In the U.S., sales in Big Lots stores open at least one year grew 1.7%.
While it would gladly stock Pampers and Huggies all the time, Big Lots can't do that.
All 1, 335 stores--a jumble of Big Lots, Odd Lots, MacFrugal's and Pic 'N' Save--would operate under the Big Lots name.
With a combined company, Big Lots suddenly had three distribution centers instead of one, adding to the confusion and inventory delays.
For the first time, the retailer held focus groups with people who didn't shop at Big Lots or didn't like its stores.
It's even more chaotic for Big Lots, which must be able to make a deal on the fly and receive huge shipments--270 trailers of Mead paper supplies, say--within days.
In corporate news this week, Big Lots (BIG) announced a loss of 10 cents per share for the fiscal third quarter, versus earnings of 6 cents per share in the same period last year.
The intelligence has induced Big Lots to expand consumables and home decor and abandon artificial flowers, to pull Nascar products from the West Coast and to stock four times as much liquid as powder detergent on the East Coast.
MacFrugal's merchandising head, put in charge of all buying, assumed that what had worked on the West Coast, where he had cut his teeth, would do just as well in the Midwest and the South, where Big Lots predominated.
The conventional wisdom was to build something big with lots of info and get traffic.
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Thursday is this month's big day in the retail world, with lots of big chains reporting same-store sales figures for February.
It is as if they are one big species with lots of differently colored males.
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They are stereotyped as wanting big cars, lots of money and all kinds of fame.
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So in Japan big companies waste lots of effort passing profits to smaller companies within their group.
The premium is smaller in India and Pakistan, two other big growers with lots of cheap labour, and greater in America.
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Providian should gain too: hitching itself to a big lender with lots of cheap retail deposits will cut its borrowing costs.
Fingers crossed they'll execute on this stuff -- Microsoft's a big company with lots of wonderful ideas that seem to fall out of the truck on the way to the store.
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Big anticipation, lots of hoopla, great theater, no solution.
What kinds of news organizations tend to be big, have lots of writers and bureaus all over the map, use formal language with high standards of copy editing, and have been around long enough to have established reputations?
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Lots of big scientific names are working in synthetic biology, which so far has produced lots of hype and headlines but few practical breakthroughs.
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Big trading operations, lots of close relationships with the governments of resource rich countries, giant asset-intensive operations.
The place was homey, paneled in dark wood with lots of big, leafy plants and large, stained-glass windows.
Big acquisitions, and lots of spending later, and Mr. Hurd replaced Ms. Fiorina.
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It is premised on the notion that Big Oil is pouring lots of carbon-drenched money into pockets of climate crisis skeptics.
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It would be nice to think that kindness is a way of doing business that might infect lots of big business rather than just a few pioneers.
The only way it can get there, by lots of big complex acquisitions (like the July purchase of networking company Force10), is relatively new turf for Dell.
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