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by goofingaround 3050 days ago
The "ship from store" argument does not make sense.

Many healthy retailers use omnichannel, ship-from-store, buy-online-fulfill-in-store, etc. These methods can improve fulfillment, increase inventory utilization, and reduce stale inventory.

If a retailer wants to draw down inventory, then just cut replenishment. I believe Target Canada was accused of doing so. Implementing "faux omnichannel" and the associated IT, store processes, etc. would be much harder.
1 comments
CodeWriter23 3050 days ago
What the author is saying is they used the “closer to customer” argument as a smoke screen to cover the fact that they performed a logisticextomy last year.

The fact of the matter is logistic operations in the Midwest are favorable for the medium range retailer. In the post-warehouse age, when the book your NYC customer wants is in Seattle, you’re paying Zone 8 rates to USPS instead of Zone 3 from Indiana to NYC (or Seattle).

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goofingaround 3050 days ago
I don't see the logistics argument in the article.

The article states i) distraction from in-store sales for employees, ii) removing inventory from store shelves, and iii) no credit for stores.

The "stores don't get credit" argument is weak. The article implies that corporate is siphoning credit from stores to online. Sales are down 6% across the board. Samestore sales down 6.5%, online sales down 4.5%. Omnichannel does not create those numbers.

Anyway, the logistics argument depends on more than rates. Fulfilling from a midwest warehouse can be cheap; a warehouse full of product sliding down a markdown curve can be expensive.

I've been surprised by the merchant pushback to omnichannel. I've been hearing "there are no cash registers in the warehouse", etc. for years. Now we expose more inventory to customers and stores complain about selling to the wrong (usually ecommerce) customer.

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CodeWriter23 3050 days ago
It’s an illustration, not an argument. The prior deletion of the logistics operation illustrates the company has been on the chopping block / raider mode for some time.
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emodendroket 3050 days ago
My understanding of the article was that they were poorly managing the inventory and therefore unnecessarily cannibalizing their own sales.
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