Companies in all industries eventually see their revenue growth slow. Retailers are no exception. Fickle consumers, intense competition, changing markets, and the rapid encroachment of online retailing all combine to exert pressure on the top line. The retail graveyard is filled with chains such as Circuit City, Austin Reed, Linens ’n Things, Loehmann’s, British Home Stores, RadioShack, and the Sports Authority—that expanded rapidly and then, faced with declining growth, couldn’t find ways to change course. What should a retailer do when growth slows? Is it doomed, or is there a way to prosper when its business matures? To answer these questions, we examined the financial data of 37 U.S. retailers with recent sales of at least $1 billion whose top-line annual growth rate had slowed to single digits. Some of these retailers had seen their bottom lines fall even faster than their top lines; others had achieved double-digit earnings growth and above-average stock market returns. Our...

Amazon Books is now open for business in Seattle. The floor is hardwood and the shelves and displays are weighed down by beautiful, physical books. It looks and smells like any ordinary bookstore. But make no mistake. It’s anything but. Amazon’s new store is the digital economy’s coming full circle -- flipping the model to tie together online and offline in a whole new way. It’s establishing land-based business on ecommerce prowess, and modeling the methodology of the next generation of retail. The rise of an online superstore Amazon is an operation born and raised online. It speaks fluent “onlinese,” and in fact has written large chunks of the dictionary. It is the biggest, fastest and most innovative force shaping the way the world has been conducting commerce in the past 20 years, and it’s seared into the collective mind as the main deliverer of ecommerce Gospel. Now a mature 20-year-old juggernaut, the Seattle store isAmazon’s first brick...