Corporate Governance

Moody’s is wild for Walmart Neighborhood Market
New York -- Walmart’s Neighborhood Markets format offers a compelling source of new sales growth for the nation’s largest retailer, according to a report by Moody’s.

Despite strategic shifts to compete more successfully with the company, traditional supermarkets will feel the pressure as Walmart moves to increase its already dominant share of the US grocery segment.
Whole Foods Market overcharging customers?
New York -- An investigation of Whole Foods Market stores in New York City has found systemic overcharging of its customers for prepackaged food.

The city's Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) said some Whole Foods stores routinely overstated the weights of its pre-packaged products – including meats, dairy and baked goods – resulting in customers being overcharged. DCA tested packages of 80 different types of pre-packaged products and found all of the products had packages with mislabeled weights.

IBM, Box launch cloud partnership

Armonk, N.Y. – IBM and Box are launching a global, cloud-based partnership that will integrate their existing products and services and develop new solutions targeted across industries including retail. The strategic alliance brings together Box’s cloud content collaboration platform with IBM Analytics and social solutions, IBM security technologies and the global IBM cloud.
Q&A: Customer engagement evolves with connectivity

At the recent MIT CIO Symposium, Bryan Kirschner, director of the research/strategy organization Apigee Institute, and Jerry Wolfe, CEO and founder of food industry platform services provider Vivanda, participated in a panel discussion on consumer connectivity and engagement. Chain Store Age followed up with the two experts to ask a few more questions about engaging today’s connected customer.

How can retailers use APIs (application program interfaces) to provide a more personalized customer experience?
Simon reveals winners of first-ever retail start-up competition

New York – Retail real estate giant Simon has announced the winners of its inaugural 'Simon Launch,” a retail startup competition aimed at uncovering, investing in, and accelerating top startups in the retail industry.

The winning startups, which were selected from more than 300 applications, are:
Study: Retailers lack tools to fight omnichannel fraud

Naples, Fla. – Retailers often may not have the tools they need to effectively fight omnichannel fraud. More than half (54%) of retailers in the U.S. and Europe still have to consolidate their fraud management solutions across all channels, according to new research conducted by Forrester Consulting for ACI Worldwide.
Rite Aid completes purchase of pharmacy benefit manager

CAMP HILL, Pa. — Rite Aid announced on Wednesday that it has completed its previously announced acquisition of Envision Pharmaceutical Services from global private investment firm TPG and other shareholders. The transaction is valued at approximately $2 billion, including approximately $1.8 billion in cash and approximately 27.9 million Rite Aid shares.
Nilson Report: U.S. merchants’ card processing fees continue to rise

Carpinteria, Calif. -- With more Americans using credit, debit and prepaid goods to pay for goods and services, the amount merchants pay to process those cards continues to rise.
Sustainable Solutions Can Also Deliver Savings

A recent project my firm was involved in illustrated that, with some creativity and a little extra effort, sustainable solutions can not only be achieved, but also can deliver savings
Analysis: The Gap, Art Peck, and store closures

Retail consulting firm McMillanDoolittle has posted an interesting blog on Gap Inc.’s ongoing efforts to turnaround its troubled namesake brand. Here is the full posting:
Exclusive: Growth Charting

While 2014 was rocky for a great many retailers, with several thousand store closings across most categories of retail, the first half of 2015 has seen some encouraging signs of a modest resurgence in certain retail sectors and from select brands. The higher numbers of store closings are far from over, and it would not be accurate to refer to 2015 as a total turnaround, but it does seem noteworthy that there are significant categories of retail that have aggressively moved to capitalize on opportunities.
The Ugly Truth: Retailers losing millions betting on merchants’ intuition

The recent admission by Mickey Drexler to making “mistakes” while explaining the results of two J.Crew sweaters – one successful, one not – shined a bright light on the importance of each new product decision and the consequences of getting it wrong. In the grand scheme of things, one or two bad decisions do not always make or break a company. But when you string multiple bad decisions together, the stakes are much higher.