Transforming a Declining Shoe Retailer

Authors
Andrew Borchers, Bill Fredenberger
Region
North America
Topic
Accounting & Finance
Marketing & Sales
Length
3 pages
Keywords
marketing
small business
Accounting
retailing
spreadsheet
Copyright Holder
Society for Case Research
Student Price
$4.00
Target Audience
Graduate Students
Undergraduate Students

Instructors can use this incident in multiple ways.  First, instructors in Business Spreadsheet and IT Personal Productivity classes can use this data in teaching spreadsheet skills such as pivot tables and graphing.  Second, instructors in Marketing Management, Retailing or Managerial Accounting classes can focus on the decision-making aspect of determining what to trim.  In either of these situations, this case is very amendable to team oriented problem solving.  Pedagogical research emphasizes the importance of such an approach in business education.

Learning Outcomes

The learning objectives of this critical incident are for students to:

  1. Analyze financial results for a retailer, identifying profitability and contribution margin
    by store, department, shoe size and/or clerk.
  2. Apply spreadsheet software to analyze a large dataset of real transaction data.
  3. Evaluate business alternatives and make hard choices on operations to retain and those to
    close.
  4. Apply the economic concept of opportunity cost to a business decision.