A middle-income shopper may migrate to a Nordstrom from a Macy's and spend $65 instead of $45 on a gift because they are serviced better at a Nordstrom, ... Department store chains like Sears and J.C. Penney need to be very aware of this if they want to retain their shoppers over the holidays.

The closer you are to them, the greater the impact they'll be. If you can get almost one out of four people to shop at an outlet mall, that's a lot of people. It might not impact East Cooper. It might not impact Summerville. But somebody's going to feel them because that's quite a bit of business.

The closer you get to Christmas, there's this mentality on the part of consumers where they're willing to go out just a little bit more to get the even bigger discounts.

The first thing you would do is you'd assume responsibility,

This is a core product category that generates a lot of profit from sales of products and the extended service warrantees. Sears needs to protect this business at all costs.

The trouble is, if all they do is just change the name and change the logo, I'm not sure that's going to get rid of the Firestone image. They would have to re-paint the offices and move the headquarters and offices.

The trouble today with retailers is they can't afford to have too many underperforming stores. When 10 percent of your stores are unprofitable, you will start losing money. That wasn't the case years ago.

The luxury stores are the ones hitting the home runs and the discount stores are going to end up doing some pretty good numbers, ... I'm very worried that the middle part of the market is not here.

I don't think the day is the kind of day that retailers thought it would be. Christmas Eve is seldom the big day because of the fact that so many consumers ... want to be home.

High hotel rates that border on price gouging are the single biggest issue that I hear retailers complaining about, and they usually use the word 'abuse' in their complaint,