Aeropostale Case

Target Canada is the company’s first international expansion. However, Target’s expansion was not successful, as the company had initially planned for. Therefore, the company will be closing 133 Target Canada stores across the country and lay off approximately 17,600 employees. According to Target’s CEO Brian Cornell, he stated “After a thorough review of our Canadian performance and careful consideration of the implications of all options, we were unable to find a realistic scenario that would get Target Canada to profitability until at least 2021.” Moreover, problems occurred immediately when Target opened up over hundred stores in the first year of its Canadian Expansion. For example, customers complained about the lack of basic goods, prices being too high, and the unavailability of U.S. brands in the stores. It was the start of Target accumulating losses as high as a billion dollars a year. In addition, there was also increasing competition with Wal-Mart being the biggest retailer in Canada. The already intimidating rival lowered its prices in order to fend off Target. Furthermore, Target Corporation’s cash costs to discontinue Canadian operations are expected to be $500 million to $600 million, most of which will occur in the Company’s 2015 fiscal year or later. The Company has sufficient resources to fund these expected costs, including cash on hand and ongoing cash generation by

➢ Has to do what: To decide to either confront Gilman and change what she perceives as sexist and/or racist practices or to leave the company

You have recently been hired as the HR manager responsible for two separate Ontario locations belonging to Wilson Brothers Limited. You have been asked by the HR Director at the head office in Brandon, Manitoba, to quickly provide a report on any initial HR issues related to Recruitment and Selection, Compensation and Benefits, Health and Safety, Training and Development and Labour and Employee Relations that are affecting or will affect the Cambridge operation and the new plant in Scarborough. The HR Director has made it very clear that Wilson Brothers would like both the Cambridge location and the new plant in Scarborough to remain union-free and are willing to offer very competitive wages and benefits

1. Why would a large and complex company like Boeing employ off-the-shelf application-specific software for accounting, human resources, supply chain management and other core business processes? And why do they choose to own, host and operate all of their own software rather than to for example outsource payroll to ADP Corporation or sales force management to Salesforce.com? [list]

Thus, Target operations thought that opening over 100 stores all over Canada would be a great opportunity for the company to expand its profitability. However, the exact opposite happened. Instead of reaching their profitability goal, there is an estimated loss between $800-$900 million, since the opening of stores in Canada (Austin, 2014). The cause of this failure was due to a lack of inventory in most stores; leading to empty shelves and many of the favorable brands from U.S. Target’s did not make it to the stores in Canada. Another problem was that prices were higher in Canadian stores compared to U.S. store prices due to shipping costs and tax (Austin, 2014). Target failed to think this whole process through before acting on it. Starting with the 124 stores who all had to be remodeled and up and running in less than a year due to Canada’s policy of not letting any store stay vacant for any longer than that; to having the ability to furnish and fill the stores with all of their merchandise (Nolan, 2014). Soon they came to realize they could not. Target’s lack of looking into the higher prices they would have been paying making it able to get the merchandise over the border into Canada, was another issue leading to the company’s ineffective plans. Having noticed early on that the extra costs of tax will lead to a price mark up on in store products,

When compared with the industry, the inventory turnover of S&S Air of 21.43 times is well above the industry upper quartile of 10.89 times. This indicates that S&S Air is much more efficient than the industry average at inventory management.

Bed, Bath and Beyond (BBBY) currently has $400 million more in cash than they need for ongoing growth and operations requirements. While the company is financially sound analysts and investors worry about the company’s capital structure decisions. Investors do not want to see that much cash on the books and worry that the current capital structure is not the most effective for the future. They prefer that BBBY change their capital structure by paying out excess cash and issuing debt. This could allow BBBY to improve their return on equity and raise earnings per share. Given the low interest rates available it seems like the perfect time for BBBY to add debt to its capital structure. Until now they

Additionally, as expressed by Rebecca Ratner, Hsieh’s commitment to merging the workplace with social lives could present risk to the company in the form of unprofessional or inappropriate conduct that is not addressed properly.

1. Consider Dunlap’s statement on page 3 of the case: “Stakeholders! Every time I hear the word, I ask how much did they pay for their stake? There is only one constituency I am concerned about and that is the shareholder primacy? Do you agree or disagree with Dunlap’s view of shareholder primacy? Explain

Parts Emporium Inc. managed to transform itself from doing business out of a garage to becoming the largest independent distributor of auto parts in the north central region. In the past period, inventory capacity rose from 65% to 90% and sales growth has stagnated causing Parts Emporium to hire an outside manager to figure out where the problem lies.

1.a) To value Spyder Active Sports Inc., we decided to use the WACC method since we can easily value its cost of assets with the data immediately available to us in the case. We first unlevered the beta’s of 7 comparable companies and took the average to get a comparable unlevered beta for Spyder (Exhibit 1). Since we are assuming Spyder is entirely equity financed, its unlevered asset beta is equal to the beta of its assets. We now have a rough estimate of Spyder’s asset beta, we can

Founded by J.W. Nordstrom in 1880 as a small shoe store, by 1995 Nordstrom had become a giant retailer with net earnings of $203 million and over 35,000 employees. Nordstrom remains a family operation to date. The idea of the ‘Nordstrom Way’ - with strong commitment to the firm, emphasis on proactive service, no external hiring, and a decentralized management structure (e.g., Nordstrom has no CEO) - is central to their employee relations, and is seen as central to their success. Average compensation within the company is above industry average.

speed at which the company opened their stores up. This didn’t let Canadians grow into the new lifestyle to shop at Target and instead the company collapsed on itself within a year. The second issue is the lack of product availability for customers to purchase. Due to the speed of opening, Target didn’t properly achieve their equilibrium of merchandise to sell and instead left many customers disappointed with the lack of quality service. The third issue is the prices compared to Target’s US stores. There was no foresight into the comparison of quality, price and service which would become evident once they entered the Canadian market. The fact that

Rob Griffin, the senior vice president and U.S. director of search for Media contacts, a media consulting firm, is faced with the task of optimizing search engine marketing (SEM) for Air France as the company seeks to compete in the hyper-competitive U.S. market. Even though Griffin is satisfied with the performance of his company, he wants to make the team to remain the leading position and provide the results that Air France wanted. At the time of the case, SEM has become an advertising phenomenon, with North American advertisers spent $ 9.4 billion in the SEM channel, up to 62% in 2005. In the past, Media contacts h had concentrated on Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo for the search engine

Patagonia strives to provide quality clothing and outdoor equipment while staying as environmentally friendly as possible. A hiking boot, for example, would need to fit strict requirements. The boot would need to be durable, comfortable, stylish, and made from environmentally friendly products. You also need to determine if there is a large enough market for the product. This would provide the means necessary to determine if the product has the highest chance of being successful. Given these strict requirements, one way to help keep the costs down is to use recycled material from older products that costumers turn in, therefore saving resources and money.