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Category: Big Lots (BIG)
Date: 1 January 2021 Stock price of Big Lots (BIG): $42.93 In this article we take a more detailed look at Big Lots, a community retailer operating more than 1,400 Big Lots stores in 47 states, dedicated to friendly service, trustworthy value, and affordable solutions in every season and category – furniture, food, décor, and more
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Big Lots, Inc. is a community retailer operating more than 1,400 Big Lots stores in 47 states, dedicated to friendly service, trustworthy value, and affordable solutions in every season and category – furniture, food, décor, and more "
More About Big Lots
Big Lots, Inc., an Ohio corporation, through its wholly owned subsidiaries is a discount retailer operating in the United States (“U.S.”). At February 1, 2020, we operated a total of 1,404 stores and an e-commerce platform. Our mission is to help people live BIG and save LOTS. Our vision is to be the BIG difference for a better life by delivering unmatched value through surprise and delight, by building a “Best Places to Work” culture, by rewarding shareholders with consistent growth and top tier returns, and by doing good as we do well. Our values are leading with our core customer (whom we refer to as Jennifer), treating all like friends, succeeding together, and playing to win.
Big Lots, Inc. is a community retailer operating more than 1,400 Big Lots stores in 47 states, dedicated to friendly service, trustworthy value, and affordable solutions in every season and category – furniture, food, décor, and more. Our stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BIG.
We manage our business on the basis of one segment: discount retailing. We evaluate and report overall sales and merchandise performance based on the following key merchandising categories: Furniture, Seasonal, Soft Home, Food, Consumables, Hard Home, and Electronics, Toys, & Accessories. The Furniture category includes our upholstery, mattress, case goods, and readyto-assemble departments. The Seasonal category includes our Christmas trim, lawn & garden, summer, and other holiday departments. The Soft Home category includes our fashion bedding, utility bedding, bath, window, decorative textile, home organization, area rugs, home décor, and frames departments. The Food category includes our beverage & grocery, candy & snacks, and specialty foods departments. The Consumables category includes our health, beauty and cosmetics, plastics, paper, chemical, and pet departments. The Hard Home category includes our small appliances, table top, food preparation, stationery, greeting cards, and home maintenance departments. The Electronics, Toys, & Accessories category includes our electronics, toys, jewelry, apparel, and hosiery departments.
We are a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of a diverse range of recreational powerboats, including performance sport boats, sterndrive and outboard boats under four brands—Malibu, Axis, Cobalt, and 1 Pursuit. We have the #1 market share position in the United States in the performance sport boat category through our Malibu and Axis brands and the #1 market share position in the United States in the 24’—29’ segment of the sterndrive category through our Cobalt brand, and we are among the leading market share positions in the fiberglass outboard fishing boat market with our Pursuit brand. Our product portfolio of premium brands are used for a broad range of recreational boating activities including, among others, water sports such as water skiing, wakeboarding and wake surfing, as well as general recreational boating and fishing. Our passion for consistent innovation, which has led to propriety technology such as Surf Gate, has allowed us to expand the market for our products by introducing consumers to new and exciting recreational activities.
Big Lots, Inc. is a community retailer operating more than 1,400 Big Lots stores in 47 states, dedicated to friendly service, trustworthy value, and affordable solutions in every season and category – furniture, food, décor, and more. Our stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BIG.
We manage our business on the basis of one segment: discount retailing. We evaluate and report overall sales and merchandise performance based on the following key merchandising categories: Furniture, Seasonal, Soft Home, Food, Consumables, Hard Home, and Electronics, Toys, & Accessories. The Furniture category includes our upholstery, mattress, case goods, and readyto-assemble departments. The Seasonal category includes our Christmas trim, lawn & garden, summer, and other holiday departments. The Soft Home category includes our fashion bedding, utility bedding, bath, window, decorative textile, home organization, area rugs, home décor, and frames departments. The Food category includes our beverage & grocery, candy & snacks, and specialty foods departments. The Consumables category includes our health, beauty and cosmetics, plastics, paper, chemical, and pet departments. The Hard Home category includes our small appliances, table top, food preparation, stationery, greeting cards, and home maintenance departments. The Electronics, Toys, & Accessories category includes our electronics, toys, jewelry, apparel, and hosiery departments.
We are a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of a diverse range of recreational powerboats, including performance sport boats, sterndrive and outboard boats under four brands—Malibu, Axis, Cobalt, and 1 Pursuit. We have the #1 market share position in the United States in the performance sport boat category through our Malibu and Axis brands and the #1 market share position in the United States in the 24’—29’ segment of the sterndrive category through our Cobalt brand, and we are among the leading market share positions in the fiberglass outboard fishing boat market with our Pursuit brand. Our product portfolio of premium brands are used for a broad range of recreational boating activities including, among others, water sports such as water skiing, wakeboarding and wake surfing, as well as general recreational boating and fishing. Our passion for consistent innovation, which has led to propriety technology such as Surf Gate, has allowed us to expand the market for our products by introducing consumers to new and exciting recreational activities.
Merchandising of Big Lots
We focus our merchandise strategy on being the authority on price and value to Jennifer in all of our merchandise categories. We utilize traditional sourcing methods and in certain merchandise categories also take advantage of closeout channels to enhance our ability to offer outstanding value. We evaluate our product offerings using a rating process that measures the quality, brand, fashion, and value of each item. This process requires us to focus our product offering decisions on our customer's expectations and enables us to compare the potential performance of traditionally-sourced merchandise, either domestic or import, to closeout merchandise, which is generally sourced from production overruns, packaging changes, discontinued products, order cancellations, liquidations, returns, and other disruptions in the supply chain of manufacturers. We believe that focusing on our customers’ expectations has improved our ability to provide a desirable assortment of offerings in our merchandise categories.
Stores of Big Lots
Of our 1,404 stores, 33% operate in four states: California, Texas, Florida, and Ohio, and net sales from stores in these states represented 34% of our 2019 net sales. We have a concentration in these states based on their size, population, and customer base.
- Alabama 29
- Arizona 34
- Arkansas 11
- California 151
- Colorado 18
- Connecticut 14
- Delaware 5
- Florida 105
- Georgia 51
- Idaho 6
- Illinois 33
- Indiana 44
- Iowa 3
- Kansas 7
- Kentucky 40
- Louisiana 21
- Maine 6
- Maryland 26
- Massachusetts 22
- Michigan 45
- Minnesota 1
- Mississippi 14
- Missouri 23
- Montana 3
- Nebraska 3
- Nevada 12
- New Hampshire 6
- New Jersey 28
- New Mexico 11
- New York 64
- North Carolina 71
- North Dakota 1
- Ohio 97
- Oklahoma 18
- Oregon 15
- Pennsylvania 68
- Rhode Island 1
- South Carolina 34
- Tennessee 47
- Texas 112
- Utah 8
- Vermont 4
- Virginia 39
- Washington 27
- West Virginia 15
- Wisconsin 9
- Wyoming 2
Associates/ employees of Big Lots
At February 1, 2020, we had approximately 34,000 active associates comprised of 10,500 full-time and 23,500 part time associates. Approximately 69% of the associates we employed during 2019 were employed on a part-time basis. Temporary associates hired for the holiday selling season increased the total number of associates to a peak of approximately 35,900 in 2019. We consider our relationship with our associates to be good, and we are not a party to any labor agreements
Competition of Big Lots
We operate in the highly competitive retail industry. We face strong sales competition from other general merchandise, discount, food, furniture, arts and crafts, and dollar store retailers, which operate in traditional brick and mortar stores and/or online. Additionally, we compete with a number of companies for retail site locations, to attract and retain quality employees, and to acquire our broad merchandising assortment from vendors. We operate an e-commerce platform which faces additional competition from a wider range of retailers in a highly competitive marketplace, where we compete for customers, fulfillment capabilities, and technological innovation.
Purchasing of Big Lots
The goal of our merchandising strategy is to be the authority on price and value to Jennifer in all of our merchandise categories. Accordingly, we source our merchandise through both closeout opportunities and planned purchases to provide Jennifer with both the surprise and delight of closeouts and the consistency of staple product offerings. Over the past few years, we have expanded our planned purchases in the Food, Consumables, Soft Home, and Furniture merchandise categories to provide a merchandise assortment that our customers expect us to consistently offer in our stores at a significant value. In addition, the sourcing and purchasing of quality closeout merchandise directly from manufacturers and other vendors, typically at prices lower than those paid by traditional discount retailers, continues to represent an important element of our business model. We believe that our strong vendor relationships and our strong credit profile support this sourcing model. We expect that the unpredictability of the retail and manufacturing environments coupled with what we believe is our significant purchasing power position will continue to support our ability to source quality closeout merchandise at competitive prices in these categories. In connection with the implementation of our merchandising strategy, we have expanded the role of our global sourcing department, and assessed our overseas vendor relationships. We expect our import partners to responsibly source goods that our merchandising teams identify as having our desired mix of quality, fashion, and value. During 2019, we purchased approximately 24% of our merchandise directly from overseas vendors, including approximately 17% from vendors located in China. Additionally, a significant amount of our domestically-purchased merchandise is manufactured abroad.
Advertising and Promotion of Big Lots
Our brand image is an important part of our marketing program. Our principal trademarks, including the Big Lots® family of trademarks, have been registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. We use a variety of marketing vehicles to promote our brand awareness, including television, internet, social media, e-mail, in-store point-of-purchase, and print media. Over the past few years, we have refined our brand identity to accentuate our friendly service and community orientation. We focus on serving Jennifer with a friendly approach and positive shopping experience. Our community-oriented approach to retailing includes “doing good as we do well”, which means supporting both local and national causes that aid the communities in which we do business. On a local level, we invest and support our associates throughout our geographic regions with our point of sale campaigns, and the positive impacts those campaigns generate for our foundation partners. We serve the community on a national level through our Big Lots Foundation which focuses on healthcare, housing, hunger, and education. We believe our approach to retailing differentiates us from the competition and allows us to make a difference in the communities we serve. In all of our markets, we design and distribute printed advertising circulars, through newspaper insertions and mailings. In 2019, we distributed multi-page circulars representing 29 weeks of advertising coverage, which was one additional circular compared to 2018. We create regional versions of these circulars to tailor our advertising message to market differences caused by product availability, climate, and customer preferences. Our customer database is an important marketing tool that allows us to communicate in a cost-effective manner with our customers, including e-mail delivery of our circulars. In 2017, we rolled out our new rewards program, BIG Rewards, which replaced our former Buzz Club Rewards® program. The BIG Rewards program rewards our customers for making frequent and high-ticket purchases and offers a special birthday surprise. At February 1, 2020, our BIG Rewards program included over 19 million active members who had made a purchase in our stores in the last 12 months. Another element of our marketing approach focuses on brand management by communicating our message directly to Jennifer through social and digital media outlets, including Facebook® , Instagram® , Twitter® , Pinterest® , and YouTube® . Our marketing program also employs a traditional television campaign, which combines strategic branding and promotional elements used in most of our other marketing media. Our highly-targeted media placement strategy uses strategically selected networks and programs aired by national cable providers as the foundation of our television advertising. In addition, we use in-store promotional materials, including in-store signage, to emphasize special bargains and significant values offered to our customers. Total advertising expense as a percentage of total net sales was 1.8%, 1.8%, and 1.7% in 2019, 2018, and 2017, respectively.
Warehousing and Distribution of Big Lots
The majority of our merchandise offerings are processed for retail sale and distributed to our stores from five regional distribution centers located in Alabama, California, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania. During the fourth quarter of 2019, we operated six distribution centers while we transitioned our Rancho Cucamonga, California distribution center operations to our new Apple Valley, California distribution center. During 2015, we announced our intention to open a new distribution center in California and relocate our existing California distribution operations to this facility. We completed construction of the new facility in 2019 and began transitioning our operations to the new distribution center in the fourth quarter of 2019. We completed the transition during early 2020 and subsequently closed our Rancho Cucamonga, California distribution center. We select the locations of our distribution centers to help manage transportation costs and to minimize the distance from distribution centers to our stores. While certain of our merchandise vendors deliver directly to our stores, the large majority of our inventory is staged and delivered from our distribution centers to facilitate prompt and efficient distribution and transportation of merchandise to our stores and help maximize our sales and inventory turnover. In addition to our regional distribution centers that handle store merchandise, we operate two warehouses within our Ohio distribution center. One warehouse distributes fixtures and supplies to our stores and our five regional distribution centers and the other warehouse supplements our fulfillment center for our e-commerce operations.
At February 1, 2020, we owned approximately 7.6 million square feet of distribution center and warehouse space in four distribution facilities and leased approximately 2.8 million square feet of distribution center and warehouse space in two distribution facilities.
The combined output of our regional distribution centers was approximately 2.3 million merchandise cartons per week in 2019. Certain vendors deliver merchandise directly to our stores when it supports our operational goal to deliver merchandise from our vendors to the sales floor in the most efficient manner. We operate our ecommerce fulfillment center out of our Columbus, Ohio warehouse.
At February 1, 2020, we owned approximately 7.6 million square feet of distribution center and warehouse space in four distribution facilities and leased approximately 2.8 million square feet of distribution center and warehouse space in two distribution facilities.
The combined output of our regional distribution centers was approximately 2.3 million merchandise cartons per week in 2019. Certain vendors deliver merchandise directly to our stores when it supports our operational goal to deliver merchandise from our vendors to the sales floor in the most efficient manner. We operate our ecommerce fulfillment center out of our Columbus, Ohio warehouse.
Seasonality of Big Lots earnings
We have historically experienced, and expect to continue to experience, seasonal fluctuations in our sales and profitability, with a larger percentage of our net sales and operating profit realized in our fourth fiscal quarter, which includes the Christmas holiday selling season. In addition, our quarterly net sales and operating profits can be affected by the timing of new store openings and store closings, advertising, and certain holidays. We historically receive a higher proportion of merchandise, carry higher inventory levels, and incur higher outbound shipping and payroll expenses as a percentage of sales in our third fiscal quarter in anticipation of increased sales activity during our fourth fiscal quarter. Performance during our fourth fiscal quarter typically reflects a leveraging effect which has a favorable impact on our operating results because net sales are higher and certain of our costs, such as rent and depreciation, are fixed and do not vary as sales levels escalate. If our sales performance is significantly better or worse during the Christmas holiday selling season, we would expect a more pronounced impact on our annual financial results than if our sales performance is significantly better or worse in a different season
Retail Operations of Big Lots
All of our stores are located in the U.S., predominantly in strip shopping centers, and have an average store size of approximately 32,400 square feet, of which an average of 22,600 is selling square feet. For additional information about the properties in our retail operations, see the discussion under the caption “Real Estate” in “Item 1. Business” and under the caption “Real Estate” in MD&A in this Form 10-K. The average cost to open a new store in a leased facility during 2019 was approximately $1.8 million, including the cost of construction, fixtures, and inventory
Big Lots (BIG) stock price history over the last 5 years
The image below shows the stock price history of Big Lots. Over the last 5 years the stock of Big Lots (BIG) as increased by 15.8%. Relatively flat returns provided to Big Lots stockholders over the last 5 years.