Week 7 BOC: Largest Retailers

Who is the largest fashion retailer? Food? Fashion? Music? Well the largest retailer in American, as well as the rest of the world, is Wal-Mart. Big surprise. Wal-Mart is continuously growing and they are the biggest retailer for goods and food, and they have recently planned to buy Fresh & Easy stores in order to expand their groceries stores. Target has had a hard time warming up to Canadian shoppers, their 2^nd quarter only generated $275 million and customers didn’t like the shopping experience. Costco ranked number 1 in Canada. As for fashion, Zara has become the world’s largest retailer. The company generated €3.6 billion in global sales and opened 49 more stores worldwide between February and April -- mainly in Russia, Japan and China – bringing the total number of outlets to 6,058. It also launched its ecommerce platform in Canada and said a comparable one would be online in Russia by the fourth quarter. There’s no guess, the world’s largest music retailer is iTunes. By February 2013, the company has sold over 25 billion songs, but the company as a whole has been slowing down. In general, the top 5 retailers in the U.S after Wal-Mart, is Kroger, with roughly $92.2 billion in 2012 sales. Target ($72 billion) and Costco ($71 billion) are virtually tied for the third spot, with Home Depot ($66 billion) edging CVS ($63.7 billion) for the 5th position. Each of the US’ top 10 retailers count the US as their home country