News

Walmart grocery shoppers in North Carolina and Virginia may notice an improved assortment.   The discount giant is opening a 450,000-sq.-ft. distribution center in Mebane, North Carolina, on Wednesday, July 13. The facility, which cost nearly $100 million, will be dedicated to distributing perishables to stores in North Carolina and Virginia.  

Wal-Mart Stores is being challenged with employee protests and unofficial strikes by its employees in China.

A veteran grocery store brand in the Dallas market will soon be history.   Houston-based Fiesta Mart announced Thursday it is acquiring 11 Minyard Food Stores in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area from RLS Supermarkets. The Minyard stores will transition to the Fiesta brand over the next several month     Fiesta is a specialty grocery retailer known for its international offerings that cater to diverse communities. With the Minyard acquisition, Fiesta will now operate 70 stores across Texas.

A text-based “store” may sound like a flight of fancy, but Kaboom Chat is graphically bringing it to life.   The Dallas-based specialty comic book retailer is leveraging the Samus Chat text-based commerce app to offer a mobile store and informational platform. Kaboom Chat asks customers some discovery questions when they first register, which then enables the retailer to auto-populate the SMS-based store when they visit via mobile phone.  

Hhgregg is on the move.   The appliances, electronics and furniture retailer said it intends to open 25-30 Fine Lines appliance locations over the next two years. Hhgregg currently has 14 Fine Lines stores, including three new locations, with two in Ohio and one in Indianapolis.     

Target Corp. is tapping into its consumer base, including kids, to stay on an upward trajectory.

Tom Petty fans can commiserate with retailers who report having difficulty implementing EMV due to slow movement from the payment card industry.   According to a new survey of retailers conducted by the National Retail Federation (NRF) in May and June, 48% of respondents had already implemented the new EMV chip card system or expected to have done so by the end of June. A total of 86% expect to have EMV up and running by the end of the year.  

The Wendy's Co. is offering an update on a cyberattack it first reported in February 2016, and it contains some decidedly unsurprising details.   Wendy’s believes the breach resulted from third-party service providers' remote access credentials being compromised. This allowed access, and the ability to deploy malware, to some franchisees' point-of-sale systems. To date, Wendy’s said there has been no indication that any Company-operated restaurants were impacted.  

Brookfield Asset Management announced the completion of its deal to acquire Rouse Properties at a price of $18.25 per share.   Rouse will be merged with Brookfield’s BSREP II Retailing Pool LLC affiliate and the acquired company’s stock will be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.  

Payment processing platform Worldpay isn’t naming names, but appears to be owning up to playing a major role in the Etsy transactional outage.   Since July 1, what Etsy has described as a third-party payments processing issue has stalled thousands or even millions of online transactions. In a running thread on the online marketplace’s “Bugs” community forum, some users have been posting that their delayed orders have gone through, but others still complain of inability to process payments.