Gap, Inc.

San Francisco – Gap Inc. will raise the minimum hourly wage for all U.S. employees to $9 in 2014, and then raise it again, to $10, in 2015. The move will affect about 65,000 store employees across the company’s brands, which include Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Piperlime, Athleta, and Intermix. Gap's announcement comes amid a nationwide debate about the minimum wage.

San Francisco - Launching Feb. 18 "Lived-In,” Gap's global marketing campaign, features magazine, outdoor and social components. These include Gap's Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram communities, with the hashtag #LivedIn.

San Francisco -- Gap Inc. posted strong sales for January and issued a fourth-quarter profit forecast that topped expectations.

The retailer said its same-store sales rose 1% in January. Analysts had expected a drop of 1.3%. Net sales for the four weeks that ended Feb. 1 were $899 million, compared with net sales of $1.13 billion for the five-week period ended Feb. 2, 2013.

For the fourth quarter, net sales were $4.58 billion, compared with $4.73 billion a year earlier.

Portland, Ore. — Cypress Equities, the management company for Lloyd Center in Portland, Ore., has announced that the Center’s owners intend to purchase the 130,000-sq.-ft. building currently owned and occupied by Nordstrom. The acquisition is part of the center’s recently announced renovation plans.

Plans call for the building to change hands in January of 2015. Nordstrom has notified its employees that the store will close.

New York -- Levi Strauss & Co. has named Craig Nomura as president of global retail, effective Feb. 3, 2014. He joins Levi’s from Williams-Sonoma Inc., where he was most recently senior VP of global development.

Nomura, who also held leadership positions at Gap Inc., The Gymboree Corp., Guess?, Inc., and Foot Locker, succeeds Joelle Maher, who left Levi’s in June 2013 to join Gymboree as COO.

Tech providers unveil key trends for 2014

Technology trends are rippling through the retail real estate universe. Among the most important are new apps that dig deeply into data and automate tasks such as site selection, identifying and diagnosing underperforming stores and much more. Then there are apps that analyze what is going on inside shopping centers and stores. Technology is also helping to address a major change in lease accounting rules.

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How we use technology is changing

San Francisco -- Gap Inc. reported its November 2013 net sales increased 8% compared with last year. Same-store sales for the period rose 2%.

Net sales for the four-week period ended November 30, 2013 were $1.63 billion, compared with net sales of $1.52 billion for the four-week period ended November 24, 2012.

By Ike Boruchow, analyst, Sterne Agee, New York

This year, Black Friday gave us a taste of what to expect for the remainder of the holiday selling season: intense competition, deep discounts, and choppy mall traffic. Earlier store openings drove heavy traffic, which dissipated and then bounced through the day.