Conn’s Seeing ‘Minimal’ Impact on Holiday Foot Traffic From Decision To Drop Cameras, Videogames
Conn’s doesn’t deny the possibility that its decision earlier this year to drop low-profit digital cameras, videogames and tablets from its sales mix may hurt the chain’s efforts to lure foot traffic during the holiday selling season, new CEO Norm…
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Miller said on a Tuesday earnings call. Even though unit sales in those abandoned products were “significant” during past holiday selling seasons, “the margins that those products were sold at still created downward pressure from an overall retail gross-margin standpoint,” said Miller, a former Sears Automotive executive who became Conn’s CEO in early September. Eliminating those categories from the mix “could have, arguably, an impact from a traffic or a sales standpoint,” he said. “But we feel confident with the promotions we have in place and what we’re doing within the other categories -- from a TV standpoint and from a furniture standpoint, and certainly what we’ve seen in November -- we’ve been very pleased with the traffic that we’ve been seeing in our stores.” Conn’s believes dropping those categories has had “minimal, if any, impact” on foot traffic, he said. For November, excluding the discontinued products, same-store sales of CE goods at Conn’s jumped 6.4 percent from the same month a year earlier, including an 8.4 percent same-store sales increase in the TV category, the chain said. Conn’s didn’t specifically mention the impact of Ultra HD on its TV sales, but said it benefited from a shift in its TV mix to higher-margin sets.