The story of how a B.C. man found his birth mother
After his adopted parents died, Dave Rogers set out to learn more about his birth mother. DNA results and a little help from friendly strangers would put him on a path to a small town in England.
Consumer behaviour, a looming recession and the reactions of retailers to pandemic-driven supply chain issues are combining to drive a liquidation renaissance, according to one business advisor and retail futurist.
Businesses like the defunct Canadian chain Liquidation World have liquidated consumer merchandise in North America for decades, usually moving stock left over from bankrupt retailers.
However, Doug Stephens says a new post-pandemic retail landscape might see liquidators serve a new purpose: moving online shopping returns and retail overstock created in the wake of pandemic-created supply chain issues.
“What we've seen through the pandemic... is that there's been a real revolution in the way consumers are shopping,” Stephens told CTV's Your Morning on Friday. “People are shopping online now a lot more than they were pre-pandemic…and there's a higher return rate of goods when they're purchased online."
Stephens said the rate of return for apparel purchased online can be as high as 33 per cent. Further, an analysis jointly published by the National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail – a software and analytics firm – found that in 2021, shoppers returned an average of 16.6 per cent of their purchases. That number was up from 10.6 per cent in 2020 and more than double the rate in 2019.
Stephens said large online retailers with liberal return policies like Amazon and Wayfair have shifted the benchmark for return policies across the retail landscape, feeding the trend of consumers buying items online, only to send them back. In some cases, as with Amazon, Stephens said retailers route those returns directly to third-party liquidators.
"So what we find is that retailers like Amazon, Wayfair and others are not even accepting these goods back. They don't want them back,” he said. “They're just selling them off to liquidators and it's creating almost a subclass or subcategory of retail in the market now that liquidators are basically becoming an everyday force in the marketplace to clear out these returns."
Stephens said online shopping returns only make up part of the excess inventory retailers are trying to move. A significant lag between demand for consumer goods during the pandemic and the supply of those goods has also contributed to retail overstock.
Retailers caught without inventory amid the supply chain issues of 2020 and 2021 are finally catching up to demand for household goods and electronics, he said, just in time for economic growth to slow in Canada and the U.S., leading consumers to curb spending.
In July, Walmart released a fiscal update warning its operating profits would drop sharply as it cut prices to move inventory due to an oversupply of general merchandise. This discord between supply and demand has created a new liquidation market Stephens expects will linger for a while.
"Once [retailers] were able to catch up to demand and place large orders and receive large orders, we're now starting to hear reverberations of a pending recession,” Stephens said.
"So now you have retailers sitting on mountains of inventory that they've now got to clear out."
A previous version of this story stated Doug Stephens spoke with CTVNews.ca. The story has been corrected to reflect that he actually spoke with CTV's Your Morning.
After his adopted parents died, Dave Rogers set out to learn more about his birth mother. DNA results and a little help from friendly strangers would put him on a path to a small town in England.
A Montreal man is warning Tesla drivers about using the Smart Summon feature after his vehicle hit another in a parking lot.
Italy's mafia rarely dirties its hands with blood these days. Extortion rackets have gone out of fashion and murders are largely frowned upon by the godfathers.
The Israel-Hamas war has led to a spike in 'violent rhetoric' from 'extremist actors' that could prompt some in Canada to turn to violence, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service warns.
Russia plans to hold drills simulating the use of battlefield nuclear weapons, the Defense Ministry announced Monday, days after the Kremlin reacted angrily to comments by senior Western officials about the war in Ukraine and Moscow warned that tensions with the West are deepening.
As Canadians brace themselves for summer temperatures, forecasters say a weakening El Nino cycle doesn’t mean relief from the heat.
Actor Bernard Hill, who delivered a rousing cry before leading his people into battle in 'The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King' and went down with the ship as the captain in 'Titanic,' has died.
Police say it’s fortunate no one was injured or killed in a collision at North Vancouver’s Park and Tilford shopping centre Saturday evening that sent one vehicle careening into a flower shop and another into a set of concrete barriers outside a Winners store.
The Israeli army ordered some 100,000 Palestinians on Monday to begin evacuating from the southern city of Rafah, signaling that a long-promised ground invasion there could be imminent and further complicating efforts to broker a cease-fire in Gaza.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.
Since 1932, Montreal's Henri Henri has been filled to the brim with every possible kind of hat, from newsboy caps to feathered fedoras.
Police in Oak Bay, B.C., had to close a stretch of road Sunday to help an elephant seal named Emerson get safely back into the water.