Mass Merchant

Target Corp. is letting the cat out of the bag early with regards to its next limited edition apparel collection.   The retailer announced its limited-edition spring collaboration will be with popular designer Victoria Beckham. The collection will be available April 9, 2017, at all Target stores and Target.com, the collection. In addition, select pieces from the collection will be available for sale internationally via Victoriabeckham.com.  

Once the mecca of “Valley Girls” lured by white marble interiors and retailers like Saks and I. Magnin, the Promenade Mall in Warner Center north of Los Angeles will be razed and replaced by a $1.5 billion mixed-use development.   Westfield, owner of the 43-year-old, 550,000-sq.-ft. mall, has announced a re-imagination of the site in line with the Los Angeles City Council’s Warner Center 2035 plan to urbanize the area.  

Black Friday may have lost some of its allure in recent years, but it still comes out on top in a ranking of the busiest shopping days.    Black Friday, which falls on November 25 this year, took the No. 1 spot in a ranking of the anticipated 10 busiest shopping days of 2016 by ShopperTrak, a Tyco Retail Solutions business unit. The second and third busiest shopping days are expected to be Monday, Dec. 26 and Friday, Dec. 23. (See end of article for the complete list.  

Target Corp. has knocked Walmart off its perennial top spot in an annual ranking of the U.S. companies with the most solar energy capacity.      Target now has 147.5 megawatts (MW) of installed solar capacity, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association’s 2016 Solar Means Business report, which ranks companies based on capacity current through the third quarter of this year.     

Michael O’Hanlon, a 35-year real estate industry veteran, has been hired as OliverMcMillan’s new chief operating officer. The company’s properties include The Shops at Buckhead in Atlanta and the River Oaks District in Houston.  

Lidl, the German no-frills grocery chain, is shaping up as a potential retail powerhouse even before it opens its first U.S. store.   The company will generate $8.8 billion in sales by 2023, larger than Wegman’s 2016 value of $8.1 billion, according to a just-released forecast by Kantar Retail.  

Walmart is making a bold move in the competitive on-demand digital content marketplace.   Leveraging its free, premium video streaming service called Vudu, the retail behemoth now features “Vudu Movies on Us,” a program that offers customers the ability to watch “thousands of movie and TV titles for free, and on-demand, with limited commercials,” according to a company statement.  

Organized retail crime does not discriminate.      In a unanimous finding, a full 100% of retailers reported that their companies had experienced ORC in the past year, up from 97% in 2015, according to the 12th annual ORC study released by the National Retail Federation. It is the first time in the survey’s history that all responding companies reported being a victim.