An interesting Fung Global Retail & Tech report considers how much sales densities have in fact changed at US retailers over the past five years, stripping out e-commerce. For some time, commentators and analysts have been arguing that retail is becoming a lower profit business. This has in part been blamed on the lower profitability of e-commerce which has been accounting for an ever-growing share of revenue within companies. The Fung report looks at sales per square metre from brick-and-mortar stores only, and finds that while Home Depot, and Lowe's for example have increased their figures, Nordstrom, Target, Macy's, Kohl's, JC Penney and Sears hhave lost sales. The report calculates how much selling space these companies would have to lose in order to return to the in-store sales densities they enjoyed in 2011. Thus Nordstrom would need to reduce their space by one miilion square feet, and Macy's by 58 million.

see report