Welcome to Industry Focus, the podcast that dives into a different sector of the stock market every day.

I'm your host, Vincent Shen and it is Tuesday, February 28th, and today we will be covering some of the latest earnings coming out of the

retail sector before reaching into the mailbag to answer a question from one of our

foolish listeners. For earnings we will be looking at some of the major department

store specifically and I have recruited senior

fool dot com contributor and consumer good specialist Adam Levine

Weinberg to help break down the results. Hey Adam, great having you back

on the show man how are you? I'm doing really well. How are you?

Good. A lot I feel like our timing today is pretty good because the companies that we will be discussing all reported their

Q4 and full year 2016 results in the past week essentially.

Yes that's right. So before we dive into the specifics for each company though, I think the industry overall has kind of found itself in the headlines for generally more bearish trends and news.

Can you give us a little context on the state of this sector at the moment?

Yeah, over the past two years or so, really, Department Stores have really been struggling. Up until then, most department store chains had managed,

despite the rise of e-commerce players like Amazon.com, they'd managed to put up their own e-commerce

businesses and continue to bring people into the malls

so that they could post not big sales gains but at least modest sales gains and by keeping costs in check they were able to grow their

earnings.

In the last two years that's really fallen apart and it's been pretty broad-based with

every department store chain seeing the declines in comparable store sales, and also

declines in earnings, in some cases pretty steep declines in earnings.

And this trend really continued into the fourth quarter.

Both online and off-price retailers saw solid sales gains

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