Retail

The retail industry and many of those who work at Walmart are going to get a double shot of Greg Foran next week. The former international executive assumes his new role as CEO of the Walmart U.S. division as the retailer prepares to release second quarter results and host a major U.S. manufacturing summit.

Milwaukee – Costs related to the exit of its Rainbow business in the Twin Cities markets, as well as the upcoming closure of a distribution center, helped push Roundy’s Inc. to a net loss in the second quarter of fiscal 2014. Roundy’s reported a net loss of $13.5 million, compared to net income of $11.6 million.

Net sales from continuing operations for second quarter 2014 were $971.9 million, an increase of 12% from $868.3 million for second quarter 2013. Same-store sales dropped 2.2%.

Despite reporting a second-quarter sales increase of 5% and a digital sales increase of 9% — with mobile representing 15% of its total sales — HSN missed Wall Street expectations for its net income thanks to a 5% drop from $43.3 million a year earlier to $40.9 million for the quarter.

Overall net sales grew 5% over the prior year to $855.2 million.

New York -- Less than 30% of middle-market retailers have websites optimized for mobile purchases, according to a national survey of C-suite executives by GE Capital. Currently, middle market retailers conduct 16% of their transactions online and about half expect the proportion of online transactions to increase in the next 12 months. (GE identifies middle-market retailers as ranging from $10 million to $1 billion in annual sales).

Despite positive performance through mid-June, the remainder of the second quarter proved more challenging for Ann Inc., prompting the company to reduce its outlook for the second quarter so it reflects lower-than-anticipated comparable sales and gross margin rate performance.  

President and CEO Kay Krill cited soft traffic across the industry and a highly promotional environment, but added that — despite delivering a positive comp for the quarter at Ann Taylor — a disappointing performance at Loft offset results.

New York – Barnes & Noble Inc. and Google Inc. are reportedly teaming up on a pilot of same-day delivery of book orders from local Barnes & Noble stores in several U.S. cities. According to the New York Times, customers in Manhattan, West Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area can have online book orders fulfilled from nearby Barnes & Noble locations via the Google Shopping service.

The J.M. Smucker Company has gained entry to a new business segment with the acquisition of privately held Sahale Snacks.

Smucker said it reached an agreement with Seattle-based Sahale to acquire the supplier of nut and fruit snacks to warehouse clubs, convenience stores and grocery retailers. Sahale’s annual sales of $50 million won’t have a material impact on Smucker, whose annual sales last year were $5.6 billion, but the deal does extend Smucker’s reach into new product categories.

Atlanta -- Teradata, the analytic data platforms, marketing applications, and services company, announced that it is working with Office Depot to expand the retailer’s enterprise data warehouse (EDW) with the very latest Teradata platforms and innovation. The new Teradata Active EDW can support the most demanding real-time workloads, with the ability for unlimited concurrent users to run queries against massive data volumes.