A lot of lowes peeps praised the "coupon event" for bringing in soooo many customers and doing soooo much in sales.........i cringed....all of us here on the layoff cringed....we knew better......"sales" are meaningless if youre giving the customer the money to buy the product!!! WE have all been criticizing the insane amount of product lowes was forcing into the stores while also cutting hours for stocking and truck processing crews. i tell my wife every day marvin doesnt understand COST and i bet he doesnt even control the "purse" in his own house! he spends and spends on gambles but invest nothing in the bedrock of a companies success. i have joked on here when all this product doesnt sell in a timely manner i bet marvin will hold another "garage sale" to get rid of it. he operates like a teenager who grows bored with what they saved up for so they sell it for a third of the price so they can use the money to go buy some other new toy..... all this excess freight and buying at all cost was bound to hurt margin. just having tons of product isnt going to magically bring those contractors through the doors if youre gutting your staff at the same time it just looks like more of the same nonsense. guess what....morgan stanley agrees with us.
"To that end, Morgan Stanley analysts said in a scathing note released on Wednesday that it appeared Lowe's may have been "highly promotional" in the first quarter, leading to its earnings hit. Otherwise, the company may not have understood its product acquisition costs or not realized how promotional it was being due to "outdated technology," the analysts said.
"The critical question on this morning's conference call will be how quickly LOW can get this gross margin issue under control and to what extent it will adversely impact sales," the firm's analysts led by Simeon Gutman wrote in a note to clients. They called the first-quarter earnings miss "unexpected."