News

What better way to celebrate the holidays than a tour of a CPG company’s headquarter?

The SC Johnson company is proud of its corporate campus designed by legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright and is offering free tours it contends make for a great activity for families and guests visiting the company’s home town of Racine, WI.

San Jose, Calif. -- Nearly half (40%) of retailers will add a mobile version of their website in 2013, with 20% planning to create a mobile app, according to the "2012 ECommerce Trends Survey,” a survey of nearly 500 global retailers conducted by SLI Systems. Retailers’ biggest challenges in e-commerce continue to be improving conversions (63%) and attracting more customers to their websites (61%), the survey revealed.

Dollar General fined tuned its full year sales and profit forecast following better than expected third quarter results that also flashed a few warning signs.

AVON, Ohio — Duck Tape is teaming up with the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards to get students to stick with the arts. To that end, it will sponsor the Mixed Media category and offer a $500 prize to five works within the category, chosen by Duck brand from a pool of National Gold Medal Scholastic Award winners.

Atlanta -- Dollar volume growth remained solid at 5.8% in November, down from 6.7% in October, according to the First Data SpendTrend analysis for the full month of November 2012 compared with November 2011. SpendTrend tracks same-store consumer spending by credit, signature debit, PIN debit, EBT, closed-loop prepaid cards and checks at U.S. merchant locations.

WASHINGTON — Top officials at Johnson & Johnson and the Food and Drug Administration are among those to receive service and leadership awards from the Food and Drug Law Institute. The honorees include Minnie Baylor-Henry, worldwide VP for regulatory affairs at Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices & Diagnostics; John M. Taylor III, counselor to the commissioner, Office of the Commissioner, FDA; Alan Bennett, managing partner of the Ropes & Gray DC office and Thomas O. Henteleff, managing partner of Kleinfeld, Kaplan and Becker.

Wayne, N.J. -- Ubisoft  and Toys “R” Us announced that they have teamed up to create Toys “R” Us Towers, a free-to-play toy store simulation game with real-world benefits, available now on Facebook. The game will also be available on mobile devices in the coming months.

Cargo volumes at U.S. ports are forecast to increase 3.9% in December following a 5.6% decline in November, according to the monthly Global Port Tracker report compiled by the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates.

The West coast strike by workers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach negatively affected container volumes in November, but resolution of the strike after eight days meant disruption in December was limited to just two days.