News

Sports Authority has partnered with the National Sports Center for the Disabled (NSCD) in honor of National Disability Employment Awareness Month. Throughout the month of October, Sports Authority locations nationwide will be collecting point-of-sale donations with the goal of raising at least $150,000 for the NSCD.

All proceeds will go toward benefiting the lives of children and adults with disabilities.

Vera Bradley will be deploying consumer behavior insights and location-based analytics provider ShopperTrak's Perimeter Analytics tool at each of its new U.S. stores this year, with plans to roll out the service across all corporate stores in the coming year.

Belk, Discovery Education and the International Society for Technology in Education have launched the Belk Service Learning Challenge, a comprehensive standards-aligned program encouraging middle school students to facilitate positive changes in their communities by applying critical thinking, problem-solving and creativity skills to a service-learning project of their choice.

First Data Corporation has bolstered its senior leadership team as part of its ongoing transformation from a payments processor to a collaborative technology company and solutions provider for merchants and financial institutions around the world.

The company promoted two executives to new roles: Barry McCarthy to lead four strategic businesses including the STAR Network and Sanjiv Das to lead First Data’s international business. The company has also brought in two new hires: Andrew Gelb to lead the financial services business and Adam Rosman as general counsel.

Twitter is giving over every message ever tweeted to the data scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s famed Media Lab. The social media giant is also giving $10 million (throughout a five-year period) to fund the new Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM), which will be based at the Media Lab.

The new initiative aims to build new tools that will analyze and enable communication on social platforms. Twitter will provide full access to its real-time, public stream of tweets, as well as the archive of every tweet dating back to the first.  

Was he or wasn’t he? Unfortunately for Walmart, a legitimate question about whether comedian Tracy Morgan and his entourage were wearing seatbelts the night their limousine was rear-ended by a Walmart truck has made a bad situation worse for the retailer.

London – Amazon.com ranks first in end-to end customer experience across key digital channels including websites, mobile sites and apps. According to the latest EChannel Retail Benchmark report from EDigitalResearch, Amazon tops the benchmark study due to their core multichannel functionality, especially across the search and purchase sections of the customer journey.

Lewisville, Texas - Consumers are still sensitive to price, so they're willing to drive at least five-to-10 minutes out of their way to get a better deal. According to the new Parago shopper study "Ring Up More Holiday Sales," 81% of consumers would drive five to 10 minutes out of their way for a $10 rebate on a $50 item.

Port Washington, N.Y. – Spending during the total back-to-school season (nine weeks ending Sept. 6, 2014) on traditional supplies increased 2% from 2013, with e-commerce acting as a key catalyst at more than 20% growth during the same time period. According to new data from The NPD Group Inc., most back-to-school shopping occurs at retail brick-and-mortar stores (88%), but 2014 online sales claimed an estimated $33 million previously held by brick-and-mortar retailers.

Cupertino, Calif. – Following an investigation launched in June, the European Union (EU) is reportedly formally accusing the Republic of Ireland and Apple of striking an improper deal that has kept Apple’s taxes in Ireland artificially low since 1991. According to CNN, the arrangement has allowed Apple to pay a tax rate as low as 2% on earnings of Irish subsidiary.