Ray Allegrezza

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Ikea May Be Overselling The "In-Store" Experience

Leave it to IKEA. At a time when most retailers are scratching their heads for ways to entice shoppers into their stores,  it appears that the IKEA location in Beijing needs to find ways to get customers to go home. Really. There was a recent story in the L.A. Times reporting how scores of shoppers in and around Beijing take day trips to IKEA. Sounds like that would be good news, right? Maybe not.... More

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Memo to furniture retailers: Facebook is your friend!

Wesley Lee, manager of a Thomasville store, is a man after my own heart.  He looks for good news and when he finds it,  he is quick to share it. Today, he sent me a note along with a just-issed report from BIGresearch that is worth sharing with you. Recently, BIGresearch polled more than 22,000 consumers regarding their utilization of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and o... More

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Hit 'em where they ain't...reach 'em where they are.

At 5′ 4″ and 140 pounds, Willie Keeler had the distinction of being the smallest player ever to play professional baseball.   By today’s standards, his 30-inch, 29-0unce-bat looks like a toothpick compared to some of the logs the big boys use today, but even so, Wee Willie had an eight-year run beginning in 1894 that netted him eight seasons of rapping 200 hits each year. Pretty amazing, especiall... More

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Furniture frustrations: Time to pay the piper?

While CIT’s latest  challenges may not be the straw heavy enough to break the camel’s back, it certainly seems to have the potential to put the darn dromedary in a corset. And with CIT’s future still murky–and credit still tight as a tick–the added stress of an uncertain outcome  certainly appears to have shortened the tempers  of more than one vendor. So much so that after having extended convers... More

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Furniture execs wonder if it is time to pay the piper?

We all know what they say about payback. Well, if an investigation set to get underway by a  fledgling coalition of case-goods importers, Chinese factories and a Seattle-based law firm gets legs, they could come running full speed at the group of domestic case goods makers that supported the now famous antidumping suit. As first reported in our paper, this coalition has hired the law-firm of Garve... More