Corporate Governance

Rue21 is looking towards the future.    The retailer announced Friday that it has completed its financial restructuring and has emerged from bankruptcy. The chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May 2017, listing $307 million in pre-petition assets. It filed a month after it said it would close 400 stores.   "We are pleased to be moving forward with rue21's next chapter of growth as a highly performing and distinctive retailer," said Melanie Cox, CEO of rue21.

Albertsons Cos. has become the first national grocery retailer to acquire a prepared-meals company.   The nation's second largest supermarket chain is acquiring online meal company Plated in a deal that is expected to close later this month. The move taps into Americans' growing demand for meal delivery services and also shores up Albertsons' defenses against Amazon, which has become a key player in grocery with its acquisition of Whole Foods Market.    

Ikea is looking to expand its presence in Arizona.    The home furnishings retailer plans to open a store in Glendale, Arizona. It would be the company's second location in the state.  

The continued popularity and development of town centers and lifestyle centers have made it clear that retailers can no longer go it alone. They must co-exist in a symbiotic live-work-play environment, and that means they must also co-exist with the different demands and cost structures of residential and office spaces.  

Three restaurants and a hotel claimed four of the seven new out-parcels The Market at Czech Hall in Oklahoma City.   Developer GBT Realty announced that Hooters, Arby’s, Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen, and Sleep Inn have signed leases at the 160,000-sq.-ft. “regional neighborhood center” on Interstate 40.  

PREIT announced that it has fully leased the space vacated by Sears at Magnolia Mall, nine months after the store closed shop at the Florence, South Carolina, property.   Burlington opens in a 46,000-sq.-ft. space there this week. It will be joined by HomeGoods (20,000 sq. ft.) and Five Below (8,500 sq. ft.) in the spring. Also slated to open at that time is a 20,000-sq.-ft. H&M store.  

Tiffany & Co. has named Roger Farah as chairman, effective Oct. 2.    Farah, 64, joined Tiffany’s board in March 2017. He succeeds Michael J. Kowalski, who has served as chairman since 2002.   Kowalski, who served as CEO of Tiffany from 1999 until his retirement in March 2015, has been acting as interim CEO since February 2017. He will relinquish that title when the company’s newly appointed CEO, Alessandro Bogliolo, takes the reins in October.  

Amazon is about to put down some new roots in New York City — and is hunting for new employees to support the operation.  

To work in retail is to accept the inevitability of déjà vu. But what returns is often never quite the same, as can be seen in the current struggle by many shopping malls to generate enough traffic to remain viable. Let me take you back to the days of my initiation to retail in New Orleans (site of next week’s National Retail Tenants Association conference), when malls began rising in former fields and woodlands and store owners in all regions struggled to manage the change.  

An uptick in consumer spending could drive sales as high as $1.05 trillion this holiday season.   Retail holiday sales should rise a healthy 4% to 4.5% over last year's shopping season — a factor that could drive sales between $1.04 trillion and $1.05 trillion between November 2017 and January 2018, according to the annual retail holiday sales forecast from the firm’s retail and distribution practices. (Holiday sales are seasonally adjusted, and exclude motor vehicles and gasoline.)