Tipsheet: China Scolds Retailer | Body Parts Side Hustle | Sam’s -10% | Venezuelans Chase Cows
Walmart’s Bumpy Day: From Wage Increase to Store Closings at CNBC. “They should have been taking a victory lap tonight,” said Mr. Galloway, the New York University professor, “and instead they are back on their heels.” Read more
CAN’T WIN – Wal-Mart’s Wage Hike Would Represent Just Five Hours of Sales by Matthew Boyle at Bloomberg. “At about $57 million in sales per hour, that’s how long it would take to ring up $300 million — the amount Wal-Mart expects to spend on the wage increases, excluding the costs of separate one-time cash bonuses. The company is on track for about $12 billion in net income this year, so it will take about nine days of profit to recoup the extra spending.” Read more
Wal-Mart will Close 10% of Its 660 Sam’s Club Stores by Charisse Jones at USA Today. “…about 50 will be going out of business for good. Roughly 10 of those locations are closing their doors as of Thursday, while the remainder will be shuttered over the next three to four weeks. About 10 to 12 of the stores are slated to be closed temporarily as the retailer converts them to regional distributional centers to help fulfill online purchases.” Read more
NBC Has ‘Less Than 10’ Super Bowl Ad Slots Available With Just 3 Weeks to Go by Jason Lynch at Adweek. “The company is averaging “more than $5 million for a 30-second spot,” which covers linear, digital and Spanish language platforms.” Read more
Venezuelans Are Rioting Over Food Shortages via Fortune. “A video on social media also showed around a dozen men running into a lush pasture, chasing a cow, and then apparently beating it to death. “They’re hunting. The people are hungry!” says the narrator of the video, who filmed the incident from his car. Lawmaker Paparoni said some 300 animals were believed to have been killed.” Read more
The Richest Women in America (Alice Walton #1) at Money. List
Pilot Flying J ex-president heard on secret recordings using racial epithets by Jamie Satterfield at USA Today. “Where’s our greasy (racial epithet) song?” former Pilot Flying J President Mark Hazelwood said…A song by country artist David Allan Coe with a two-word title consisting of a racial epitaph and a profanity that describes a white man’s upset that his girlfriend had dumped him for a black man could then be heard, with Hazelwood and his subordinates singing along.” Read more
Crate & Barrel is headed Chicago’s rapidly-gentrifying Logan Square neighborhood by Lewis Lazare at Chicago Business Journal. “Crate & Barrel will become the anchor office tenant in the massive redevelopment, which covers 22 acres and includes 1.5 million square feet of space that was formerly a Marshall Field’s facility before it was vacated in 2008.” Pic/Read more
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Walmart rollbacks ahead: Retailer expected to use tax windfall to fund price cuts at CNBC. “Our sense is WMT will proceed judiciously [with] incremental near-term price investments,” UBS analyst Michael Lasser wrote in a note to clients. “It’s already been deploying ‘billions of dollars of price investments,'” Lasser said.” Read more
A funeral home’s side hustle: selling body parts by Brian Grow at Reuters. “Escher said Koch, who embalmed and dismembered bodies, pulled teeth from some of the corpses to extract the gold in crowns or fillings. She showed me her collection of gold teeth one day,” said Escher, who helped manage a former cremation-marketing business owned by Hess. Koch said “she had sold a different batch a year prior, and they took the whole family to Disneyland in California on the gold that they cashed in,” Escher said.” Read more
Where’s Cortana? Microsoft is playing the long game as Amazon and Google dominate CES by Nat Levy at GeekWire. “It’s a long journey to making a real assistant that you can communicate with over a longer period of time to really be approachable and interesting and better than the alternative,” Andrew Shuman, corporate vice president of Cortana engineering, told GeekWire.” Read more
Retailer Zara flies into China trouble over Tibet and Taiwan at CNN Money. “Also on Friday, Shanghai’s internet authority summoned representatives of European clothing retailer Zara, chastising the company for listing Taiwan as a “country” and ordering it to rectify the situation immediately.” Read more
Corporations may dodge billions in U.S. taxes through new loophole: experts by David Morgan at Reuters. “By manipulating their foreign cash positions…a U.S. multinational could potentially save money by shifting profits to the lower rate from the higher one, according to Stephen Shay, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School. The savings could amount to more than $4 billion in Apple’s case alone, he said.” Read more
Nearly $100K In Jewels Stolen From Costco Display Case On Long Island at CBS New York. Video/Read more
France tries to stem damage from failed baby milk recall at Fox Business. “The baby products were still available in hospitals, day cares, pharmacies, and leading supermarkets well after last month’s recall. Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire summoned the head of French dairy giant Lactalis for a meeting Friday, but acknowledged on BFM television that he couldn’t guarantee that recalled milk isn’t still available.” Read more
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