Hey, Urban Outfitters, Stop Opening New Stores
It’s time for Urban Outfitters to re-think its thing for physical stores.Shares in the hipster-chic retailer dropped by as much as 9 percent Friday after it warned investors, in a quarterly results filing late Thursday, of falling sales in the current quarter. More than half a dozen Wall Street analysts subsequently cut their share-price targets. The consensus now pegs Urban’s stock price in the next 12 months at around $31, down from around $40 a year ago. More telling, though, was another sentence tucked into the filing: The retailer said its fairly meager 0.9 percent comparable sales growth across all its brands in the latest quarter was driven by its direct-to-consumer channel — meaning e-commerce — which was partially offset by declining comparable store sales. Read more at Bloomberg.
