Lilly Pulitzer rush overwhelms Target’s website, quickly sells out at stores by Kavita Kumar at Star-Tribune. “At one point, Target made the site inaccessible for about 15 minutes in order to grapple with the traffic and avoid a full-blown crash…Target had hoped to make the Lilly Pulitzer collection available online by about 3 a.m., it was delayed until 5 a.m. because of high traffic, (Joshua) Thomas said…“There was extreme interest, extreme demand — traffic that would be on par with Black Friday,” he said.” Read more

 

Costco to Pay Almost Zero to Accept Credit Cards by Elizabeth Dexheimer at Bloomberg. “In a deal with Visa Inc. and Citigroup Inc., Costco’s acceptance costs will be about zero, according to people familiar with the arrangement. That compares with the roughly 0.6 percent of each transaction the retailer pays its current partner, American Express Co.” Read more

 

Target takes aim at Latinos with new marketing campaign by Samantha Masunaga at LA Times. “As singers croon in Spanish during a new television commercial for Target, three generations laugh around the dinner table long after the food has been cleared away. This is sobremesa, a common practice in Latin cultures of lingering after a meal to chat. The English language has no comparable term…” Read more

 

Walmart Eliminates Zone Managers by Kim Souza at The City Wire. “There are about five zone managers in a typical supercenter and those employees will be reassigned to either department of assistant managers, he said. The role of a zone manager has typically been to oversee a few departments and came about as an effort to reduce store count away from department managers.” Read more 

 

Dick’s Sporting Goods CFO Presents at Penn State via Smeal College of Business. “We talk about four things as an organization that we should be focused on: “We have to improve the productivity of our stores…The second part is our ecommerce sales…The third part is we’ve launched a new specialty concept — Field and Stream…The last part is … to focus on talent.” Read more  See the video

 

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Home Depot Adds Cyber Week in Ploy to Turn Spring Into Christmas by Matt Townsend at Forbes. “We’re going to follow the customer,” (Kevin) Hofmann said. “When the customer quits buying, that’s when we’ll stop running events.” Read more

 

Amazon Pays $450,000 A Year To This Self-Published Writer by Jay McGregor at Forbes.  Read more

 

Laid-Off Walmart Workers Head to Labor Board by Hiroko Tabuchi at NY Times. “Walmart said that the closings were temporary and were prompted by plumbing issues at the five stores…But a claim set to be filed on Monday by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union with the National Labor Relations Board says that the closings were in retaliation for a history of labor activism at one of the shuttered stores, in Pico Rivera, Calif.” Read more

 

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Eye-on-Retail Tipsheet is created early every weekday morning and read by retail merchants and executives worldwide. We love data, earnings reports, executive presentations and stories off the beaten path that get at what’s happening in the world of retail. Contact us at info@shiftmarketinggroup.net.