Last April, Gamestop Corp. (GME) opened a store on Facebook to generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered. Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap Inc., J.C. Penney (JCP) Co. and Nordstrom (JWN) Inc. have all opened [...]

Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into [...]

Amazon.com’s Prime service, a linchpin of its effort to keep customers loyal and fuel long-term profit, has attracted fewer than half as many members as analysts estimate, three people familiar with the matter said. As of October, 3 million to 5 million people subscribed to Prime, a program begun in 2005 that provides two-day shipping [...]

On June 11, 2003, those with a stake in radio-frequency identification technology enjoyed an early Christmas. At 8:30 that morning, before a packed house at the Retail Systems Conference in Chicago, Wal-Mart CIO Linda Dillman announced that the world’s largest retailer would require its top 100 suppliers to tag pallets and cases of goods with [...]

The relatively small town of Athens, Georgia, is stuck in a Wal-Mart battle. Athens is nearly 30 percent African-American, and Black leaders from both sides of the argument are stuck trying to figure out what to do about a proposal to build a Wal-Mart near the city’s downtown area. One the one hand, leaders argue [...]

American consumers don’t just like buying in bulk—they like the shopping experience at one bulk-buying warehouse store a lot more compared to other retailers. Based on the results of a new survey, Costco has been named the retailer scoring the highest overall ratings with shoppers. In Consumer Reports’ latest survey, some 26,000 consumers were asked [...]

Walmart has shot to third place on the EPA’s rankings of the country’s top green power purchasers, from 15th place just last quarter. The Green Power Partnership ranking, for the retailer’s Texas and California facilities alone, pushes Whole Foods down to fourth place. According to the EPA’s data, Walmart’s facilities in the two states use [...]