Those clucking about Wal-Mart’s woes may want to pay attention this month as American parents participate in the real reason they call it “the dog days of August”: the back-to-school spending binge. A new survey says that parents prefer Wal-Mart by more than two to one over the next closest retailer, Target.

So, despite recent uncertainty about its fundamental pricing and merchandising strategy, Wal-Mart is still perceived as the place to go for bargains on mundane stuff like backpacks, jeans and folders. The chain may have lost its edge, at least temporarily, as Americans’ default choice for “the lowest prices,” but its reputation for comprehensive selection clearly is offsetting that.Continue reading...

Love jeans with that relaxed, sandblasted look? You’re going to have to find a different brand than Gianni Versace.

The Italian design house has now joined Gucci and H&M (for which Versace is producing a collection this fall) by banning the practice after much outrage and lobbying by the Clean Clothes Campaign.

To get that look, “workers fire sand under high pressure at jeans” (according to the Courier Post Online), a practice that has led to the deaths of workers in Turkey, Bangladesh, “and other countries” where the process is done manually, the site reports. What's more, sandblasting leaves “large amounts of silica dust” in the air for workers to breathe. It can cause silicosis, a pulmonary disease that can be a killer.

Those things probably aren’t the first things  on the mind of a consumer when he or she is buying Versace. And now they don’t need to be.Continue reading...

Walgreens’ New York-centric Duane Reade division is throwing a red carpet opening tonight for its flagship store on Wall Street. That's right — a VIP bash to celebrate opening a new drugstore in a city that has one (it seems) on every other corner.

Duane Reade, which has been remodeling its stores, has been putting on a show to promote its new locations, including Broadway-style dancers and tuxedoed street teams. But this opening will top them all.

The 22,000-sq.-ft. new location will be open 24/7, in The Trump Building at 40 Wall Street, an iconic address that once upon a time was a bank hall known as the "Crown Jewel of Wall Street" and touted as the tallest building in the world.

40 Wall Street, which opens its doors to the public at 7am on Wednesday, is the chain’s most ambitious, glittering and elaborate store to date, geared to its moneyed, rushed, picky and well-heeled neighborhood clientele.

The elite amenities on offer certainly 'Trump' DR's other Manhattan locations to date.Continue reading...

June will be a big month for retailer Target, and today, one of the brand's bigger June days. It's the retailer's annual shareholders meeting and also the day after a pension fund trustee representing 1 million shares of Target stock wrote an open letter to New York City's comptroller asking him to "consider withholding votes from relevant Target Corp. directors, in the absence of a change in policy on political spending."

Elsewhere in New York, Target has become the national focus of the next chapter between corporations and organized labor. It's a union battle that Target loses, even if it wins.Continue reading...

Popularizing electric vehicles is requiring a lot of out-of-the-box thinking, because American consumers still aren’t quite sure about tiny cars that only operate on batteries and run out of juice after just 50 or 75 miles — no matter where you are.

Increasingly, more of that fresh thinking is coming from outside the auto industry. Electric utilities, real estate developers and others are experimenting, for instance, with how to dot enough charging stations around a metro area to create electricity availability that would make EV purchasers comfortable about “range anxiety.”

Now, Best Buy is contemplating selling EVs at its 1,100 stores across the US. It's not a huge stretch for the Minneapolis-based consumer-electronics retailer, as it already sells electric motorcycles.Continue reading...

Walmart has always been bigger than however many stores the chain happened to have, or its customer count or employee rolls. America’s best-known retailer invariably has been a sort of reflection on the country itself — and, now, on the world.

That’s why it can’t be too surprising that Wal-Mart corporate's latest financial results were disappointing to its American execs and investors. Same-store sales in the US fell by 1.8% during the quarter ended January 28 after CEO Mike Duke had said at the beginning of the period that US sales for the quarter would come out “positive.”

It shouldn't come as a shock that Walmart has been performing relatively better overseas these days.Continue reading...

Ikea's latest UK campaign is sure to please fans of cat videos: 100 cats roaming their Wembley store to promote their 2011 catalog.

The tagline  — "happy inside"  — is part of a competition: guess which pieces of furniture the cats choose to settle on  — and win that piece. Linked, of course, to Facebook, the campaign gives "herding cats" (and keeping cats off the furniture) a whole new meaning.

The campaign, which echoes its highly praised "Malmo" Facebook-tagging promotion, comes from Mother London. Feh Tarty, Mother's creative director, tells Brand Republic that "The idea behind the work is that cats know better than anything what makes them feel happy inside. They live their lives in pursuit of their own comfort.”

Across the Atlantic, a new campaign is now breaking in the US.Continue reading...

For Starbucks, it's all about surviving the onslaught of such competitors as Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's and finding a new way to extend brand sales. We've watched the coffee purveyor for months as it aggressively pushed into the retail environment, even as it closed stores.

Now, CEO Howard Schultz has made clear what we've expected all along — that Starbucks will increasingly sell itself as a consumer brand on store shelves. His strategy, according to the Wall Street Journal, is "to leverage Starbucks's retail stores to build a stronger consumer packaged goods business." In effect, Starbucks plans to test products in its own stores and then roll out the successful ones to supermarkets.

While Starbucks has sold some beverages, such as the Frappuccino, in supermarkets since 1996, only recently did it take its core coffee product and make it available in stores.Continue reading...