Top 100 Retailers
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Click on chart to see a sortable list of the Top 100 Retailers.
This year has been a bumpy one for retailers as the nation’s economy proceeds with its herky-jerky, high-unemployment recovery. Early on, off-pricers, discounters and grocers fared better than general merchandise and apparel specialty chains. Walmart, playing the everyday low price card, was especially blessed.
But 2009 was quite different, with most retailers — including the Bentonville Behemoth — slogging through a difficult year. Non-store retailers, particularly pure e-commerce operators, managed to do all right, but bricks-and-mortar success stories were few and far between.
“It was very challenging,” says Mary Brett Whitfield, senior vice president of Kantar Retail, the research firm that provided the figures found in the Top 100 and Power Players charts. “The consumer was very anxious, cautious in her approach” and tended to shop on a “need-to-buy rather than a want-to-buy basis.” Kantar’s economists believe we are “clearly very early” in what they predict will be “a slow recovery,” Whitfield says.
The two-year-plus recession was the most severe economic crisis that most “core retail shoppers have gone through in their lifetimes,” Whitfield says. The result is that the recession has “created value consumers” whose frugal habits are likely to last for some time, much the way the Great Depression affected an entire generation of shoppers.
It is in the context of such an environment that STORES presents the 2010 iteration of its annual Top 100 Retailers. This version eliminates, as best it can, sales outside the 50 states. Even with sales from international operations excluded, Walmart easily retains its No. 1 position. A more significant change is the one that eliminates petroleum sales from total retail sales in most instances. This knocked virtually all convenience store operators but Alimentation Couche-Tard and 7-Eleven off the chart.
To demonstrate how fuel sales can influence performance measures, Kroger’s 2009 identical-store sales — the supermarket industry’s more stringent equivalent of same-store sales — increased 2.1 percent if fuel sales are eliminated, but gained only 0.6 percent if sales from fuel centers are included. Fuel sales volume didn’t vary that much from year to year, but petroleum prices were certainly volatile.
Changes and disclaimers not withstanding, the Top 10 cast of characters doesn’t read much different from 2009. Walmart is followed by Kroger, Target, Walgreen, The Home Depot, Costco, CVS Caremark, Lowe’s, Sears Holdings and Best Buy.
Newcomer IKEA North America (No. 92) represents a unique achievement for a foreign-based retailer in that it joined the Top 100 without having taken over an existing U.S. business.
Though Walmart’s best growth opportunities of late have been overseas, the company says it can still generate another $100 billion in annual sales from domestic markets, perhaps with smaller-sized stores. These might not carry supercenters’ economies of scale, but the reduced footprints could help the company win approval from zoning officials in places like New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, Walmart continues to bolster its good corporate citizen credentials by reducing packaging and shrinking its carbon footprint in operations and the supply chain.
Kroger’s operations include 2,468 supermarkets and 777 convenience stores. It also operates multi-department stores, including Fred Meyer in the Pacific Northwest, and 374 jewelry stores, both freestanding as well as stores-within-stores in some of its multi-department stores.
All of No. 3 Target’s 1,740 stores are in this country, with groceries generating 16 percent of its $63.4 billion in sales last year.
Next comes Walgreen, which opened its 7,000th location last year. Included among the new units was its first store in Alaska, giving the company a presence in all 50 states. Walgreen also went on an acquisitions spree, taking over 25 Snyder’s Drug Stores in Minnesota, a dozen Eaton’s Apothecary locations in greater Boston and 257 Duane Reade units in and around New York City. These acquisitions helped boost Walgreen’s sales 7.3 percent, which clearly distinguishes it from the other chart-topping retailers.
The bottom half of the Top 10 starts with Costco, which generated sales of $56.5 billion at its 406 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico. Next comes CVS, with its retail pharmacy sales separated from the corporate total that includes revenues generated by pharmacy benefits management firm Caremark Rx. CVS’s retail business saw its sales figure improve 13 percent from the previous year, primarily because it included the first full year’s performance from the Long’s Drug Stores it acquired in 2008.
Like The Home Depot, Lowe’s was negatively impacted by the prolonged housing slump and saw sales decline 2.1 percent (in an exception to the new methodology, Lowe’s global sales are included in the total because its international operations consist of 16 stores in the eastern half of Canada).
Sears Holdings had sales of $44 billion generated by Sears stores, Kmart locations, hybrid stores and a number of specialty formats. Sales have been trending downward, however, a pattern that continued into the current fiscal year as the company endeavors to close underperforming stores.
There are those who view the Sears’ operation with a wary eye. One industry watcher who doesn’t is Carol Spieckerman, president of consulting firm newmarketbuilders. She sees the future of retailing being implemented in some Sears’ pilot projects, including Marketplace at Sears.com; MyGofer, which democratizes personal shopping; and Sears the Licensor, which makes house brand goods bearing the Craftsman, DieHard and Kenmore labels available to broader audiences via licensing.
Rounding out the Top 10 is Best Buy, one of only two traditional consumer electronics retailers on the chart. It generated $37.3 billion sales in 1,192 U.S. stores, and HDTVs were a big driver of higher average tickets that helped push comp-store sales up 1.7 percent.
