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Muji, the low-cost, high-design Japanese retailer that had heretofore concentrated its stores in fashionable districts of New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, is making a move into New Jersey.   Muji will open an 8,600-sq.-ft. store next month at the Westfield Garden State Plaza in Paramus, its first mall location in the Greater New York area. Current shops are found on Fifth Avenue and in Soho and Cooper Square in Manhattan.  

Amazon.com is continuing its aggressive strategy of launching new distribution facilities and physical pickup centers.   The retailer will open a new fulfillment center in Kansas City, Kansas by the end of 2016. The 855,000-sq.-ft. facility, the second large-sized fulfillment center Amazon has announced within a span of four months, will create more than 1,000 full-time roles. In addition to this center and an upcoming facility in Edgerton, Amazon has existing Kansas facilities in Lenexa.  

Two mid-sized U.S. and Canadian chains are joining forces to create the third-largest pet specialty retailer and the largest small format, neighborhood specialty pet retailer in North America   Pet Valu and Pet Supermarket have merged to create a combined business named Pet Retail Brands. With more than 930 stores, it is expected to generate approximately $1 billion in system-wide retail sales across the U.S. and Canada. Pet Retail Brands will have stores from the East Coast to the West Coast and from Miami to Vancouver.  

Walmart was offering its own July online savings event before Amazon Prime Day was officially announced, and now the discount giant is sweetening its deal.   Walmart is offering all customers free shipping with no minimum purchase on its e-commerce site from Monday, July 11 – Friday, July 15. This builds on a previously announced online promotion that offers a free 30-day trial of the retailer’s ShippingPass program, which provides consumers unlimited, two-day free shipping for a year.  

A new player has entered the value grocery segment.    LogicLane, a start-up company that provides discount wholesale grocery supply chain services and a wholesale grocery e-commerce marketplace for businesses, has entered the retail arena, opening a supermarket in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.       Called Mill Street Merchants, the store is designed to extend the extreme value deals previously only available to national businesses on the LogicLane website to local businesses and consumers.

Payment processing platform Worldpay isn’t naming names, but appears to be owning up to playing a major role in the Etsy transactional outage.   Since July 1, what Etsy has described as a third-party payments processing issue has stalled thousands or even millions of online transactions. In a running thread on the online marketplace’s “Bugs” community forum, some users have been posting that their delayed orders have gone through, but others still complain of inability to process payments.  

The online space doesn’t have a lock on new retail concepts, but with its lower start-up costs and potential audience reach it has proved itself a great breeding ground for disruptive retailers.   Here’s a look at four innovative e-tailers that are generating buzz and revenue increases — enough to place them among the top 15 fastest-growing e-retailers in a recent study.*   Casper

Enough of the “retail is dying” narrative that has dominated so many headlines the past few months. It’s way overplayed.

Brick-and-mortar is evolving, not dying. And it’s full of exciting new players — many of them digitally native — that are infusing the industry with something it can always use: new blood. Here’s a quick rundown of some of these newcomers to the physical space: