Strategy

One of the largest grocers in Canada has just expanded its presence in the drugstore business.    Metro Inc., the third largest food retailer in Canada, on Monday announced a deal to acquire the Jean Coutu Group, which operates more than 400 pharmacies, for $3.6 billion. The deal creates a combined food and pharmacy retailer with annual sales of $12.8 billion, and an overall network of more than 1,300 stores in Canada, with 677 drug stores.  

Thanks to Wernher von Braun, who developed the Saturn V rocket in the Alabama town, Huntsville is known as the Rocket City. Now the appellation is being applied to its population.  

Starbucks Corp.’s online store has officially closed its virtual doors.   The e-commerce site, which sold Starbucks’ branded merchandise — from mugs and coffee brewers to coffee, tea, and flavored syrups — shut down on Sunday, Oct. 1. The coffee giant decided to close the online store to focus on integrating its physical and digital channels, and to establish stores as destinations, according to Business Insider.  

We have a tendency to take things that have been with us forever, reinvent them, and give them new names. Mixed-use centers, for instance, are essentially the 21st century version of downtowns. But whereas America’s towns grew up organically alongside harbors, rivers, and transportation crossroads, mixed-use centers aren’t always able to be so logically placed.

Marcus & Millichap’s Q2 Boston market report signals urgency to retailers like the famed lamps Paul Revere placed in the tower of the Old North Church. To wit:

As department stores continue to falter and Amazon continues to grow and the “Malls are Dead” headlines continue to proliferate in the general press, one glaring fact rears its head: We built way, way, way too many malls to begin with. Average retail square footage per person in America, by several accounts, is four times that of other industrialized nations like the United Kingdom and Japan.

In remodels and new construction, paint is one of a retailer’s most effective design tools, both from a cost and overall appearance standpoint. Chain Store Age spoke with Jim Gorman, senior strategic account manager at Benjamin Moore & Co., who discussed trends and offered some advice on how retailers can get the most for their painting investment. 

What are some of the trends you are seeing in retail and restaurant spaces in regard to the use of paint?

RYU Apparel is coming to the Big Apple.   RYU (Respect Your Universe) announced plans to open a store in in the hip Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The 2,800-sq.-ft. store, the brand's first in the U.S., will open in the first quarter of 2018.  

Toys “R” Us is adding a new customer touch-point that it will use to get merchandise into shoppers hands faster.  

Someone forgot to tell At Home that big-box stores are passé. Or that a retailer needs to sell online to be successful.

Since Lee Bird took the reins as chief executive at the beginning of 2013, the Plano, Texas-based home decor superstore retailer has been on a steep upward trajectory — and it shows no signs of losing momentum anytime soon.