SUPER HOLLYWOOD: Famous Footwear Discount

Thursday 12 July 2012

Famous Footwear Discount

As of October 2010, Famous Footwear consisted of 1,126 retail stores in the United States, including 947 Famous Footwear stores and 179 thematically-structured outlet stores. The company indicates that it has plans to close 126 underperforming stores by the end of 2012, approximately matched by planned openings of additional new locations. Some 26 new stores were launched or are planned to debut in calendar 2010. The company indicates a long-term desire to add another 400 to 500 stores to the company's ranks.
Famous Footwear still struggles in this area of being recognized by shoe manufacturers as a discount retailer, but in essense they are not a genuine discounter in a tradition fashion any longer. Their pricing structure leads to Outlet stores often being much more expensive on same items than in their retail stores. Coupled with the fact that retail stores will run BOGO sales, and this can be upsetting to customers who have both retail and outlet stores near them. Famous Footwear is not allowed to carry certain high dollar athletic footwear items in their stores because they are considered a discount chain where customer service isn't the commitment. So trying to find items like Nike Shox, or other high dollar items is quite impossible. Famous opened 5 ahtletic driven stores named "Mind Body and Soul" with the intent to be able to show manufacturers like Nike, Reebok, Brooks, Asics, Adidas, and Mizuno that they have a capability to sell these items through commitment to training and customer service. This move was a stroke of genious, in that once these small sales stores were unable to move certian high dollar items, the company would be able to move them into the outlet store under the assumption of them being clear outs being moved to the outlets. What ended up happening though was these items were moved into the outlets and the price was placed at or near retail price, regardless of age or the business trend in the price of such items.