Discount Store

Newport, Ky. -- Divisions Maintenance Group, a provider of facilities maintenance services for retail properties, recently purchased 19 box plows for its Denver district in preparation for the 2013-14 snow season. This represents the largest influx of box plows purchased by the company in one year for one specific district.

Discount online shopping retailer Overstock.com has added prescription brand-name glasses and sunglasses to its website.

"Adding prescription eyewear to the Overstock website, with great names at great prices, seemed a natural fit," states Overstock.com chairman and CEO Patrick M. Byrne. "Unbeatable prices, fashionable styles, ease of ordering, stellar customer service, made the whole concept work for us and for our customers."

Chicago -- Consumers spent a majority of last week recovering from “Black Weekend” holiday shopping. ShopperTrak – the world’s largest provider of retail shopper analytics – reported that for the week of Dec. 2 to Dec. 8, brick-and-mortar sales of general merchandise, apparel, furniture and other products (GAFO) fell 2.9% compared to the same time last year. Last week’s retail shopper traffic decreased 21.6% compared to the same time period in 2012.

Increased traffic at Costco helped fueled sales in the first quarter of 2014.

Houston — Jones Lang LaSalle’s Capital Markets group has closed the sale of Northwest Crossing Centre, a 179,469-sq.-ft., fully leased shopping center in Houston. USA Properties purchased the property from Weingarten Realty. JLL secured 10-year, fixed-rate financing for the acquisition.

New York -- Amazon.com made more than 2.5 million price changes a day throughout November, according to price intelligence firm Profitero. By comparison, in November, Best Buy implemented a total of 52,956 price changes every day and Walmart a total of 54,633 price changes.

Profitero’s analysis revealed that Amazon.com has increased its number of daily price changes 10-fold during the last 12 months. At the beginning of December 2012, the online retailer implemented just 269,113 price changes.

We are all susceptible to media hype, and to established narratives, so it’s easy to miss important details in the growing chaos and chatter that surrounds Black Friday each year. We see big crowds and big bargains and a holiday shopping event that used to be a day now morphing into a brick-and-mortar and online extravaganza that lasts more than a week. That said, we should be asking what is really going on behind the scenes — and behind the numbers — and what does that mean for retailers for the rest of the holiday shopping season?

West Hempstead, N.Y. – Liquidation retailer NSC Wholesale Holdings has selected Agilence Retail 20/20 to reduce shrink and improve in-store operations. NSC plans to use the cloud-based exception reporting solution to obtain visibility into daily store operations to increase efficiency and reduce fraud.