Labor & Employment

New store formats loom large in Starbucks Corp.’s long-term strategy.   The coffee giant on Monday announced that Cliff Burrows, who has headed up Starbucks' Americas business for eight years, will lead a new group within the company called Siren Retail. In the role, Burrows will oversee the global expansion of the chain’s new Roastery concept, as well as the development of the upscale Starbucks Reserve stores. http://www.chainstoreage.com/article/coffee-giant-two-new-store-expansion-moves  

Unsecured creditors of Sports Authority said in court papers that the bankrupt retailer should not waste its dwindling funds preparing a plan to end its Chapter 11.     The unsecured creditors argued the company, which filed Chapter 11 in March, is "administratively insolvent," meaning it cannot even pay the cost of running its bankruptcy case, Reuters reported.  

Influential and longtime Walmart executive Don Soderquist died after complications related to heart surgery. He was 82.   Soderquist joined Walmart in 1980 as executive VP of administration and logistics and was a driving force behind the company’s growth. From 1988 to 1999, he served as vice chairman and COO. He retired in 2000 and remained on the Walmart board until 2002.   

Some three years after he returned to save J.C. Penney, industry veteran Myron E. (Mike) Ullman will retire from the company on Aug. 1.    Ullman is passing the reins of chairman of Penney’s board of directors to current CEO Marvin R. Ellison. The succession is in accordance with a transition plan the company outlined in 2014.  

Party City Holdco Inc. on Thursday named Daniel J. Sullivan as CFO.   Sullivan succeeds Michael A. Correale, who is stepping down as Party City CFO to focus on the newly created position of executive VP chief accounting officer and treasurer, effective Aug. 29. In his new role, Correale will be responsible for all of the company’s external financial reporting, treasury functions, banking and credit relationships.  

Politics can make for some strange bedfellows.   Donald Trump’s campaign is reportedly using American Apparel to manufacture some of its campaign apparel merchandise, according to Fortune.  

A shopping center in a tough neighborhood of Madison, Wisconsin, pays a troop of three parents to keep kids away from stores and cops away from kids.   Wearing yellow T-shirts imprinted with “P.O.P,” for Parents on Premises, the local adults interact with teens hanging out at the Meadowood Shopping Center, intervening with those fighting or caught shoplifting on behalf of the center’s owners.  

Cushman & Wakefield’s senior director for Brooklyn Joseph Cirone is incredibly bullish on the borough in which he lives and works.    “If you are a tenant in Manhattan with a lease expiring any time in the next 36 months, you need to come and kick the tires in Brooklyn,” Cirone told attendees at a presentation of the company’s mid-year commercial real estate outlook for Manhattan.