Mass Merchant

Target ended last year with sales of $67.4 billion and earnings per share of $4, but company chairman, president and CEO Gregg Steinhafel believes sales will hit $100 billion and earnings will double to $8 a share within six or seven years.

New York City -- Amazon.com said Friday that it would drop its online affiliates in Arkansas in response to a new state law that would have required the online retailer to start charging sales tax, the Associated Press reported.

Lawmakers passed a bill earlier this year to require out-of-state online retailers such as Amazon to collect sales tax from customers if their annual sales in the state exceed $10,000.

New York City -- Local 1-S of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union announced that more than 4,000 union workers at Macy's Manhattan flagship and three other New York locations have voted to strike if a new contract is not reached by midnight on Wednesday.

The other stores are in the Bronx, Queens and Westchester County.

They are however interested in which political candidates and trade associations receive political donations from the company and what the decision-making process is behind those donations. At least it’s what anyone who attended or listened to a webcast of the company’s shareholders’ meeting last week is left to conclude after listening to the line of questioning that followed prepared remarks by Target chairman, president and CEO Gregg Steinhafel.

All of the proposals voted on at Walmart’s shareholders’ meeting last Friday were defeated, but the official tally of results filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last night revealed one proposal that drew a surprisingly large number of votes.

Toronto -- Sears Canada has replaced more than 130,000 inefficient incandescent spotlights with energy-saving LED lighting in all Sears Home and full-line stores across Canada. The retrofit will reduce the company's electricity use by more than 16 million kilowatt hours (kWh) per year.

They both serve on the Walmart board of directors and were re-elected by shareholders at the company’s annual meeting last week, but for some reason they also drew the largest number of negative votes, according to results of the election Walmart filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission late Thursday.

New York City -- The family of a 4-year-old Massachusetts boy who died after falling from an escalator at the Auburn Mall, in Auburn, Mass., have filed a wrongful-death lawsuit that alleges the escalator was "dangerous and defective" and did not follow state codes or the blueprint for its installation.