Mass Merchant

New York -- Half of Americans (50%) say they will be purchasing toys as gifts this holiday season. This is slightly down from the 52% of U.S. adults who said they were purchasing toys last year, according to results of a new Harris Poll.

San Francisco – Free digital personal shopping assistant Shop It To Me has released an iPhone app. This makes Shop It To Me, previously available via Internet and e-mail, available to smartphone users.

Shop It To Me searches more than 100 online department stores and specialty retailers to uncover sales on items that exactly match each shopper's preferences. Relevant sale items are compiled into a single email and delivered to the shopper, who can click through to a retailer to make the purchase.

Instacart, a service that delivers groceries from multiple local stores within an hour, has expanded its footprint to include independent supermarket Berkeley Bowl as well as Costco to its grocery store lineup just in time for the holiday season.

The company’s Berkeley and Oakland customers can now mix items from Whole Foods, Safeway, Costco and Berkeley Bowl into one order and have them delivered the same day.

North Plainfield, N.J. — Levin Management’s annual pre-holiday retail sentiment survey has found that retailers expect consumers to begin their holiday shopping sooner this year. Specifically, Levin said that 43.3% of responding retailers believe that holiday sales will peak prior to and during the Thanksgiving/Black Friday weekend sales period.

Only 13.5% believe that sales will peak later — during the weekend before Christmas, a significant drop from last year’s 29.2%.

Mooresville, N.C. -- Angela F. Braly, 52, has been named to the Lowe’s board of directors, with a term expiring at Lowe’s 2014 annual meeting of shareholders. This brings Lowe’s board of directors to 12 members, 11 of whom are independent.

Atlanta -- Dollar volume growth in credit, signature debit, PIN debit, EBT, closed-loop prepaid cards and checks at U.S. merchant locations in October 2013 was 6.8%, an uptick from the prior month’s growth of 5.3%. First Data Corporation’s First Data SpendTrend analysis shows the growth was supported by the onset of cooler temperatures, which drove sales of seasonal merchandise and early holiday advertising attracting shopper foot-traffic.

Suffern, N.Y. — Lane Bryant has opened new stores in Kentucky, New Jersey and Texas. The Kentucky store is located at The Shoppes at Gary Farms in Bowling Green. In New Jersey, the new Lane Bryant has opened at Willow Ridge Plaza in Marlton. The third location is in the Chimney Rock Shopping Center in Odessa, Texas.

Lane Bryant is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ascena Retail Group.

Bentonville, Ark. – Wal-Mart Stores has reportedly tested more than 200 factories with which it does business in Bangladesh and found safety issues at 32 of them. According to Reuters, Wal-Mart sent out an email saying that 30 of those 32 factories have corrected the issues since their discovery.