Walmart

New York -- A former executive from Wal-Mart Stores has joined up with a real estate executive to expand New York City-based luxury home décor retailer Gracious Home.

Dottie Mattison who served in a variety of executive roles from 2006 to 2010 at Wal-Mart, including senior VP and general manager of the apparel global merchandising center and chief merchant of Walmart.com, has teamed up with David Mitchell to buy a majority stake in Gracious Home for an undisclosed price. Mattison will serve as CEO and Mitchell as chairman.

Generation Y prefers to shop at Walmart over Target, Costco, Kroger, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s, according to Ad Age.

"Millennials now, as a generation, like Walmart the best, more so than Generation X, more so than boomers," Matt Kistler, Walmart’s senior VP-consumer insights and analytics, said.

Walmart is most popular among people under 24, as well as every store but Target among 25- to 34-year-olds, according to InfoScout, a provider of shopper insights with a nationwide panel of more than 170,000 shoppers.

Liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Bloomberg financial columnist Barry Ritholz weighed in this week with points of view on Walmart’s recent investment in wages and other changes to improve worker satisfaction.

Both took shots at the company by revisiting some of the negative characterizations of how Walmart treats workers that have been repeated so often they have taken on a life of their own.

Krugman offer a more technical view on the company’s actions while Ritholz took more of a snarky approach.

Walmart Stores, Inc., president and CEO Doug McMillon invoked a baking metaphor at a retail conference in Northwest Arkansas this week to describe the company’s merchandising philosophy and approach to offering customers every day low prices.

New York — Walmart continues its building boom in Northwest Arkansas, opening a Neighborhood Market store just a few miles from the chain’s headquarters in Bentonville. During the past few years, company has added new Sam’s Clubs, Supercenters, a Walmart To Go convenience store, a grocery pick up facility and nearly 10 new Neighborhood Markets to the area.   While adding another new Neighborhood Market isn’t a huge deal, but the store’s location, its layout and some of the signing elements are noteworthy.

The TPN division of global marketing and corporate communications giant Omnicon has worked with Walmart and its supplier community for more than 10 years and now that it has a physical presence in Northwest Arkansas the retail marketing agency is ready for some serious growth.

TPN, which stand for The Promotion Network, is part of Omnicon’s Diversified Agency Services division. TPN recently open an office in Bentonville and tapped John Meyer to lead the organization which is part of TPN’s 300 person organization with nine offices nationwide.

Walmart’s saturation of Northwest Arkansas with its Neighborhood Market format continued this week with the opening of a new location on north Walton Boulevard just a few miles from the retailer’s headquarters.

When Whole Foods Market announced in May that it planned to open a new chain of stores offering a lower price point and specifically targeting millennials, it’s safe to say that the reaction from industry analysts and observers was underwhelming. Responses have ranged from confusion to outright skepticism, and there is a general sense of uncertainty surrounding the whole enterprise.