In an effort to boost the movement toward goods made right here in the good old U.S. of A., Walmart is kicking off a two-day summit bringing together other retailers as well as government officials and suppliers. The goal seems to be some kind of big brainstorming session to figure out how to get more American-made products in stores and jobs back on our shores. [More]
Retail Services
Sears Lost Even More Money This Quarter Than Experts Expected
By 8.22.13
No one with any sense of how capitalism works would expect the profit and loss numbers out of Sears Holdings Corporation this week to be good. It turns out, though, that the company lost even more money in the second quarter of 2013 than experts had anticipated, and needs serious help to get out of its downward slide. [More]
Bank Of America Closing Some Drive-Up Tellers Because We’ll All Have Space Cars Soon, Anyway
By 8.22.13
Hope you’ve got your space car ready or at the very least, your walking shoes laced up because you’ll no longer be able to drive up to many Bank of America drive-through teller lanes. Branches from Georgia to Texas have already closed their drive-up bank teller services, a spokeswoman said, although it’s unclear how many have been shuttered. [More]
Costco Snowman Laughs At Your Feeble Attempt To Buy Beach Supplies During Beach Season
By 8.21.13
Despite the moans and groans of children heading back to school, or that perpetually pessimistic Facebook friend you haven’t seen in 17 years but yet still you haven’t hidden her cranky statuses from your newsfeed (self-torture is weird), summer is not over, people. [More]
Consumer Reports Learns All About Target’s Fuzzy Unit Pricing Math
By 8.21.13
I don’t know how we could have been so naive, but we thought that we could trust the unit prices on shelf tags in stores, including Target. If this site has taught us anything, it’s that labels can be inaccurate, and that Target may not even be part of our present reality at all. [More]
Former City Councilman Warns Residents: Walmart Shoppers Will Bring Down Property Values
By 8.21.13
Everyone has an opinion on Walmart and the impact it has on a community whenever a new store is opened. But some residents of Kansas City suburb say a former city councilman went too far when he recently distributed a letter claiming that a new Walmart in the area would attract an undesirable element and ultimately result in a drop in property values. [More]
Target Expands To Canada, No One Really Likes It
By 8.20.13 — Updated: 1.19.15
Target opened its first stores in Canada earlier this year and plans to take over some now-closed Zellers locations. Now that it’s about six months into their tenure north of the border, how are they doing? Canadians aren’t really warming to Target, as it turns out. [More]
Amazon Offering $10 Game Trade-Ins For Customers Who Want To Upgrade Their Xbox
By 8.20.13
One of the big knocks against the upcoming Xbox One gaming console is that it not backwards-compatible with titles for the Xbox 360, meaning you’d need to keep your old console hooked up to your TV if you want to play all those games you’ve acquired over the years. To ease that pain for some customers, Amazon is offering a $10 trade-in program on a handful of Xbox 360 games that will also soon be released on the Xbox One. [More]
Everything Is Awful Right Now… Except For The Kind Target Worker Who Knew I Needed A Hug
By 8.19.13
Emily and her husband are brand new New Yorkers. Well, make that, brand new U.S. citizens, sort of: She’s originally from Ohio, where she and her German husband met in college. They’d been living in Munich for about seven years, up until last Saturday. That’s when the couple moved to New York, a city with a hustle and bustle that isn’t much like Munich. That’s stressful enough, right? And oh yeah — Emily is 29 weeks pregnant. With twins. Headaches? Abounding. But also plentiful were the hugs and good feelings at a Brooklyn Target, right when Emily needed a dose of happy. [More]
After A Year On The Job, How’s Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly Doing?
By 8.19.13
One year ago this week, Best Buy sought to end a turbulent year of executive shakeups, sinking sales, and all-around bad publicity, by naming Hubert Joly as the company’s new CEO. For a company whose previous CEO had worked his way from the retail floor to the boardroom, this was a huge departure, but was it a smart move? [More]
Maybe The Most Depressing Amazon Listing Ever (Unless You’re In The Market For A Crack Pipe)
By 8.19.13
People employ all manner of odd devices in the smoking of illegal drugs like crack and crystal meth, but there’s something particularly heartbreaking about realizing that people are using these novelty “love roses” as an affordable way to ruin their lives. [More]
Texas Walmart Evacuated After Shoppers Release Mysterious Spray Into Air
By 8.19.13
Imagine you’re enjoying a peaceful Sunday night of shopping at Walmart when suddenly a pair of doofuses (doofi?) choose to unleash some sort of spray that causes folks in the store to start choking and wheezing. Next thing you know, you’re being rushed out of the building with more than 100 other customers. [More]
Is The “Useless Plastic Box” A Best Buy Exclusive?
By 8.16.13
Earlier this month, some Best Buy shoppers in the L.A. area began noticing a peculiar new offering on their shelves: A Useless Plastic Box, or rather the “Useless Plasticbox 1.2,” all for the low, low price of $99.99. [More]
Better Type Fast: Walmart.com Live Chat Is Only Available One Minute A Week
By 8.16.13
Trying to contact a Walmart customer service representative in a live chat is apparently an exercise only to be undertaken by the fleetest of fingers, the tersest of typists. Because as Consumerist reader Jasmina points out, it’s only available for one minute every week. [More]
Time To Speculate Over Whether Or Not Amazon Is Expanding Its Grocery Service
By 8.15.13
That incessant buzzing you hear emanating from the East Coast is a hive of gossipy grocery customers wondering if AmazonFresh will be coming to New York City. It would be a boon to citizens of the land where stocking up on food supplies is a thrice-weekly (at least) lesson in pain endurance due nine plastic bags cutting off your arm circulation/will to live. There’s mysterious hiring going on at a super secret Amazon New Jersey warehouse, so a whole bunch of tongues are wagging. [via All Things D] [More]
Shopkeeper Stocked Store From The TJ Maxx Where He Worked
By 8.15.13
When you’re launching a new business, it can be a good idea to keep your day job so you can keep some steady income as well as any benefits you might have. However, you should avoid the worker-to-owner transition that one Brooklyn man made. He allegedly stocked his little store with merchandise that he took off the shelves of the TJ Maxx store where he worked. [More]
Decade-Old Hard Drives Languish On Walmart Store Shelves, Make Us Sad
By 8.14.13 — Updated: 8.15.13
If you’re in need of some vintage “high-capacity mobile storage,” get yourself over to the Walmart stores of Massachusetts. You can get some nice mint in package USB hard drives dating back to the early ’00s at comically high prices. [More]
Does The World Really Need An Adult-Sized Big Wheel?
By 8.14.13
The adult-sized tricycle, that makes sense to us. Not everyone who wants to pedal around using their own power has a good sense of balance. What doesn’t make sense to us is this adult-sized Big Wheel, intended for people who want to recapture their childhoods and weigh up to 275 pounds. [More]
