Mass Merchant

M&M'S World Las Vegas is celebrating the recent opening of its new candy wall — the largest M&M'S candy wall in the world — with a 3-D representation of the wall designed on the sidewalk outside the store.

M&M'S World Las Vegas has partnered with the We Talk Chalk art group to create the three-dimensional chalk rendering.

The wall itself spans more than 62 ft. wide and includes 125 tubes of colorful M&M'S, offering 22 varieties and 11 flavors.

Issaquah, Wash. – Costco Wholesale Corp. increased profit and sales during the first quarter of fiscal 2014 that missed Wall Street expectations hurt by a 5.5% rise in operating expenses, lower gasoline prices, and weak foreign currencies.
Profit rose 2% $425 million, from $416 million a year earlier.

Net sales rose 5% to $24.47, missing estimates of $25.4 million.

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

Reston, Va. -- For the holiday season-to-date, $31.5 billion has been spent online, marking a 9% increase versus the corresponding days last year, according to comScore. However, as noted in previous releases, Thanksgiving Day was six days later this year than last and causes more heavy spending days to fall in the year ago period, thereby diluting growth rates at this point.

Green Monday (Dec. 9) saw $1.4 billion in desktop online spending, up 10% versus year ago, representing the third heaviest online spending day of the holiday season-to-date.

Atlanta – The Home Depot plans to open new eight new stores and increase sales by approximately 5% during fiscal 2014. The retailer released guidance for both fiscal 2013 and 2014 on Dec. 10.

For fiscal 2013, Home Depot has reaffirmed guidance of 5.6% sales growth and 7% same-store sales growth.

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.

As expected, shopper activity increased this November as holiday shopping began in earnest. Total retail store shopper traffic increased 19.9% compared to October 2013. Shopper traffic for November 2013, however, decreased by 10.2% compared to the same month last year.

Analysis from price intelligence firm Profitero showed that Amazon.com makes more than 2.5 million price changes every day, compared with a little more than 50,000 total price changes made by brick-and-mortar retailers Walmart and Best Buy throughout November.

Profitero’s analysis also 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.