Budgets/Spending/Market Size

Dallas -- Corner Bakery Café said Wednesday it plans to open 18 restaurants in the Boston area, joining under-development markets in neighboring Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The bakery-café concept is targeting its growth through franchising deals with restaurant pros capable of opening multiple units. Corner Bakery has set a goal of doubling its current U.S. footprint of 147 locations by the end of 2015.

The second and third largest players in the office retail space could soon join forces. According to published reports,OfficeMax and Office Depot could announce a merger this week.

The rumors have gotten Wall Street buzzing as pre-market trading saw shares of Office Depot and OfficeMax up 28.5% and 20%, respectively.

New York -- Office Depot and OfficeMax are in talks to merge, according to reports by the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.

The retailers are discussing as potential stock swap that would result in a single company with nearly $18 billion in revenue, reports said. The combined company would be better positioned to take on Staples, Walmart and other competitors.

RESTON, Va. — In terms of growth, clicks continued to outpace bricks in 2012 — and how!

That was the key takeaway from comScore’s “2013 U.S. Digital Future in Focus” report: Despite the backdrop of continued economic uncertainty, 2012 was a strong year for retail e-commerce. Throughout the year, growth rates versus the prior year remained in the mid-teens to outpace growth at brick-and-mortar retail by a factor of approximately four times.

Houston -- A report released Tuesday by research company NPD Group found that the convenience store sector experienced marked gains last year, as visits increased 4.6% in the fourth quarter and grew an average of 3.7% per month for 2012.

Traffic gains were spread among all type of c-stores, according to NPD’s Convenience Store Monitor, which tracks the consumer purchasing behavior of more than 51,000 convenience store shoppers in the U.S.  

New York -- Bad feelings about the global economy persist, with more than half of consumers around the world say the world is in an economic recession, according to a new study by Nielsen.

According to the Nielsen Global Survey of Consumer Confidence and Spending Intentions, 71% of North Americans said they were in a recession in the fourth-quarter of 2012, but this represented a drop in 15 percentage points from the fourth quarter 2011, representing the largest drop in negative sentiments about the economy of any area.

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. -- Using social media to drive brand awareness and sales has to be a carefully thought out process, a new study by J.D. Power and Associates has found.

New York -- Analysts had already suggested that Wal-Mart Stores Inc. would report weakened sales in February, as its primary customer base felt the pinch of newly increased payroll taxes. But internal emails leaked to the press confirmed the impending bad news.
 
Bloomberg on Friday quoted an email generated by a Wal-Mart mid-level executive as saying that the retailer had the worst sales start to any month in seven years in February. Wal-Mart blames the slow start to the 2% payroll increase as well as on delayed tax returns.