News

The nation’s largest retailer of used cars has turned to the CPG world to hire Jim Lyski as its new chief marketing officer.

Lyski spent the past three years as chief marketing officer at The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company where he led all brand responsibilities, including global innovation, product development, positioning, advertising, packaging, pricing and promotions. Prior to Scotts, Lyski was CMO at Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company. He has also held marketing roles at Cigna Healthcare and FedEx.

Trace One, which provides solutions to branded and private-label goods companies, has added Chris Morrison as its chief marketing officer.
 
In his new position, Morrison will oversee the company’s global communications, product strategies and marketing. He’ll be a part of the rollout of new Trace One solutions and assist in expanding the company’s global reach.
 

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.