Retail

Hello Kitty Cafe is pretty darn cute — and popular.    Located at the Irvine Spectrum Center in Irvine, California, the pop-up café opened on July 15, and draw such crowds that it had to temporarily close for a few hours. It’s housed within a pink shipping container that has been refurbished to feature a counter and dining patio area, complete with bistro tables and pink-and-white striped awnings. Bold character graphics adorn the exterior and interior container panels.  

Glen Valley Center’s taxable value had fallen to $776,221 since 2013, and the foreclosed, 35,775-sq.-ft. strip center in Caledonia, Michigan, had been the property of Wells Fargo Bank since 2007. So why did the bank walk away with $2.3 million for the center after a bidding war erupted among six buyers?   “We have a huge lack of product for investors to put their money in," explained Mark Ansara to mlive.com, which recently ran a report on the sale consummated at the end of June.  

The Hershey Company is moving its popular store in Manhattan’s Times Square to a much larger location.   The company will unveil a new Hershey’s Chocolate World flagship at 20 Times Square in late 2017. The new store will be three times larger than the existing Hershey’s store, which has been a major tourist attraction since it opened in 2002. It will also feature even more bells and whistles, including a state-of-the-art digital billboard.  

When it comes to shopping via mobile app, consumers favor one retailer above all others.   Not too surprisingly, Amazon.com’s general dominance of digital retailing extends to the mobile app arena. According to new data from SurveyMonkey Intelligence, Amazon has more than 30 million monthly active users (MAU) of its mobile app in the U.S. This means about one in 10 Americans uses the Amazon app every month.  

Wearable technology has a way to go before it becomes mainstream, but perhaps not as far as some observers think.  

It appears that Aeropostale Inc., which declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May, will be selling its assets rather than reorganizing.       The teen retailer said in court papers that “reorganization on a standalone basis is not feasible.” Instead, it will look for a “stalking horse” to make the lead bid at an auction next month, Bloomberg reported.   

Cindy Schooler has joined SRS Real Estate Partners as a senior VP in the Orlando, Florida, office directing landlord and tenant representation. She held a similar role with Cushman & Wakefield in Central Florida for the past two years.   Schooler has long experience in retail site selection, having spent eight years performing market analysis and negotiating leases for new restaurant concepts with Restaurant Partners in Orlando. She also spent five years as owner of Cynco Properties, a real estate broker.  

J.C. Penney and Sears are turning up the heat on one another in the appliance category — and that translates into good news for consumers. Penney began rolling out expanded appliance departments to stores nationwide this past weekend, offering aggressive price cuts and other special deals, Fortune reported.