Case Study: Leading Specialty Retailing Company achieves $2.5M annual profit improvement by targeting extended Saturday hours with Applied Predictive Technologies

Leading Specialty Retailing Company - Customer Case Study

A leading specialty retailer was considering opening stores two hours earlier on Saturdays to capture heavy weekend traffic but wanted to know whether the added sales would cover higher labor and operating costs and avoid cannibalizing other dayparts. Executives needed a rigorous way to measure the incremental profit impact of the schedule change before a network-wide rollout.

Using APT’s Test & Learn® for Sites, the retailer ran an in-market experiment comparing test stores with matched controls to isolate incremental effects. Results showed an 8.4% ($210) lift in Saturday gross profit but a 1.1% ($28) decline on Sundays and $170 in additional costs, producing a net loss of $43 per store on average; however, APT’s analytics identified specific stores (lower-income areas, larger households, more nearby competitors) where the change was profitable. By targeting only those stores, the retailer realized a $2.5M incremental annual profit and applied the same Test & Learn approach to deploy other tailored operating-hour changes.