Consumer Affairs & Relations

Revelations of job cuts at leading retailers, the latest involving Sam’s Club, are a reminder that pro-active expense control remains retailers' best friend when it comes to ensuring profitability when faced with a murky outlook for consumer spending.

Sam’s Club on Friday became the latest retailer to disclose plans to eliminate 2,300 hourly and middle management positions. The move was characterized as a rebalancing of resources, according to Sam’s Club spokesman Bill Durling. Other retailers such as Macy’s and Target also recently announced job cuts.

New York -- The Retail Industry Leaders Association elected Richard Dreiling, chairman and CEO of Dollar General, as the new chairman of its board of directors.

“I am honored to have the opportunity to serve as board chairman for RILA and to work with this exceptional group of retail leaders to strengthen our industry,” said Dreiling. “RILA is a critical strategic partner in empowering our industry to speak with one voice to champion issues that affect the retail sector, our workforce and our valued customers.”

Colorado Springs, Colo. – Secure data vault provider CertainStore is rolling out of a cybersecurity solution utilizing its proprietary micro-encryption/micro-tokenization technology to prevent the re-occurrence of recent malicious attacks on customer data.

Michaels may have been the victim of an attack on its data, but it wasn’t going to wait to find out the way Target and Neiman Marcus did before warning customers.

In a statement laced with the word, “may,” Michaels said it recently learned of possible fraudulent activity on some U.S. payment cards that had been used at its stores, which it said suggested the company may have experienced a data security attack.

In recent years, customer engagement has become much more of a mission-critical function for retailers. While nobody would argue that retailers must engage their customers in a way that recognizes the disruptive effects of leading-edge technologies like social and mobile, there is a priority that looms even larger. Namely, data security.

Insecure Data Creates Insecure Customers

The Michigan Retailers Association (MRA) said that Michigan's retail industry had a poor holiday shopping season thanks to damaging winter storms and “outdated government policies that favor out-of-state online companies.”

Retailers posted only a 0.1% average increase over last holiday season, according to the Michigan Retail Index, a joint project of MRA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Cary, N.C. – The Pantry has confirmed that JCP Investment Management, LLC, and Lone Star Value Management, LLC (“the dissident group”) submitted a notice of intent to nominate director candidates to stand for election to The Pantry’s board of directors at the company's 2014 annual meeting of stockholders.

Washington, D.C. – The FBI has reportedly issued a confidential report to U.S. retailers warning that more cyber attacks like the ones recently suffered by Target and Neiman Marcus will occur. According to Reuters, the three-page report was distributed Jan. 17 and informs retailers that the FBI has discovered in the past year there have been at least 20 attacks using the same type of malware used against Target.