The Top 10 Ridiculous Retail Moments Of 2021 To Date

It’s only the middle of June but as we approach the halfway mark for the year, there has been an usually robust number of moves made by American retailers, many of which seem questionable at best…and downright crazy at worst.

In the interests of public service (not to mention pulling together all of these things just to make sure we’re not the crazy ones), presented here are what from this vantage point at least look like the Top 10 most ridiculous moments in the retailing business so far in 2021.

10. Neiman Marcus Digital Deal Days: The luxury department store, with a new balance sheet coming out of bankruptcy, has gone on a $500 million buying spree of digitally based businesses to beef up its online presence. That this is even newsworthy when every other decent retailer has been doing this for a decade is only eclipsed by the fact the NM was once a leader in e-commerce but let it get away in the piles of private equity debt payments.

9. Victoria’s Secret Gets Politically Correct: Again, another “duh” moment in retailing when it became painfully clear to just about everybody else that this company sexy-tailing strategy was an embarrassing anachronism. Better late than never? We’ll see how complete this transformation really is at the store level where old habits — and push-up bras — are hard to lose.

8. Macy’s M Edifice Complex: Were we the only ones who shook our head at the news that the department store was going to build an officer tower over its Herald Square flagship — in the worst urban commercial real estate market in Manhattan since September 12, 2001? Even in the best of times prime office space was going to be a tough sell on 34^th Street but to offer this up as the solution to all the company’s financial problems just seemed about as promising as trotting out yet another three-day-One-Day-Sale.

7. At Home Going Private: Given the just-about-perfect record of big retail chains going private and taking on debt — they’ve almost always failed — this one seems to be straight out of 2006. At Home, under its former guise as Garden Ridge, has been here before and it didn’t end happily. Google Toys R Us, Linens N Things or the aforementioned Neiman’s if you want to learn more.

6. ABG Going Public: On the flip side of things, the reports that Authentic Brands Group is considering a public offering seem to be nearly as hard to understand. We get why Jaimie Salter and friends want to cash in before all the second-rate, wannabe brands they’ve accumulated prove to be less than the sum of their parts. What’s much harder to figure out is why anyone else would want to be part of this as a shareholder.

5. Home Depot HD Buys A Boat: OK, maybe they didn’t actually purchase a container ship but the big home improvement chain seems to have gotten exclusive rights for one at a time when shipping prices have exploded while availability has imploded. Maybe this will work…until it doesn’t. Remember when Delta Airlines DAL bought an oil refinery as its solution for volatile jet fuel prices. You don’t hear much about that anymore as the global oil market has more ups and downs than a yo-yo. Check back with Depot when containers go back down to $3,000 and see what they think about this idea then.

4. Staples Hopes the Third Time is Charmed: With yet another attempt to buy the retail division of Office Depot ODP , Staples continues to try find a way to succeed at its scaling up strategy. While bigger is usually better, do you really want more of a position in an industry segment where Amazon AMZN is a monster and all of those thousands of physical retail locations are sitting there doing their albatross imitations? Maybe Staples needs to move to Plan B…or D.

3. J.P. Morgan Says Amazon Will Pass Walmart WMT : Maybe…and maybe not. And it depends on what you’re counting. Amazon now gets more than half its retail sales from its third-party marketplace business. Should that count? What about global sales? Hey, Walmart blew it by being so late to the e-comm party and has been playing catch-up ever since. Maybe they deserve to lose the top spot, much as Sears, Kmart and others did when they failed to read the changes in the marketplace correctly. Still, just because Jeff Bezos is blasting off for outer space it doesn’t mean his company will too.

2. Gap GPS & Walmart…& Gap & Kanye: We know everyone is trying to find the right branding partnerships and certainly some odd ones have turned out to be successful. But Walmart introducing a Gap Home program seems to be about 20 years too late for both of them while the Kanye West Yeezy collection at Gap could have markdown written all over it once the singer pulls his next anti-social stunt. What, they couldn’t get OJ?

1. JCPenney JCP Remains the Headless Horseman: It is close to Day 180 without a permanent president for Penney, now under the leadership, such as it is, of its assorted benevolent new owners. This is a company that is entering its second six-month-plus stint without a CEO in the past four years, a practice it can ill-afford as the retail irrelevance clocks keeps counting down. A good leader is hard to find, we know. No leader is even harder to bear.

Stay tuned for the second half of the year to see what happens next in the wonderful wacky world of retail. You can’t make this stuff up.