Finance & Capital Management

HRC Advisory’s annual CEO and CFO survey revealed a major disconnect between capital investments, retail growth and operating strategies.

Chain Store Age spoke with HRC Advisory CEO Antony Karabus about the survey.

What did you find most surprising about the survey results?

A key Under Armour executive is stepping down.

Under Armour announced that its COO and CFO, Brad Dickerson, is leaving the company to pursue an unnamed opportunity outside of the athletic performance industry.

Dollar General is rightsizing its expense structure by eliminating several hundred positions at its home office.

Dollar General is rightsizing its expense structure by eliminating several hundred positions at its home office.

Dollar General said that effective immediately it had eliminated 255 positions but noted that 115 of those positions were vacant. The move follows an announcement the previous week by Walmart to eliminate 450 positions at its Bentonville, Ark., headquarters. Dollar General said the move was part of a broader initiative aimed at proactively improving efficiencies and reducing expenses by restructuring its corporate support functions.

The majority of retailers are not doing a very good job when it comes to integrating online channels with brick-and-mortar stores.

What’s more, many retailers are not properly balancing their investment spend, sometimes investing more in online while neglecting their physical stores, which puts them in danger of losing market share.

Kroger has announced that it had added transgender health benefits to one of the company’s health insurance plans, according to Forbes. "Beginning January 1, 2016, medical procedures including surgery and drug therapy for gender reassignment will be covered up to a $100,000 lifetime maximum for eligible associates and their dependents,” the company wrote on their employee social network. (Forbes)

Curt Garner, who first announced he would leave his current role as CIO of Starbucks Corp. in June, has revealed his next professional stop.

Garner will join Chipotle Mexican Grill as CIO effective Nov. 23, and become the company’s first executive with that title. Chipotle appears to want to duplicate some of the IT-related success Starbucks has had in areas such as store operations and customer experience.

Irvine Company is making history as the first major real estate company in the world to plan portfolio-wide use of energy storage.

The Irvine Company on Monday announced an initiative to become the world's first major real estate company to create a fleet of hybrid-electric buildings powered by state-of-the-art energy storage systems from Tesla Energy.

The company recently signed a memorandum of understanding for the ground-breaking environmental initiative with San Francisco-based Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS).