Data & Analytics

After taking a look at some of the post-holiday sales figures, it seems like maybe I was a little too pessimistic. While the overall 2013 holiday season’s sales aren’t particularly impressive, they aren’t flat, either — which is an outcome that I had worried about.

New York -- Walgreens’ net zero energy store in Evanston, Ill., was selected as Sustainable Store of the Year in Chain Store Age’s 32nd annual Retail Store of the Year design competition. The store, designed and built to produce energy equal to or greater than it consumes, will be highlighted during a special session at Chain Store Age’s 50th annual SPECS conference, March 9 -12, in Grapevine, Texas.

Deerfield Park, Ill. – Walgreen Co. is reportedly suing CVS Caremark Corp., Rite Aid Corp. and Shopko Stores Inc. for allegedly infringing on a patent for using mobile phone scanners to refill prescriptions. According to Bloomberg, Walgreens filed a complaint in federal court in Wilmington, Del., saying the three competitors are violating a patent it received in January 2013.

Grand Forks, N.D. - Acme Tools is revamping its online customer experience by launching its redesigned e-commerce website with IBM WebSphere Commerce and BlueSky Technology Partners. The new acmetools.com has new features and functionality that deliver a significantly improved customer experience for easy online shopping.

Aplharetta, Ga. - Catavolt, Inc., a provider of enterprise application mobility solutions, has launched the Catavolt for AirWatch app in the AirWatch Marketplace and Apple’s App Store. Catavolt’s cloud platform will enable AirWatch customers to rapidly and securely create new mobile apps that seamlessly integrate with existing enterprise systems.

Salt Lake City – Park City Group is adding enhancements to its food safety solution known as ReposiTrak. To enhance interaction between product suppliers and their customers, a communication feature has been added to ReposiTrak related to each referential document.  

Minneapolis – John J. Mulligan, CFO and executive VP of Target, is publicly calling for U.S. businesses to adopt chip-enabled smartcards. In a column published in the Congressional blog of political site The Hill, Mulligan said the attack on Target exposed the sophistication of today’s hackers and that the retailer had already been striving toward adopting chip-enabled smartcards, used in most of the rest of the world, before the holiday 2013 data breach.

Dallas -- J.C. Penney Company on Tuesday said its same-store sales rose 2% in the fourth quarter, which included the holiday season. It was the chain’s first positive quarterly sales result since 2011.

Sport Chalet’s digital strategy paid off in the third quarter ended Dec. 29, which saw online sales surge 22% from Thanksgiving to Christmas.

The company reported net income for the quarter of $1.5 million, or $0.10 per diluted share, compared to a net loss of $1.9 million, or $0.13 per diluted share, in the third quarter of last year.

KEASBEY, N.J. — ShopRite is piloting a program that takes shoppers beyond the traditional checkout lines and self-checkout lanes and enables them to check out from their smartphones.