The holiday season is when retail is humming, so there’s lots of news which we round up here.
Mattel warned in a filing yesterday that its sales for Q4 are being driven downward by “key retail partners moving toward tighter inventory management” (translation: Toys R Us isn’t buying as much), and that its sales for the year will be down in the mid to high single digits. Hasbro made an offer to acquire the company last month (see “Hasbro Makes Offer for Mattel”), perhaps tied to Mattel’s struggling stock price, and this news has continued to pressure the share price downward.
Speaking of Toys R Us, a federal bankruptcy judge ruled last week that the company will be permitted to pay 17 top executives $14 million in incentive bonuses, according to USA Today. The U.S. Trustee’s office had objected to the payments, arguing that Toys R Us executives are already highly compensated and receive lavish perks.
Online retail is moving jobs from humans to robots, according to an analysis by Quartz. The report compared reductions in retail employment to hiring and robot deployment by Amazon and concluded that Amazon’s impact on retail businesses was helping to eliminate 170,000 retail jobs in 2017, as Amazon hired 146,000 more people. The difference appears to be made up by robots; Amazon is deploying roughly 75,000 new warehouse robots in 2017.
Online retailers should do more to battle bots that surf the Internet looking for hot toys that can be bought and resold at huge mark-ups, Senator Chuck Schumer urged according to the New York Daily News. One geek product we’ve seen at huge mark-ups (Lego is apparently offering it only to its VIP members so far) is the 7500-piece Star Wars Millennium Falcon, which carries a hefty $799.99 retail price, but is selling for nearly twice that on Amazon.
Sales over the Black Friday weekend compiled from point-of-sale and online data by NPD’s Checkoute-commerce service indicated that dollar sales in the fourth week of November 2017 were down 2% vs. the same week in 2016, NPD announced. The season began stronger and tailed off at the end of November, but there is plenty of time to build a stronger trend for the year.
