Sales & Marketing

Shoe Carnival is planning to open smaller stores to leverage untapped markets in smaller communities, as well as the company's omnichannel capabilities.

During the next several months, many U.S. retailers will begin transitioning their point-of-sale systems to accept EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) technology. EMV-ready cards are most frequently recognized by the presence of a small security chip embedded in the card itself. This technology is not new – it has been in use in Europe, Canada and much of the world for years.

Liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Bloomberg financial columnist Barry Ritholz weighed in this week with points of view on Walmart’s recent investment in wages and other changes to improve worker satisfaction.

Both took shots at the company by revisiting some of the negative characterizations of how Walmart treats workers that have been repeated so often they have taken on a life of their own.

Krugman offer a more technical view on the company’s actions while Ritholz took more of a snarky approach.

New York — Walmart continues its building boom in Northwest Arkansas, opening a Neighborhood Market store just a few miles from the chain’s headquarters in Bentonville. During the past few years, company has added new Sam’s Clubs, Supercenters, a Walmart To Go convenience store, a grocery pick up facility and nearly 10 new Neighborhood Markets to the area.   While adding another new Neighborhood Market isn’t a huge deal, but the store’s location, its layout and some of the signing elements are noteworthy.

Etsy and the West Elm division of Williams-Sonoma continue to fuel the maker movement with new initiatives that were launched to coincide with a Presidential Proclamation establishing the National Week of Making.

In conjunction with an event at the White House and a proclamation by President Barack Obama, online retailer Etsy said it planned to expand its Craft Entrepreneurship program to 30 cities by July 2016 from the current 19 cities.

<The Neiman Marcus Group says currency exchange rates put pressure on traffic in the first quarter as the company reported a smaller than expected boost in same store sales. 

The retailer said same store sales increased 2.2% for the third quarter ended May 2 as the strong dollar had some impact on the retailer’s business.

Kmart has overhauled its marketing team by making several personnel changes and replacing its CMO with a veteran from DSW.

According to Ad Age, the company has named Kelly Cook as its new chief marketing officer after Mark Andeer left the company.

Cook will be leading the company's "omnichannel transformation," according to Ad Age.

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Walmart Stores, Inc., president and CEO Doug McMillon invoked a baking metaphor at a retail conference in Northwest Arkansas this week to describe the company’s merchandising philosophy and approach to offering customers every day low prices.