News

A massive new Academy Sports and Outdoors distribution center in Tennessee is expected to fuel the retailer’s growth for years to come when the 1.6 million-sq.-ft. facility opens in 2016.

Seattle - Amazon.com has expanded same-day delivery in Baltimore, Dallas, Indianapolis, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., metro areas, with more than a million eligible items now available for same-day delivery. These six cities join the existing same-day delivery-eligible cities of Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Francisco and Seattle.

San Francisco -- Banana Republic in late August will extend its digital reach as part of a select group of brands partnering with Instagram on paid advertising — a first-time amplification for the brand on the platform.

Tewksbury, Mass. – Delhaize Group, parent company of Maine-based supermarket chain Hannaford Bros. Co., is reportedly making a bid for part or all of the embattled Market Basket grocery chain. Market Basket operates 71 stores in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, and has been embroiled in a dispute with employees over management since July.

Atlanta -- Teradata, the analytic data platforms, marketing applications, and services company, announced that it is working with Office Depot to expand the retailer’s enterprise data warehouse (EDW) with the very latest Teradata platforms and innovation. The new Teradata Active EDW can support the most demanding real-time workloads, with the ability for unlimited concurrent users to run queries against massive data volumes.

New York -- Costco Wholesale Corp. fell slightly short of estimates in July even as most other retailers who still report same-store monthly sales outperformed expectations.

The warehouse club giant reported a 5% rise in same-store sales for July, excluding gasoline, falling short of estimates for a 5.7% increase. The company said foreign currencies had a slightly negative impact. It was the first time in five months that Costco's sales have increased less than expected. Costco's total revenue for the month increased 9% to $8.55 billion.

Boulder, Colo. -- Cheesecake Factory is North America’s favorite casual-dining chain, according to a study by Market Force Information. More than 6,100 consumers were polled for the study, which ranks the top restaurant chains in five categories: general menu, breakfast, steak, Italian and seafood. Cheesecake Factory was tops in the general menu category, receiving high marks for quality of food, healthiness of food and atmosphere.
 

San Francisco – Twitter is reportedly making moves that indicate it is considering launching e-commerce services. According to The Next Web, users of the Twitter Android app are reporting a dormant “Payment & Shipping” option appearing in the settings menu.

New York – Barnes & Noble Inc. and Google Inc. are reportedly teaming up on a pilot of same-day delivery of book orders from local Barnes & Noble stores in several U.S. cities. According to the New York Times, customers in Manhattan, West Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area can have online book orders fulfilled from nearby Barnes & Noble locations via the Google Shopping service.

Montvale, N.J. – The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) is using the IBM FlashSystem V840 to compress live data and speed access to Big Data. The FlashSystem now integrates into a new Control Enclosure with IBM’s SAN Volume Controller (SVC) data virtualization system, a key component of IBM’s Software Defined Storage solution.