Home Depot

Home Depot EVP Marvin Ellison will become president of J.C. Penney on November 1 and succeed Mike Ullman as CEO of the department store retailer next August.

New York - Executives from The Home Depot, Warby Parker and Chico’s will receive top honors at the National Retail Federation’s annual covention (the Big Show) in New York.   Frank Blake, former Home Depot CEO and current chairman, will receive NRF’s Gold Medal Award. Clicks-to-bricks eyewear retailer Warby Parker will receive the Retail Innovator of the Year Award,  with company co-founders and co-CEOs David Gilboa and Neil Blumenthal accepting the award.   

Orem, Utah – Checking the Yellow Pages for various types of information is a time-honored tradition, but now consumers can use the mobile version to find products. App developer Avantar is releasing a feature in the Yellow Pages app that lets shoppers pinpoint locations of products.  

Time and again in 2014 the vulnerability of retailers’ information systems became apparent with Staples the latest major chain forced to admit an inability to protect customers’ personal information.

Now Staples has released more information about its data breach in September.

Executives from The Home Depot, Warby Parker and Chico’s will receive top honors from the retail industry next month when the National Retail Federation convenes its annual Big Show in New York.

Mountain View, Calif. – Google Inc. is reportedly studying the effect color has on consumer purchase decisions, among other issues. According to Reuters, the company has found a clear link between color and employee satisfaction with their workspaces, and is still in the early stages of research.  

GAINESVILLE, Fla - More than 40 major retail chains, including The Home Depot, Walmart, Kroger and Target, formed a specialized research council to facilitate the use of science to curtail theft and violence. As part of this effort, A specialized University of Florida research team has been formed to interviews offenders, analyzes large datasets, and conducts field experiments to adapt and devise new crime control methods and technologies.  

Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) have become more common on companies’ senior leadership teams. They might be in even higher demand after the highly publicized data breaches at Target, Home Depot, Neiman Marcus and other companies in the past couple of years (see a timeline of data breaches in the past decade here). In fact, Neiman Marcus just hired its first CISO, Sarah Hendrickson.

ECRM compared retail circular advertising in November 2013 vs. November 2014 and noted trends occurring across top retail chains. Home Depot added an additional Black Friday 2014 circular promoting appliances. Home Depot offered deep Black Friday 2014 discounts on microwaves. Staples increased circular pages by +38%, and featured an attractive “Free Kindle eReader with laptop purchase” and a $99 Asus laptop on the Black Friday 2014 circular front. Walgreens had little change in November circular metrics but CVS cut 9 pages; a 10% decline.

Adam Kujawa, head of Malware Intelligence at Malwarebytes Labs, research arm of the anti-malware company: “It looks like the payment systems for (Bebe’s) U.S. stores were attacked, meaning that most likely they were all using the same software/hardware that had the same vulnerability. Unfortunately, without additional technical explanations, exactly what was vulnerable on those systems will remain a secret and we can only hope that the same vulnerability isn’t going to be used against another retailer.”