker productivity and a lower rate of turnover than its competitors, Ton found.

Hancock, the retired CPA in Delaware, said she hasn't abandoned Wal-Mart altogether because she likes the low prices on the items she can find in stock. White, the shopper in California, said those low prices were crucial to his family as he started out his career.

"When I was in law school, it really helped us out," White said.

Wal-Mart shoppers for more than a decade, White's family continued to shop there even once he started earning more money.

"I was pro-Wal-Mart even when our friends rolled their eyes," he said. "I don't defend them anymore."

He added a caveat: "They could get us back if they fixed these problems."

Stores Charges Customers $5 'Just Looking' Fee to Combat Showrooming

By Kim Bhasin | Business Insider – 1 hour 38 minutes ago

RedditThere's a store in Australia that really hates it when its customers walk around the store without buying anything.

Redditor BarrettFox posted a pic of a sign informing shoppers of a new fee at a  specialty food store in Brisbane.

It's $5 for "just looking."

The fee exists to stop people from "showrooming" — which occurs when a customer looks at items in a physical store, then makes the purchase online.

The sign assures that you'll have the five dollars deducted from the final purchase price, so you'll get your money back if you buy something.

Here's what the sign says:

As of the first of February, this store will be charging people a $5 fee per person for “just looking.”

The $5 fee will be deducted when goods are purchased.

Why has this come about?

There has been high volume of people who use this store as a reference and then purchase goods elsewhere. These people are unaware our prices are almost the same as the other stores plus we have products simply not available anywhere else.

This policy is line with many other clothing, shoe and electronic stores who are also facing the same issue.

Management

The policy is being ripped apart unanimously.

"It has to be the most misguided strategy we've seen for dealing with showrooming," wrote Matt Brownell at Daily Finance. "The goal of any retailer should be to impress customers with competitive pricing and great customer service — not treat their customers with suspicion and hostility from the moment they walk in the door."

"If customers aren’t buying, the seller needs to figure out why and adapt accordingly," wrote Chris Morran at The Consumerist. "If this store’s prices are truly the best, then maybe it should be offering a price-match guarantee. If it truly offers products that aren’t available elsewhere, then how are these showrooming shoppers buying these items from someone else?"

The commenters in the Reddit thread were more straightforward.

"This store seems desperate to go out of business," quipped one commenter.

"If it was me, I'd say 'Screw you.' and not give them a dime, walk out and refuse them any future business," wrote another. " They are asking to go out of business."

And those were the polite ones.