Rebecca Day

Black Friday pushback is showing up in two ways this year as retailers such as Walmart, Best Buy, hhgregg, Target and GameStop have announced plans to open doorbuster offers the second the clock ticks past midnight on Thanksgiving Day.

Target is feeling the effects of Walmart’s holiday layaway program, Target executives said Wednesday on the company’s Q3 earnings call. The layaway program, which began Oct. 17, enables consumers to delay payment on total purchases of $50 or more that are paid off by Dec. 16. Walmart’s layaway program “hurt us in November,” said Kathryn Tesija, executive vice president-merchandising, “but it remains to be seen if that continues or if it was just a November issue.” Tesija said the toy business is slow so far with “guests still researching what they want to buy so we really haven’t seen the season kick off yet.” Tesija is more sanguine about the electronics category, feeling “pretty confident” about the chain’s Q4 gift items. Tesija said Target has seen “good results so far” in electronics positioned as gift items, including e-readers, tablets, iPods and iPads. CEO Gregg Steinhafel referred to “early Black Friday hype” that could be keeping shoppers from stores. “There’s a perception in some of these categories that deals are going to get better, which really isn’t true,” he said. “There’s a lot of discussion out there and a lot of other retailers have released their Black Friday ads early so there’s a lot of comparison shopping going on,” he said. “Unfortunately, that amounts to having to do more business in a shorter period of time, but that’s just the way the marketplace is,” he said. Consumer spending is likely to be soft and uneven until there’s a robust improvement in the jobs market, Steinhafel said, but the company grew comp sales by 4.3 percent in Q3, due to the company’s “core retail business” and RedCard loyalty card business. The company recently announced plans to offer free shipping to shoppers who purchase using their RedCards, which also give shoppers a five percent discount on merchandise, he noted. The company is on track to open its City Target concept stores in four urban areas in 2012, Steinhafel said, and between 125-135 retail stores in Canada in 2013, he said. Target reported profit of $555 million for the quarter ended Oct. 29, compared with $535 million in the year-ago quarter. Earnings per share in Q3 grew 10.2 percent to $0.82 from $0.74 in the same period a year ago, the company said. Target shares closed down 0.45 percent to $52.94

Growth in sales of tablets, laptops, e-readers and copy and print business offset softness in desktop PCs, computer media, software and computer accessories in Staples’ third quarter, company executives said in the earnings call Tuesday. Sales in North America were flat at $2.7 billion, and same-store sales were down 1 percent in the U.S., the company said. International sales were down two percent in dollars and seven percent in local currencies, the company said, with softness in international markets driven by weak sales. Despite economic reports and high unemployment, the North American “consumer has held up a lot better than small business,” said CEO Ron Sargent, saying business accounts for 80 percent of Staples’ sales. Consumer spending is “about where it was when the recession began,” Sargent said. Staples closed three stores and opened four in Q3 and is on track to open 20 new stores net in 2011 to bring the total of North American stores to 1,908, Sargent said. The chain will continue to focus on growth areas, including mobile phones, he said. The chain added 375 mobile phone departments in the quarter to bring the total to 450 and it expects to add 50 more by year-end, he said. Technology and copy and print “are getting to the point where critical mass will hopefully deliver sales growth to carry the whole company,” said CFO John Mahoney. The company said its Canadian stores are selling the iPad, a practice which executives hope will extend to U.S. stores in the future. For the quarter, sales inched up 0.5 percent to $6.6 billion, while earnings per share grew 15 percent to 47 cents for the period, the company said. For Q4, Staples is forecasting flat to low single-digit sales growth compared with last year. Staples’ stock closed down 3.6 percent Tuesday to close at $14.81.

Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer referred to “the Windows era” Tuesday during the company’s annual shareholder webcast. In response to the question whether “we're now in the post-PC world,” Ballmer said: “We were, we are and we always will be,” in the Windows era, citing new applications upcoming with Windows 8, Windows Phone and tablets.

Arris is branding its lineup of Whole Home Solutions products with the Moxi name as part of an effort to spotlight the entertainment features of its set-top boxes that are primarily sold through cable operators. The branding effort could lead to a return to a direct-to-consumer retail model for Moxi-branded products down the road, Stan Brovont, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Arris, told us. “The goal is to communicate to the marketplace that the new Moxi gateway carries forward” most of the features found on the original Moxi DVR products, Brovont said of the rebranding effort.

Citing consumer demand for a high-quality, simplified speaker for PC audio, gaming systems and electronic drums and keyboards, NHT introduced the SuperPower, an active desktop speaker built largely on the platform of the company’s SuperZero speaker, according to John Johnsen, partner, marketing, on a press tour Thursday in New York. The SuperPower is NHT’s first powered speaker for the consumer market as it shifts its product mix toward a 50-50 split between active and passive loudspeakers, Johnsen said. The move to active speaker technology to play back computer audio began in the late 1990s when Johnsen and NHT co-partner Chris Byrne saw a need on the pro audio side for powered speakers to work with computer-based music, and the company launched the M-00 speaker for the studio mix market. That product is nearing the end of its life cycle, Johnsen said. The SuperPower ($199 each), to be sold direct from NHT and through J&R Music World, has a 90-watt Class D digital amplifier, which Johnsen said is Energy Star rated and uses “less power than a D battery” in standby mode. At full power the speaker uses 90 percent of supplied electrical energy, which results in more efficiency and less heat from wasted power, he said. The SuperPower, which can be paired with NHT’s current Super 8 subwoofer, will be available in late December, Johnsen said. The company will support the SuperPower with upcoming wireless accessory products for streaming music directly from mobile devices, he said. The company has chosen not to add AirPlay capability because it would add $100 to the cost of each speaker, Johnsen said. By using an outboard wireless module, consumers don’t have to pay for technology they might not use, he said. Wireless accessories are due within the next 6 months, and a second powered speaker will debut within the year, he said.

The advantageous timing of this season’s Allstate BCS National Championship with a later-than-usual January CES led to a “logical opportunity” for the network to build several events at the show around its 3D capabilities, Bryan Burns, ESPN vice president-strategic business planning, told Consumer Electronics Daily Wednesday. The network announced Monday plans for an invitation-only event at the Hilton Theater at CES, showing the BCS Championship game on Jan. 9 using RealD equipment and Marchon 3D glasses. Burns said he'll visit Las Vegas this week to do a site survey to determine the screen size and seating capacity of the space, which he estimated would accommodate “at least” 600 seats for the 3D showing.

Logitech has “no plans to build another box” for Google TV, Logitech Guerrino De Luca, chairman and acting president, said Wednesday in a company webcast. De Luca called the company’s Revue set-top box, which came out last fall for the holiday season to enable HDMI-equipped TVs to receive Google TV, a “mistake of implementation of giant nature.” With the Revue box, “we thought we had invented sliced bread,” De Luca said. The company overbuilt “because we expected everybody to line up for Christmas and buy this box for $300,” he said. “That was a big mistake.” He said Google TV is a “great concept” and “has the potential to completely disrupt the living room” but that wasn’t the case when Logitech first offered the Revue, which he said launched with “software not complete” and “not tuned to what consumers wanted."

There will be aggressive pricing promotions this holiday season among videogame products industrywide in the U.S., predicted Mad Catz Interactive Vice President of Marketing Michael Greco. But he told us Mad Catz doesn’t plan any significant price drops on its “premium” accessories, including those it spotlighted at CEA’s CES Unveiled event in New York on Tuesday.

DTS needs for future growth to focus on growth categories such as Blu-ray players and “network connected” devices as a hedge against the “softness” in gaming, automotive and AV businesses, they said during the company’s Q3 earnings call late Monday. DTS profit dropped from $3.4 million in Q3 2010 to $2.9 million in Q3 2011, with revenue slipping from $21 million in Q3 2010 to $20.5 million in Q3 2011, the company said.