Staples closes 15 Canadian stores
“Office supplies retailer struggles to improve results in face of online competition”
In North America, such as U.S. and Canada, as many as 225 Staples stores are closed. 15 of its 331 stores were closed at the end of September in Canada in order to improve their results. Staples shut the underperforming location stores and moved online for bigger business. In modern society, as the technology becomes more and more advanced, online shopping becomes increasingly convenient and popular, and it has become a good substitute for people to go shopping. More and more people choose to shop online, which has reduced the profits of the stores. A latest financial report of Staples shows that the profit declined a lot from $108 million to $82 million in the second quarter of 2013.
Today, many other retail stores are also closed, such as Grand & Toy and Office Depot, and they moved all of their business online. Online shopping is a channel for suppliers to deliver products. As this channel becomes more convenient, more companies choose to use this distribution channel. Because selling products and doing business online cannot only reduce their costs of renting a store, but also increase customers and profits. But as more companies develop online stores, these companies will confront a lot of online competition as well, such as the competition with Amazon.com. Whatever the way they choose as a channel, they should consider about the way in which they can get the most profit. They should think about their own strategy to enlarge their company and seek for greater profits, such as making differentiation of the products or lowering the price. “CEO Ron Sargent said Staples had accelerated growth in its delivery business and introduced innovations such as in-store pickup windows for online orders to increase retail traffic.” From this, we can see that Staples is trying to make the online shopping different. Staples changes its distribution channel and its operation strategy to make its company more responsive to customers’ needs.
Reference:
Staples closes 15 Canadian stores. CBC news. Oct. 01, 2014. Web.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/staples-closes-15-canadian-stores-1.2783780