Yahoo Finance recently reported welcomed news on the economy and retail. Data revealed the U.S. economy created a whopping 916,000 jobs in March 2021 – the most since August 2020. This is an important indicator that the economic rebound is gaining momentum. Payrolls were much more than anticipated and the jobless rate is at a new pandemic-era low of 6 percent. This time a year ago, 22 million Americans had lost their jobs and unemployment had shot to nearly 15 percent.
What does this good news mean for retailers? The improving market should increase consumer spending. Coupled with fiscal stimulus payments, optimism is improving, and the economic recovery is accelerating.
The next question to retailers: Are you ready? Implementing effective retail systems is a critical step toward achieving maximum profitability, especially considering that today’s retail customers have more information and more channels than ever to influence buying decisions.
Today’s software solutions can address many common challenges to help retailers emerge stronger than ever.
Merchandising – Adapt to changes across sales channels and gain visibility into inventory to give associates the tools to respond to changing market trends.
Business Analysis – Make data-driven decisions based on real-time data gathered from your entire business network.
Enterprise Planning – Tie enterprise-wide strategic plans to the execution of shared goals to produce accurate, insightful, coordinated plans while eliminating duplicate data sources.
Allocation – Enhance and translate customer knowledge into pinpointed allocations to optimize store-specific product assortments across the entire retail organization.
Replenishment – Forecast future sales and shipments and calculate lead times to determine how much to order to preserve inventory and service levels between shipments.
Hosting – Streamline processes and increase profitability with cloud hosting, systems management, and backup and data recovery services.
Other trusted resources have also reported positive trends. NRF has forecasted that 2021 retail sales (excluding automobile, gasoline and restaurants) will grow between 6.5 percent and 8.2 percent over 2020 to up to $4.4 trillion. This could top the previous record of 6.3 percent set in 2004.
Retail systems and software supports virtually all aspects of a business’s operations. It involves hardware, software, and the people who operate these systems. No matter which area of operations is causing you concern, you can trust RPE’s experts to address the issue and help your business take the next step forward as we continue to see consumer spending increase.
