Data & Analytics

Camp Hill, Pa. -- Rite Aid reported a 4% drop in same store sales for the four weeks ending April 27, 2013 compared to the same period a year earlier. The drugstore chain blamed part of the drop on the negative impact of an early Easter this year on front-end sales.

Same store sales also declined 3% for the eight-week period ending April 27, 2013 compared to the same eight weeks in 2012.

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Deliv, the same-day, low cost delivery service that partners directly with large retailers, has appointed former Amazon progressive supply chain executive Michael Hart to VP of logistics.

New York -- Sally Beauty Holdings Inc.’s second-quarter earnings decreased 4.3% amid sluggish sales. The company earned $64.9 million in the quarter ended March 31, compared with $67.8 million in the year-ago period.

Revenue rose 1% to $898.2 million from $889.3 million in the year-ago period.

Same-store sales were down 0.8%.

Gary Winterhalter, chairman, president and CEO says that the quarter's performance reflected in part lower traffic fueled by two fewer days compared with the prior year quarter.

CAMP HILL, Pa. — Rite Aid's same-store sales decreased 4% in April compared with April 2012 due to an earlier Easter and introductions of new generic drugs, the retail pharmacy chain said.

The numbers released Thursday included a 3.5% decrease in sales on the front end and a 4% decrease in pharmacy sales, but the pharmacy figure included a 4.5% negative effect due to new generics. Same-store prescription count decreased by 0.2%.

Total sales for the month were $1.9 billion, a 4.6% decrease over April 2012's $2 billion.

Seattle -- Starbucks Coffee Co. is shaking up its senior management team with five promotions and two new appointments. John Culver, head of the China-Asia Pacific region with more than 10 years of Starbucks experience, is being promoted to group president, China and Asia Pacific (CAP), channel development and emerging brands. Jeff Hansberry, a three-year Starbucks veteran who has worked on the channel development and emerging brands team, is being promoted to president of China and Asia Pacific and will report to Culver.

Toronto -- Canadian Tire Corp. announced that it will open the 'Canadian Tire Cloud Computing Centre' in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the fall of 2013. The 28,000-sq.-ft. site will house a digital content warehouse, application lab, testing lab and high performance data centre. It will serve as the core digital hub for the Canadian Tire Family of Companies.

By Douglas H. Meal, David T. Cohen, and Lisa L. Rachlin, Ropes & Gray LLP

Retailers, like all businesses, constantly seek to learn more about their customers in order to serve them better. In Tyler v. Michaels Stores, however, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court recently ruled that a simple step taken by many retailers to help achieve this goal – collecting the ZIP codes of their customers at the point of sale – can in some circumstances violate Massachusetts’ consumer protection statute.
   

Kellogg’s North American first quarter results were solid, but its performance overseas, particularly in the U.K., helped bolster its results. The company reported net sales of $4 billion, an increase of 12%. Meanwhile, internal net sales, which exclude the effects of foreign currency translation, acquisitions, dispositions and integration costs, rose by 2.2 percent over the same period.