Kurt Barnard Quotes on Business & Commerce (14 Quotes)

While it's true that Sears is stuck in a sales slump for a long time, the retailer has also been in a restructuring mode, ... By getting rid of the credit business, it can finally devote all its resources to its core business. I'm convinced Sears will deliver impressive results in the next six to 12 months.

They are taking big bites of market share out of the sneakers. The sneaker business is a mature business that represents primarily a replacement mode. People mainly buy sneakers when the old ones wear out.

We're seeing the consumer back at the discretionary counters and that is good news for the entire industry.

The rest of the industry can take comfort from Wal-Mart's projections.

The entire athletic footwear business is not doing well, ... Sneakers, the lifeblood of the business, have peaked and are on a downhill slide.

By shuttering the Marshall Field's catalogs, Target is saying something about its department stores business -- business isn't what it used to be, ... Part of the reason is that department stores overall are doing badly.

A cold spring does hurt business.

There's no question that competition in retailing is rampant and out of hand. It's getting increasingly difficult for companies to keep their heads above water. That's why the industry is getting into gear for more merger activity.

It's a good industry. It's growing, and it has been growing for a long, long time, but I think the May company is particularly interested in getting access to the bridal business,

It's not a core business, but (gardening) is a very profitable part of the business.

The worst part of these results is that they show that the effect of the tax rebate checks has petered out. This is a nightmare in itself for retailers and it doesn't bode well for Christmas. Also, we'll probably see more markdowns now, more than retailers anticipated for the holidays. That will hurt their bottom line.

The only way to grow in the retail business is to add yet another 100 stores, another 600 stores. Then someone else will see that you are successful. And that other fellow will do the same. And for a while it is fine, until suddenly there are more stores than the community needs.

The bigger it gets, the smaller the percentage growth will be. Let's say that when you add 10 new stores to 100 stores, you grow the business 10 percent. When you add 10 stores to 3,000 stores, the growth isn't obvious.

I think the future lies in two different kinds of Internet players. The one is the bricks and clicks, and that will be the dominant factor in the business, ... The other one will be highly specialized pure play click operations that carry things, do things that are simply not available elsewhere through other channels.