6 chains opening new stores

Vancouver-based vegan retailer PlantX will open its first U.S. store, a 4,500-square-foot unit on Fifth Avenue in San Diego’s Hillcrest. The retailer stocks everything from plant-based foods to all-natural soaps and air-purifying indoor plants.

Nutritional supplement brand Redcon1 is opening a second location of its branded gym this week, in Nashville. The 50,000-square-foot location doubles as a gym and store. The first Redcon1 gym opened in Boca Raton, Florida, in late 2019.

Drive-thru coffee franchise Scooter’s Coffee expanded its portfolio by 50 stores in 2020, while also achieving same-store sales growth of 26 percent. Stores built around the company’s drive-thru-kiosk model experienced 31 percent growth.

Barnes & Noble will open a store in Raleigh, North Carolina’s Village District by late summer. The retailer’s seventh Raleigh-area store, it will open in a 10,400-square-foot store that Pier 1 occupied before filing for bankruptcy and closing all its stores in 2020.

Downtown Denver will be home to the first North American store for Swedish travel accessories brand Thule. The company will open a 1,600-square-foot, streetfront unit at mixed-use complex Market Station on June 11. Thule has 24 stores globally, but its products have been sold in North America only on other retailers’ shelves. The Denver store will stock everything from bike racks, backpacks and rooftop cargo carriers to luggage, strollers and tents.

Women’s specialty apparel retailer Evereve is entering Florida for the first time, with a store in Winter Park’s upscale Park Avenue shopping district. In July, the company will open a 3,193-square-foot store in part of a 9,113-square-foot Gap that closed in January 2020. The new store is part of an expansion that includes doubling the size of Evereve’s hometown flagship and opening six stores by the end of 2021.

5 tenant updates

• Macy’s Inc. hopes to attract shoppers under 40 years old with new merchandise categories, CEO Jeff Gennette said on an earnings call. The department store chain is adding gourmet food, health and wellness, homer decor, pet supplies and toys. Sales at its 512 stores jumped 56 percent in the first quarter. As a result, Macy’s Inc. now anticipates sales between $21.7 billion and $22.2 billion this year, up from a previous forecast of between $19.8 billion and $20.8 billion.

• Amazon is folding its Amazon Go Grocery banner into Amazon Fresh to reduce confusion among its prototypes. The retailer had opened two Amazon Go stores in its hometown of Seattle but plans to close one and convert the other to Amazon Fresh. The retailer operates eight Amazon Fresh stores in California and four around its hometown of Seattle.

• Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken restaurant added an artificial intelligence-powered technology to speed up the drive-thru experience. The tech, created by Hi Auto, greets each drive-thru guest, answers questions, suggests menu items, enters the order in Lee’s point-of-sale system and confirms the order. It isolates the consumer’s speech to ensure order accuracy and converses politely and like a person. If a guest asks an unrelated question or asks for something not on the menu, the AI automatically switches to a Lee’s employee. “We don’t have customers waiting anymore,” said Chuck Doran, owner and operator of an Englewood, Ohio, Lee’s. Average check size, service time, consistency and customer service have improved thanks to the technology, he said.

Last year, drive-thru orders in the U.S. increased by 22 percent, accounting for 44 percent of all off-premises orders across the restaurant industry, according to NPD. Average drive-thru time also increased, by nearly 30 seconds, according to Hi Auto co-founder and CEO Roy Baharav. “By augmenting human employees with an AI assistant, employees can focus on high-touch duties, including fulfilling the orders, managing inventory and interacting with in-store customers.”

Lee’s plans to deploy the AI in additional drive-thru locations. Baharav says the company is piloting its system with the largest quick-service restaurant chains in the country.

• Google will open its first-ever physical retail store, in New York City’s Chelsea, so consumers can experience the company’s hardware and services. Google Store will open this summer in the company’s urban campus, home to many of the tech giant’s 11,000 NYC employees, said vice president of direct channels and membership Jason Rosenthal. “We look forward to meeting many of our customers and hearing their feedback on the store so we can continue to explore and experiment with the possibilities of a physical retail space and build upon the experience.”

• Target CEO Brian Cornell said click-and-collect fueled 18 percent growth in same-store sales during the first quarter. Click-and-collect accounted for only 5 percent of Target’s first-quarter digital sales two years ago and expanded to more than 30 percent in the first quarter of 2021. Click-and-collect sales totaled some $1 billion over the past two years, he said.

Target fulfills nearly all its online orders at stores, which makes its online sales more profitable, Cornell added. “Because of our unique stores-and-hub model, more than three-quarters of our first-quarter digital sales were fulfilled by our stores,” he said on an earnings call. “That means in total, more than 95 percent of Target’s first-quarter sales were driven by our store assets, store inventory and store team. This store-driven growth is translating into long-standing bottom-line performance.”

Facebook and TikTok are diving into video shopping

Facebook has launched Live Shopping Fridays for beauty and apparel retailers. Each week until July 16, shoppers can see the latest trends in makeup and apparel, ask questions and shop from home. Sephora will lead off today. Meanwhile, TikTok is partnering with Walmart to test in-app shopping features.

Positive retail foot traffic is predicted for Memorial Day weekend

Memorial Day weekend may prove to be a turning point for brick-and-mortar stores in attracting consumers, according to Springboard, which interviewed 2,000 U.S. consumers on May 11 for its first National Retail Consumer Report. Forty-five percent intend to shop in person during the holiday weekend, and more than 53 percent intend to visit shopping destinations to both shop and dine out. Eighty-eight percent of consumers are comfortable making trips to retail destinations to some degree.