Brace yourself. For those retailers struggling in today’s economy, next year could be even more challenging, according to new forecasts from TNS Retail Forward. As part of the retail consulting firm’s 2008 Strategic Outlook Conference series, Senior VP Lois Huff presented a sobering outlook for the retail industry that the declining retail sales will continue next year and aren’t expected to rebound until 2010.

Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt from one of RetailWire’s recent online discussions. Each business morning on RetailWire.com, retail industry executives get plugged in to the latest news and issues with key insights from a “BrainTrust” of retail industry experts. If at first you don't succeed.... Four years after Forever 21 failed in an attempt to purchase Mervyns from Target, the discount apparel chain is now making another bid to acquire 150 of the department stores locations as it operates under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Mark Wattles knows his way around retail. So when he acquired a 6.5% stake in Circuit City last year, he clearly saw an opportunity to cash in on the consumer electronics retailer either turning its business around or at least becoming a takeover candidate. Now that Wattles has been successful in campaigning to drive out Philip Schoonover from the CEO seat, there are still some big questions and hurdles in the way of Wattles and other stockholders cashing in on a buyout.

Spyder Active Sports is poised for growth using Epicor Retail’s Software as a Service (SaaS) solution to provide merchandising, POS, sales audit and analytics tools for its growing specialty skiwear business. Spyder is currently the largest specialty skiwear brand in the world and outfits the U.S. and Canadian Alpine Ski Teams.

By optimizing its locations, an Atlanta-based restaurant chain discovered it could improve average store-over-store sales volume by 43 percent, from $2.2 million to $3.1 million. That’s just one example of how analyzing store locations, customer volume and competition can improve the bottom line, according to David Powell, vice president of sales and marketing for geoVue, a provider of location optimization software.

 If you aren’t managing the checkout area of your stores, now may be the time. The old adage, “You can lead a horse to water, but can’t make him drink” unfortunately proves to be true in too many retail situations. Retailers can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars each year per store from customer walkaways due to poor checkout management.

IBM and Epicor Software are attempting to fill a niche in specialty and department store retail management with a new partnership announced on June 30, 2008. The two companies are developing what they refer to as a “total offering to centrally manage and support point-of-sale (POS) hardware and software via IBM’s Remote Management Agent (RMA),” as described in a recent press announcement.