Corporate Governance

Target may have wanted to draw attention to its Shops at Target program at its media event in New York last week, the press in attendance appeared to be interested in one thing -- Apple.

Though the Target executives present did their best to steer questions toward the topic at hand, they failed to keep reporters from asking about the retailer's partnership with Apple. The persistent reporters, as is required by such a career path, kept at it and did manage to get a few snippets of information from the tight-lipped folks at Target.

Smarter decision-making is a goal all retailers have, and now Target should be in an even better position to execute on that objective following a major agreement with industry leading data warehousing and analytics provider Teradata.

ST. LOUIS — The boards of directors for Ralcorp Holdings' Ralcorp and Post divisions were unveiled Friday by the company.

As previously reported, Ralcorp said its Post cereal business will be spun off to become its own entity.

In an era when retail cashiers look warily at a $100 bill, hard to imagine what a man was thinking when he tried to pass a $1 million bill at a Walmart in North Carolina.

Walmart’s sharpest critics will acknowledge that much good has come of the company’s sustainability efforts, but there are voices who maintain an inherent conflict exists between saving the planet and a business model based on selling as much low-priced stuff as possible to as many people as possible.

Was it a good holiday season or a bad one? Depends who you ask and how results are interpreted as evidenced by conflicting perspectives on U.S. Commerce Department statistics released Thursday morning.

It was widely reported that December sales were a disappointment by media outlets, which cited Commerce Department statistics released Thursday morning showing a rise of 0.1% versus the 0.3% that was widely reported as the expectation of economists.

Julie Roehm may have only spent a short time in Walmart’s marketing department over five years ago but she made quite a name for herself during that brief tenure and after she was fired. Now, Ad Age is reporting the former Walmart SVP has turned up in a similar capacity at software maker SAP.

LOS ANGELES — Kohl's has signed on as the exclusive retail partner of "¡Q’viva! The Chosen," a documentary celebrating Latin culture, music, and dance is making its Spanish-language U.S. debut January 28, 2012 on Univision and will also air on leading networks throughout the Americas, according to a press statement released by Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony, Jamie King, Simon Fuller and XIX Entertainment.

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for December, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $400.6 billion.

The December figure is up 0.1% from November, and up 6.5% from December 2010.

Total sales for the October through December 2011 period were up 7.0% from the same period a year ago.

By Stephen Wyss, BDO USA, LLP