BJ’s Shifting Holiday Mix ‘Pretty Meaningfully’ Toward Tech, Other Home Goods, Says CEO

The holiday season amid COVID-19 “is going to be particularly tricky to plan,” said BJ’s Wholesale Club CEO Lee Delaney on a Q2 investor call Thursday. “A fair amount of work has gone into really thinking through the implications and how we should plan the stores and the online offerings” in the general merchandise business, which includes consumer tech products, said Delaney. It’s trying to “buy into new categories in a bigger way,” he said. “So we are looking at exercise equipment and textiles and consumer electronics and connected home devices, because our baseline assumption is you will still have a large amount of people either working from home or spending more times in their homes and the investment in people’s homes will continue. And so we are shifting the equipment pretty meaningfully in that direction.” Q2 general merchandise sales jumped 22%, partly on strong TV sales in the quarter, said Chief Financial and Administrative Officer Bob Eddy.