There’s more cost-cutting planned at Sears Holdings through the end of this year and the beginning of next year. That news shouldn’t surprise anyone, but the total has increased to 39 Sears stores, and 70 Kmart stores, along with one Sears distribution center, one Kmart distribution center, and three Sears repair centers. [More]
Retail Services
Walmart Workers Chain Massive Food Donation Bin Outside Home Of Alice Walton
By 11.24.14
Just days after another Walmart launched the holiday giving season by placing a food donation bin for employees to help out their co-workers in need, some workers have placed a much larger bin outside the home of someone who makes a little bit more than $10/hour from the nation’s largest retailer — Alice Walton. [More]
Can Retailers Make Us Stop Returning So Much Stuff?
By 11.24.14
After the holiday shopping frenzy is over, frenzy season isn’t yet complete: in malls and in post offices alike, shoppers then go into an item-returning and gift-card-spending frenzy. Unfortunately, this costs retailers a lot of money. Instead of accepting the cost of returns as a recurring annual thing, can they find a way to reduce them? [More]
Why You Should Rethink Buying Gift Cards This Year
By 11.21.14
Giving people gift cards has many advantages: you can take a loved one out to dinner from hundreds or thousands of miles away, or you can buy someone new clothes or shoes without guessing at their size. However, gift cards and prepaid debit cards aren’t always the one-size-fits-all gift option that they seem to be, since they can have some serious drawbacks. [More]
Amazon Reportedly Launching Hotel Booking Site In 2015
By 11.21.14
Consumers preparing to go on vacation might peruse Amazon for the necessities: sunscreen, rafts, hiking backpacks –– you name it and the online retailer probably has it. Unless, of course, you were looking to book your lodging. But that’s about to change now that the e-tailer is reportedly gearing up to launch its own hotel-booking service that would compete with the likes of TripAdvisor and Booking.com.. [More]
Zappos Is Opening An Enormous Real-Life Holiday Pop-Up Store
By 11.21.14
Zappos is famous for its attentive customer service, but how would that translate to real life? Customers will have the opportunity to find out from this weekend until December 31, as Zappos opens a 20,000 square foot holiday pop-up store in downtown Las Vegas. Since it’s Vegas, the store will be open 24/7 the whole time (except for Thanksgiving and Christmas) and offer an integrated retail and online shopping experience, especially to customers who download the app before they shop. [More]
Get Ready For Parents To Fight Over Pink Plastic Pregnant Puppies
By 11.20.14
Many readers will recognize the product at the top of this page: It’s Puppy Surprise, a toy originally introduced in 1991. The gimmick: inside you will find three, four, or five puppies with different markings and personalities. Puppy Surprise came back on the market this fall, and has been so popular that the company had to pull its ads off TV. [More]
Amazon Deploys Robot Army To Assemble Your Orders
By 11.20.14
While government regulations are keeping Amazon’s delivery drones out of American skies for now, the company is still looking for ways to remove slow, error-prone humans from the fulfillment process in order to save time and money. One cool piece of machinery that will help the company with the holiday rush are robots that don’t pick items off the shelves: they bring the shelves to the human order-pickers. [More]
Discover, Wells Fargo To Offer Private Student Loan Modifications
By 11.20.14
Consumers facing difficulty in paying back their private student loans often have a difficult time receiving any relief from lenders. While some smaller banks have relaxed their repayment terms for good borrowers in the past, two of the nation’s largest private lenders are set to make the same opportunities available to private student loan borrowers. [More]
Lewis Black Rants About The Expansion Of Black Friday
By 11.20.14
Most Americans don’t go shopping on Black Friday or on Thanksgiving Day, but it remains a popular topic for us in the media to yap about. This year, the increasing number of stores opening on Thanksgiving Day and growing controversy over the practice has prompted Lewis Black, professional ranter, to weigh in. [More]
Walmart Stores Once Again Asking Employees To Donate Food To Co-Workers In Need
By 11.20.14
Almost exactly a year ago, a Walmart in Ohio made headlines for an employee food drive intended to help support their fellow Walmart workers. Now come reports of additional stores rolling out the donation bins, showing that the retailers employees try to take care of one another while also spotlighting the question of whether or not Walmart is paying its associates sufficient wages. [More]
Best Buy Is Actually Managing This Whole ‘Turnaround’ Thing
By 11.20.14
We haven’t featured very many reader complaints about Best Buy on this site in the last year or so. Is that because people aren’t shopping at Best Buy at all anymore? Surprisingly, no. Best Buy is doing great, thank you very much, having convinced enough customers to quit showrooming and actually buy things there. [More]
Walmart Closes Now-Infamous Online Price-Matching Loophole
By 11.20.14
It was fabulous news for bargain-hunters when Walmart announced a change to its price-matching policy, allowing shoppers to bring in listings from popular online retailers as long as the items are identical. When some shoppers formulated an evil-genius plan to use fake third-party seller Amazon listings to buy PlayStation 4s for less than 25% of the sticker price, the wording of the original policy technically allowed this to happen. Walmart has responded by changing their policy. [More]
Wells Fargo Refusing To Honor Widow’s 30-Year-Old CD
By 11.19.14
In 1984, an Arizona man invested more than $18,000 in a Certificate of Deposit at First Interstate Bank, and then placed that CD away in his family’s personal records where it sat for 25 years. Then in 2009, after he passed away, his widow discovered the CD and attempted to cash it out, only to be denied by First Interstate’s new owner, Wells Fargo. [More]
Attempting To Steal Steaks From Walmart By Sitting On Them Only Leads To Your Arrest And Really Flat Steaks
By 11.19.14
We already know that meat is the product of choice for many shoplifters and that more often than not that particular kind of theft involves the meat being shoved down one’s pants. But a new development in meat-centric thefts occurred this week when a man allegedly tried to steal several rib-eye steaks by sitting on them. [More]
Asian-American Sephora Customers With Closed Accounts File Discrimination Lawsuit
By 11.19.14
A few weeks ago, we shared with you the claims of some loyal Sephora customers who found that their accounts for placing online orders (and more importantly, for collecting rewards points) had been shut down. While Sephora claimed that account shutdowns were aimed at people buying large amounts of makeup to re-sell, customers complained that the only thing the company looked at was whether a given customer had a Chinese surname. Now customers living in the United States whose accounts were closed are filing a class action suit against the company. [More]
Terrible People Create Fake Amazon Pages, Convince Walmart To Price-Match Them
November 18, 2014
It seemed like a great victory for consumers when Walmart announced that it would price-match select online retailers, including Amazon.com. However, because we’re not evil, we didn’t foresee how some people would misuse the price-matching privilege to scam Wally World into selling them video game consoles at cut-rate prices. [More]
Christopher & Banks, C.J. Banks To Defy Mall Fines, Close On Thanksgiving Day
By 11.18.14
You may not have heard of the clothing store chain Christopher & Banks/C.J. Banks, but that’s probably because you’re not a woman of a certain age or a certain dress size. They’re a chain that sells clothing aimed at mature women. The important thing to know, other than that they sell some nice corduroys, is that the chain is defying the malls where it rents and staying closed on Thanksgiving Day this year. [More]
