Hello New Shoes, Bye Bye Blues

by Vic Drabicky on 06/09/2009 at 5:57 pm in Commentary, Market Research & Data, Observations, Performance Marketing

I like music. I have never hidden that fact. Whether it is Wilco (who I will be lucky enough to see play this weekend) or any of the 10+ musicians that currently work at Range, I love listening to each and every one of them. But one thing I have always tried to stay away from is relating my work life to my music life. It just seems cheesy. Well, ladies and gentlemen (aka the 2 people that read this blog), I have decided to be cheesy this morning and try to work a music reference into my article on retail sales numbers. The victim of my cheesy attempt here is a Scottish singer named Paolo Nutini (he has two great albums – buy them both). That said, here goes nothing…

Whether he approves of it or not, I think Paolo Nutini’s “New Shoes” (the song from which I stole the title of this article), should be retail’s theme song right now. For the past 9 months, we have had nothing but bad news, predictions of unmitigated doom and gloom about the end of retail as we know it (I even wrote a little rant about it here). True, times have not been good, but we are beginning to see a few shoots of green (as Chairman of the Fed Ben Bernanke likes to say) in the retail market – and no matter how small, I think they are worth celebrating.

Looking at retail results as a whole, the numbers are still down. In May, retail sales dropped about 4% (excluding Wal-Mart who has stopped giving monthly data – but has the ability to greatly shift the actual percentage). Of the top 30 retailers included, 22 showed more year-over-year drops. The last time we saw retail sales grow was in August. For some retailers, May marks 12+ months of consecutive losses. Abercrombie is down for 13 months in a row, Nordstrom for 12 months and Saks for 11 months. Sigh.
Luckily, there are a few rays of sunshine piercing the darkness.

For example:

• Gap is showing its best month in the last year and a half (I like to think it is because Range handles search for the GAP brands, but I digress)
• In the teen market, Aeropostale and Buckle are showing growth north of 10%
• Consumer confidence levels are overall on the rise

While the trend is clear that the retailers that are doing well are doing so on an economical side, remember there was a time not too long ago when even the discounters were losing ground (Ross was down September, October, November and January, but posted a 4% gain in May).

We are nowhere near being out of the woods just yet, but I am beginning to think of it this way: if we all just did what Paolo Nutini said, we would be in the clear… “put some new shoes on and suddenly everything is right.”