Chico's hung up in port

Imagine dozens of shipping containers full of apparel you hope to sell for the holidays steaming from Asia into a port on the West Coast.

Then, an unexpected workers' slowdown at the docks holds up your containers and you have to find a way to get them out of the port and into your stores before Black Friday.

That's the nightmare Chico's FAS faced recently, according to a transcript of CEO David Dyer's call with investors on Nov. 25. Dyer blamed the port holdups as one of the holiday sales challenges the apparel company faced recently, particularly for its White House | Black Market brand.

“You can imagine, I think a couple of weeks ago, we had a ship that came in with 18,000 containers on it, of which we had 26,” Dyer says in the call. “Trying to get your 26 out of 18,000 containers in the backed up port is like finding a needle in a haystack. We did do a pretty good job of getting them out and again the weeks that we have delayed have been somewhere between one and two weeks depending on particular situation.”

There are still containers stuck in port, however. “I mean you can take a look at the some of the problems we had, coming into this week we started with about 44 containers in the [Los Angeles] ports that were tied up,” Dyer says. “I think we have gotten about half of them out now. So we are focusing on the other half.”

In the meantime, Fort Myers-based Chico's was working on Plan B.

“We continue to work with our shipping partners to minimize the impact of delays on our fall and winter receipts, including diverting flow to the east coast ports as well as air shipping merchandise in select critical categories of our holiday assortment.”

The port snafus were not welcome news. For the quarter ending Nov. 1, sales at stores open longer than one year fell 1.6% compared with the same quarter one year ago.