Employees of Payless ShoeSource who lost their jobs before the company’s bankruptcy filing have received some really difficult news: They won’t be receiving their severance payments for at least another month, as the company waits for its next hearing in federal bankruptcy court. [More]
Retail Services
Robots Now Delivering Food For Yelp’s Eat24 Service In San Francisco
By 4.12.17
Yelp’s Eat24 food delivery service is making it easier for some users who want to avoid interacting with humans as much as possible, deploying robots in San Francisco to bring food to customers. [More]
Walmart Adds Discount For Shopping Online, Picking Up In Store
By 4.12.17 — Updated: 5.10.17
Shopping online and being able to pick up your purchase at the store is a minor convenience, but you still have to drive to the store, wait to be served, get your package, and drive home — and you may have paid more than you would at Amazon or some other online-only retailer. So to make this option more attractive to shoppers, Walmart.com will be discounting millions of items if you purchase them for in-store pickup. [More]
Gymboree Rumored To Be Prepping For Bankruptcy, So Use Your Gift Cards Now
By 4.11.17
Do you have a Gymboree gift card, or items to return or exchange? Stop putting that shopping trip off, because there are reports that the debt-laden children’s clothing retailer and enrichment class provider might be preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy soon. [More]
Maybe IKEA Could Really Use These Relationship-Saving Stations
By 4.11.17
Furniture and home-goods megastore IKEA doesn’t offer in-store intervention for relationship problems, but maybe it should. There’s something about the store and its perfect, untouched fake rooms that brings issues with ourselves, our relationships, and with our homes to the surface. That’s why a comedian who likes to create fake and almost plausible signs created a “relationship saving station” to put in a real IKEA store. [More]
GoPro Tries To Combat Buyer’s Remorse With Trade-In Program
By 4.11.17
Did you spend hundreds of dollars on a GoPro camera only a couple of years ago, only to see better (and sometimes less-expensive) miniature action cameras hit the market? For folks looking at their expensive, outdated GoPro and having regrets, the company is launching a trade-in program. [More]
Demise Of hhgregg Means You’ll Buy Your Next Fridge From Best Buy
By 4.11.17
The bankruptcy and liquidation of hhgregg is terrible for the retailer’s employees and retail landlords, but someone may benefit from the retailer’s downfall. Best Buy has a national presence and a large overlap with what hhgregg sells, and is in a position to pick up some of the retailer’s former customers the next time that they need a fridge or a computer. [More]
Why Doesn’t Taco Bell Do Its Own Delivery?
By 4.11.17
If you want Taco Bell but don’t want to go to Taco Bell, there are third-party delivery services that will take your order, but those can be costly and slow. Even Taco Bell says these options aren’t fast enough, so why isn’t the company doing its own delivery? CEO Brian Niccol says it might… eventually. [More]
Whole Foods Is Bleeding, Attracting Sharks
By 4.10.17
What is the point of Whole Foods when you can buy gluten-free pie crust, organic sweet corn, and quinoa in most regular grocery stores? Whole Foods doesn’t seem to know, and neither do the people who used to shop there, which is why a major shareholder of the supermarket chain wants Whole Foods to clean itself up and see whether anyone might be interested in a merger. [More]
Starbucks Testing Lunch In Chicago This Week
By 4.10.17
Starbucks may have missed out on gobbling up Panera, but that doesn’t mean the company is ditching lunch. Instead, the coffee chain will begin tests of a specific lunch menu in Chicago this week. [More]
To Compete With Your Living Room, AMC Will Offer Full Meals At 400 Theaters
By 4.10.17
Theaters know that you can stay home and watch movies on your huge 4K TV from the comfort of your couch while eating whatever you want. To entice moviegoers to pay top-dollar to get this same experience, just surrounded by a few hundred other people, AMC is revamping hundreds of theaters to serve full-fledged meals. [More]
hhgregg Stores Are Closing After Bankrupt Retailer Can’t Find Buyer
By 4.10.17 — Updated: 5.9.17
Up until 5 P.M. on Friday, appliance retailer hhgregg was waiting for a buyer to swoop in and save it from liquidation. The appliance, electronics, and furniture retailer could find someone to buy its business as a going concern, keeping at least some of its stores open, or it could liquidate and close. Store closing sales began on Saturday. [More]
Hackers Targeting Amazon Third-Party Sellers
By 4.10.17
If you’ve seen something with a too-good-to-be-true price in the Amazon Marketplace lately, there’s probably a good reason for that. Or, rather, a bad one, as it seems some fraudsters’ new favorite trick is to hijack unsuspecting Amazon sellers’ accounts and fleece shoppers for every penny they can. [More]
Wells Fargo Takes Back Another $75M From Former CEO & Exec Blamed For Fake Accounts
By 4.10.17 — Updated: 5.10.17
The Wells Fargo board of directors has completed its investigation into the bank’s fake account fiasco, which saw Wells employees open more than two million bogus accounts in customers’ names. For their failure to curb this bad behavior, “retired” CEO John Stumpf and former head of retail banking Carrie Tolstedt have had an additional $75 million in compensation clawed back.
[More]
The Retail Sector Lost 30,000 Jobs Last Month
By 4.7.17 — Updated: 5.10.17
We’ve focused a lot in recent months on the worrisome trend of retail bankruptcies and all the stores and malls being left vacant in their wake. But a new federal jobs report gives an idea of the impact these tough times have had on workers, with nearly 30,000 retail jobs vanishing in March. [More]
American Apparel Reportedly Starts Making Clothes In Honduras And Nicaragua
By 4.7.17
Twice-bankrupt clothing company American Apparel was known for three things: its controversial founder Dov Charney; advertising that ranged from sassy to “is this porn?”; and for making all of its merchandise in the U.S. Now that Charney is long gone and the brand has been sold to Gildan, a Canadian company not associated with any of this history, it looks like some American Apparel be coming from Central America. [More]
GameStop May Be The Latest Loser In Data Breach Roulette
By 4.7.17
Add a new certainty to the old pair of “death and taxes”: data breaches. GameStop may be the latest retailer to face this inevitability, with a new report indicating that customer data has been stolen from its website. [More]
L.L. Bean Introducing New Duck Boot Designs
By 4.7.17
For several years, L.L. Bean has had trouble keeping up with demand for its iconic duck boots, repeatedly putting the footwear on backorder . The company appears to have learned the lesson that scarcity can lend an air of desirability to a product, as it now plans to offer limited-availability variations of the duck boot. [More]
