Walmart

BOSTON — Shoebuy.com, a leading global online retailer of shoes and clothing, has expanded its marketing leadership team with the appointments of Heather Adams as SVP of marketing and Kavita Baball as SVP of customer experience and retention. 

Top executives from Walmart will be sharing insights into the company’s strategies this fall by participating in a wide range of conferences and investor event.
First up is Walmart U.S. president and CEO Bill Simon who is scheduled as the featured luncheon speaker on September 11, at the Goldman Sachs Global Retailing Conference in New York. Simon also spoke at the event in 2010 and 2012 and this year he will be fresh off of headlining Walmart’s U.S. manufacturing summit in Orlando in late August.

As if competing against Target, Best Buy and Amazon.com isn’t challenging enough, nationwide the fast-food “strike” which took place Thursday offered a glimpse of the type of headline-grabbing, disruptive activities Walmart can expect from its opponents this holiday season.

Walmart will be making a progressing move and extending health insurance benefits to same-sex domestic partners of its U.S. employees starting next year, according to a Reuters report. 

The report stated that the retailer will also offer vision care to its eligible employees and their dependents.

Widening competition for commodity grocery sales is changing grocery-anchored shopping centers.

Supermarket-anchored shopping centers haven't changed much since the invention of suburbia. Find a good location, sign a grocery anchor, get a construction loan and some inline local, regional and maybe national retailers, and you're in business.

Today, however, supermarkets are beginning to change, and supermarket-anchored shopping centers, of course, must follow along.

Why are grocers changing? Competition from all sides.

New York -- Wal-Mart Stores will offer health insurance benefits to its U.S. workers' domestic partners, including those of the same sex, starting Jan. 1, 2014. Wal-Mart sent a postcard to its associates on Monday to tell them about the change. The chain also informed workers that it plans to begin offering vision care to its eligible employees and their dependents.

Financial network CNBC’s top anchor Maria Bartiromo took her show “Closing Bell” on the road this week to broadcast live outside the auditorium at the Orlando convention center where Walmart convened its domestic manufacturing summit.

Walmart’s SVP of Home Michelle Gloeckler may not have been among those on stage at the retailer’s domestic sourcing summit, but she is the one leading the execution of massive initiative.