Harris Teeter at Friendly

The Harris Teeter at the Friendly Center is the grocery store that I frequent most in Greensboro. I believe it falls under the lifestyle center category as the ambience of Friendly center tries to create a main street atmosphere where you have the opportunity to sit around and eat ice cream at Ben and Jerry's or stop into the Apple Store to look at a new iPod for yourself or eat at PF Chang's or get your grocery shopping done at Harris Teeter. There is a little bit of everything for everyone that comes to this lifestyle center.

Advantages for this location is that there is a great amount of parking, so they can handle a great amount of customers at any one time. Since it is located in a lifestyle center, they are able to handle a greater amount of pedestrian traffic, as customers have a greater freedom to walk around and browse the area, so Harris Teeter would greatly benefit from it. The Harris Teeter is also seen as a destination store within this lifestyle center because it is so vast. It even has the nickname of the 'Taj Ma-Teeter' so it has everything you could ever want, so people will go out of their way to come here. They also get a steady stream of vehicular traffic running by it, so that's another advantage of this location. Disadvantages would include how far the store sits from the road. It's not especially convenient to the road like most stores are for customers when they want to make a quick trip to the grocery store. You have to make the effort to go through the shops to get to Harris Teeter. It isn't in a type of shopping center that you would normally find a grocery store in, i.e. Neighborhood strip center, so it may seem out of place to some consumers.

I think that it's an extremely good location, because it's very close to such a large college as UNC-G and it's conveniently close to many neighborhoods nearby on Friendly Dr., so the size of the target market they're able to attract is extremely vast. The uniqueness of their offering with many of the fresh foods cooked in front of the customers is something that draws customers to their store. This also includes their vast assortment and depth of merchandise they are able to offer which makes this particular Harris Teeter unique to other grocery stores in the area. There are also very few grocery stores in this area, so the Harris Teeter on Friendly tends to monopolize the grocery store market in this area. Even though it may not seem the most convenient, I know that personally I will always make the extra effort to go to this particular Harris Teeter when I can, which I think it says something about its uniqueness and the particular location its placed itself in in a lifestyle center. The only improvement upon its location I can think of is if it could be placed closer to the vehicular traffic on Friendly Dr. in Friendly Center to make it more convenient for customers.

Claire's, a childhood love that's gone under. - Blog 4

Claire's growing up was every little girl's fantasy. It was full of pink, glitter, accessories, items to go along with some of our favorite movies, and so on and so forth. What also made this store oh so wonderful was it's cheap items, so we could spend all of our spare cash in this store, especially when they would have their 10 items for $5 sales, in which you could find so many treasures. As the years have passes, Claire's Store Inc. has found them greatly endangered in the retailing world, which caused them to be bought out by Apollo Management LP in 2007

for $3.1 billion and had $245 million in cash on hand when the deal was announced. As of Nov. 1, it had long term debt of $2.3 billion. They also had to worry about how their sales in the third quarter had continued to fall. (Verdon)

How could this have happened? One factor is the global retail environment we've found ourself in this current economic recession, no one's wanting to buy. People are wanting to spend money on the essentials, which is why superfluous stores such as Claire's are the first to close, which would make sense as we see stores that have catered to this young teen/tween market, i.e. Club Libby Lu, are filing for bankruptcy as well. (Lynch) Another factor I believe that attributed to this loss was its inability to handle the financial aspects as well as they created a market for cheap fashionable finds. They found themselves in a corner with being so focused on creating the best deal for its customer they lost sight of being able to properly handle the operations of a company. (Verdon) One major thing that also lead to this occurring was when the company was bought out, it went from being a private company to a public company, meaning that a lot of debt was acquired in the transition. Normally you can count on sales to make up the difference in this situation, yet the market is having one of the worst periods in years, so Claire's continued to find itself asunder. (Verdon) It seems to me that ultimately Claire's lack of organization was the beginning of their downfall to their bankruptcy. Without a properly organized structure, they weren't able to adequately deal with all of its problems, which was seen in its good retail strategy and specific market they targeted that failed in its financial strategy. My 11 year old self at heart hopes they are able to turn this around, because this store has created many memories for people such as myself for getting my ears pierced there and finding earrings for the dance and so on, but the outlook isn't good at all.

Lynch, M. (2008, Dec. 5) Claire's loss Deepens on Comp Softness. Women's Wear Daily, 196(118), p. 17, 1p. Retrieved from Business Source Premier database.

iStockAnalyst. (2009). White Elephant; Linens 'N Things Failure an Example of Private Equity's Bad Bet on Retail. Retrieved Mar. 5, 2009, from http:///www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/2986138