Sales & Marketing

With a topic of “Building stronger relationships with Walmart,” the room should be packed with suppliers next week when Walmart SVP Laura Phillips takes the stage at the Doing Business in Bentonville speaker series. The event will be held from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. on Wednesday, June 15 at the John Q. Hammons Center in Rogers, Ark. Click here for more information.

Hartford, Conn. -- FM Facility Maintenance, a leading provider of facility management for clients with multisite restaurant and retail locations,  announced that it has acquired the assets and certain liabilities of US Signs. With this acquisition, FM Facility Maintenance strengthens its position as a service provider of facility maintenance services to customers with a national footprint.

PLEASANTON, Calif. — Safeway is bringing Coinstar's self-service coin-counting kiosks to its U.S. and Canada stores, the supermarket retailer announced Thursday.

Safeway said it agreed to install 1,400 Coinstar kiosks by the end of 2011, with installations slated to begin this month in Safeway stores and its banners, including Vons, Dominick's, Randalls, Tom Thumb, Genuardi's, Pavilions, Carrs and Pak N' Save.

As part three of our ongoing coverage of RECon, the annual retail real estate convention conducted by the International Council of Shopping Centers and held May 22-25 in Las Vegas, Chain Store Age talked with Joe Boehm, senior VP, retail leasing, of Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprises, regarding his impressions of RECon 2011 and what Forest City projects garnered the most attention at the show.

What impression of the state of the industry were you left with by the end of RECon 2011?

DULUTH, Ga. — Delhaize America banners are getting the kiosk treatment.

NCR is adding more than 800 Blockbuster Express kiosks to Delhaize America supermarkets, including Food Lion, Bottom Dollar Food, Harveys and Reid's across 11 states.

Blockbuster Express kiosks will be located either inside or outside the stores and provide easy access to a wide selection of popular movies, starting at a promotional price of $1 per night per rental, NCR said.

In the May 26 edition of SiteTalk, we asked the question, "Did you attend RECon 2011 in Las Vegas this week? If so, what was your key takeaway from the show?"  This is what several readers had to say:

Sydney Rosen, former chairman of Rose Art Industries and a toy industry veteran, died on June 2 at the age of 94. 

Rosen's career in the toy industry began when he went to work for his father's company, Rosebud Art, following a medical discharge from the army. Rosen's father Isidor was an artist and lithographer by trade, creating children’s toys and arts and craft sets, games and puzzles, and eventually Sydney and his brother Irving took over the business themselves as Isidor retired.  Ultimately Rosen bought his brother’s share.

San Mateo, Calif. -- Keynote Systems, which provides Internet and mobile cloud monitoring, announced that BJ’s Wholesale Club is using various Keynote solutions for optimizing the performance of its website.

For the first phase of the project, Keynote ran peak load tests to ensure that all components of BJ’s site were fully prepared to handle expected usage before the site went live.