News

By Kumar Venkataraman

Over the last decade, America’s Atlantic shores have faced the wrath of more than a dozen hurricanes, causing damage worth several billion dollars. Year after year, retailers have been learning and fine-tuning their strategies to respond to the critical needs of consumers in the impacted areas, both in preparing for a disaster and immediately after.

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. — Staples has launched a new packaging technology nationwide that allows them to customize delivery box sizes to each order. Staples “smart-size” packaging, developed by Packsize International, is convenient for customers and also improves supply chain sustainability and efficiency.

Change — how to make it happen and effectively manage it — topped the agenda at Chain Store Age’s 10th annual Executive SPECS conference. Executives from some of the nation’s leading retail and restaurant chains and suppliers and service providers in store planning, construction and facilities management attended the event, which was held in November at Red Rock Casino, Resort & Spa, Las Vegas.

New York -- Mobile solution-provider Mobiquity said Tuesday that lifestyle retailer Alex and Ani has implemented the company’s new mobile checkout technology at all its stores.

The solution is designed to improve service and response times for customers, and drive increased revenues for Alex and Ani.

Abysmal sales at J.C. Penney haven’t deterred the company from pursuing a series of unique cause marketing activities around a potential new holiday tradition focused on giving back.

Dallas -- Neiman Marcus Group reported Tuesday that earnings for the first quarter rose to $127.8 million, compared with $122.8 million in the year-ago period.

Sales rose to $1.07 billion for the quarter, from $1.00 billion last year. Same-store sales climbed 5.4%.

Jeff Gordman is following in the family tradition. As president, chairman and CEO of Gordmans, he leads a company whose roots go back nearly 100 years, to when his grandfather opened a store in downtown Omaha in 1915.

From that one store, the company evolved over the years, eventually expanding beyond Nebraska. It also added a discount division, Half Price Stores. By 1990 the company had 32 stores, equally divided between the two divisions.

Washington, D.C. -- On Tuesday, a majority of named class plaintiffs filed a notice of appeal to challenge a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York granting preliminary approval to a proposed settlement of a long-standing antitrust class action filed by merchants against Visa, MasterCard and the largest banks. The merchant group will ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to deny preliminary approval due to the legal defects in the proposed settlement.