Hawai‘i Retailers Are Struggling More Than Other Businesses – Hawaii Business Magazine

It isn’t easy being a local retailer: If you survived the Covid shutdowns, you still have to compete with other stores in your neighborhood and on your island, plus online retailers like Amazon and superstore chains like Walmart and Costco.

To gain insights into their successes and challenges, every two years, we conduct a survey of local retailers – large, medium and small. It’s a survey within the overall BOSS Survey of business owners and executives from across the Hawaiian Islands.

The retailers are asked all of the questions that we ask everyone else, plus specific questions designed to understand what’s happening within the retail industry. Here are highlights of the survey we conducted in April and May of this year.

Revenue, Profit and Staffing

On the three main measures of performance – revenue, profit and number of employees – the retailers we surveyed are doing slightly worse overall than the other businesses we surveyed. We asked everyone: What happened on these three measures of performance at your company? Did they go up, hold steady or decline from the year before?

This chart shows the percentage of businesses that said they suffered decreases in these key measures of performance. In each case, a higher percentage of retailers suffered declines than other types of businesses.

Holiday Season Sales

For many retailers, the most important time of the year is the holiday season, from around Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day. So every time we survey retailers, we ask about their latest holiday season and compare it to the previous holiday season. Did sales go up, hold steady or go down?

This chart compares what retailers told us in the latest survey and what retailers said the last time we surveyed them. The results were almost identically gloomy. I had to go back to a BOSS Survey conducted in 2009 to find worse results from retailers.

Customers

We asked the retailers if the overall number of their customers had gone up, held steady or gone down in the past year.

Online Sales

We asked retailers if their company had online sales: 62% said yes. Then we asked those with online sales a few questions.

• We learned that overall, the majority of those online sales were to local people – a result consistent with our previous surveys of local retailers.
• To gauge the impact of online sales on their companies, we gave retailers four options to characterize their online sales. Here is what they chose.

Recent Changes

Retailers were asked to select from this list of options to characterize changes they have made over the past few years. They could choose as many as were appropriate.

What Are Your Challenges?

Retailers were asked which of these challenges 19% their companies face. The percentages reflect how many of the retailers said, “Yes, we face this challenge.” They could select as many challenges as appropriate.

The top challenge for local retailers was, by far, finding good employees. In seven previous surveys of retailers, that challenge was never cited by more than 44% of retailers.

On the other hand, the pressure to reduce prices is at a low ebb. For instance, in 2012, 29% of retailers surveyed said they faced pressure to reduce prices.