Madeleine Heffernan January 1, 2015 inShare United States retailing giant Costco plans to inject yet more capital into its Australian business as it launches more stores and seeks to muscle in to the petrol station market. Costco’s revenue surged in 2014 as customers sought out goods ranging from hearing aids to deli platters at its membership-only discount warehouses. But despite the revenue rise, Costco Wholesale Australia has posted a full-year loss because of the costs of opening three new warehouses, and accounting changes. Unlike fellow foreign retail invader, German supermarket giant Aldi, Costco provides detail on its Australian performance through corporate filings. Costco’s strategy seems to differ from Aldi’s. Aldi has slowly added stores since 2001; Costco has added warehouses quickly to capitalise on Australian appetite for competition in retail and the country’s juicy margins. Investors have become increasingly nervous about Aldi and Costco taking share of the supermarket duopoly,…

Madeleine Heffernan January 2, 2015 inShare Governments should loosen regulations to help the retail sector where one quarter of businesses run at a loss and many struggle to get to grips with online shopping, the Productivity Commission argues. In a study of the $23 billion a month sector, requested by Treasurer Joe Hockey, the commission says retailers in Australia “continue to operate under several regulatory regimes – such as those relating to trading hours, and planning and zoning – that unnecessarily inflate their costs and restrict their ability to innovate”. “However, this study also highlights that many of the cost pressures facing retailers are market driven and, therefore, require commercial responses,” commissioner Patricia Scott says. The report says the retail sector “appears to be managing rising cost pressures effectively”, citing relatively stable profit margins of 4.9 per cent, investment and employment growth in recent years, and cost-cutting such as a…

ANDY KESSLER JANUARY 03, 2015 THE AUSTRALIAN I HATE meetings. Everybody does. Yet Nancy Koehn, who teaches at the Harvard Business School, estimates that 11 million meetings take place daily in the US. Yes, daily. Maybe you’ve sat in on a boring one this week, peeking at your phone. Not much consolation to know that millions of others are stuck in the same circle of hell. Meetings are supposed to be about discovery and buy-in. That’s it. Someone has decided that a group needs to be informed about some new idea or process or scheme, and by the end of the meeting everyone has supposedly bought into this new vision of the world — one that, if you’re lucky, didn’t come with a 50-slide PowerPoint deck. But meetings too often end up being about preening and politicking, and devolve into productivity-robbing, mind-numbing monotony. Given that the hours taken up by…