Supply Chain & Merchandising

New York -- Starbucks Coffee Company said it would pay Kraft Foods $2.79 billion to settle a dispute over the coffee-shop chain’s bagged-coffee business.

The payment, ordered by an arbitrator, consists of $2.23 billion in damages and $557 million in interest and attorneys’ fees. The company said it has adequate liquidity, both in the form of cash on hand and borrowing capacity, to fund the payment and will book it as a charge to its fiscal 2013 operating expenses.

Staples Advantage, the business-to-business division of Staples, has launched a new mobile app that lets clients order anything they need for their businesses from wherever they are.

The new app is available for iOS and Android. Consumer feedback was taken into account in the app’s development.

Users can search, shop and ship on-the-go, create shopping lists of frequently purchased items for smoother reordering, scan to automatically replenish supplies, utilize one-click order approval and view order status and package tracking.

Holiday shopping continues to encroach on Thanksgiving with Walmart the latest retailer to reveal plans that its promotional activity will begin at 6 p.m. with an expanded range of featured items, price guarantees, deeper inventory levels and detailed crowd control procedures.

Atlanta -- QuantiSense, a provider of retail exception management software, announced that Christopher & Banks Corporation has licensed both QuantiSense Playbooks and QuantiSense Retail Business Intelligence to help automate the management of retail exceptions across its 598 stores in 44 states, as well as to provide the business analytic platform for their enterprise.

Sidney, Neb. -- Cabela’s Inc. announced today plans to open a store in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.

The 50,000-sq.-ft. is scheduled to open in 2015, and will be located in a new development being developed by Cordova Realty. It will be Cabela’s first location in the greater Atlantic Canada area.

Chicago -- ShopperTrak predicts that Wednesday, Dec. 4, will be the best day for consumers to shop this holiday season with the least amount of store shopper traffic.

Burlington, Mass. -- Demandware announced that Black Diamond Equipment, which specializes in active outdoor performance products for climbing, mountaineering, backpacking, skiing and other active outdoor recreation activities, has re-launched its ecommerce site on the Demandware Commerce platform.

Over time, Black Diamond, Inc. plans to leverage Demandware’s cloud platform to quickly and cost-effectively roll out distinct sites for all of its global brands, including Black Diamond, , Gregory,  POC and PIEPS.

Fresh off another quarter of same store sales growth, Food Lion held grand re-opening activities at 169 stores in North and South Carolina beginning Wednesday, November 13 in observation of investments the company said it has now made in nearly all of its 1,100 stores.