Mergers & Acquisitions

Despite dire statements made on a recent SEC filing, Sears and Kmart stores will remain as fixtures on the retail landscape for some time to come, according to retail real estate experts contacted by Chain Store Age.   “The news was not news,” said REIT analyst Alexander Goldfarb of Sandler O’Neill + Partners about a Sears filing that questioned its own future as a “going concern.”  

Sears Holdings Corp.’s acknowledgement in a filing on Tuesday that the retailer had “serious doubt” about its future came as no big surprise to the retail industry, including Joseph Coradino, chairman and CEO of PREIT, a publicly traded real estate investment trust that owns and manages 23 million square feet of retail and lifestyle space.   

The Food Marketing Institute and National Retail Federation will combine their existing risk and safety signature events into one cross-industry event starting in 2018.   The two groups will sponsor Protect in 2018, according to an announcement made Wednesday at the FMI’s Audit, Safety, Asset Protection Conference in Orlando.   

Sears Holding Corp. tried to walk back the uproar it caused early Tuesday morning when the struggling retailer included cautionary language about whether it would be able to continue as a "going concern” in its annual 10-K filing.   

The fat lady is singing at Sears Holdings Corp.   The long-struggling retailer said on Tuesday that there was “substantial doubt” that it could stay in business.   

Moody's Investors Service has some good news for the U.S. supermarket industry.    Grocery stores’ operating profits will grow at a fairly healthy rate again this year after a disappointing 2016, according to Moody’s new report, "Companies Will Perform Better in 2017 as Deflationary Pressure Wanes. Profitability last year was crimped by an unprecedented level of deflation for an economy not in recession, the report noted, but as downward pressure on prices wanes, things will pick up in the latter half of this year.

The nation’s largest retailer is delving deeper into e-commerce and evolving technology with its newest investment.   Walmart has formed Store No. 8, a technology incubator that will be based in the Silicon Valley. (The new initiative is named after an early Walmart store that company founder Sam Walton used to try out new retail strategies.)  

Jeff Gordman, the former CEO of Gordmans, plans to submit a bid for the bankrupt 106-store chain that would rescue it from liquidation. But he isn’t the only interested party.