99 Cents Only Hires New Merchandising Exec

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Source- Retailing Today

Growth prospects for the food and consumables business at 99 Cents Only just improved considerably following the appointment of a former Walmart EVP of merchandising to a key role.

Jack Sinclair was named chief merchandising officer at 99 Cents Only in a move that signals the retailer’s growth aspirations. Sinclair left Walmart earlier this year as part of larger senior leadership change but not until after he had spent seven years leading Walmart’s U.S. grocery business as executive vice president of merchandising. Prior to Walmart, Sinclair spent 14 years at U.K.-based Safeway holding a variety of merchandising, marketing and operations roles.

“Jack’s significant experience in retail merchandising will be an asset to 99 Cents Only Stores as we continue to improve the execution of our core business plan that emphasizes a strong mix of seasonal, grocery, and close-out products,” Giancamilli said. “His deep knowledge of the grocery and fresh food category will be particularly valuable, given the importance of these categories to our customers and for driving traffic in our stores.”

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Satellite Imagery Shows Home Depot is Busier than Lowe’s

Source- Washington Post

A few years ago, Americans who wanted to invest in China would have a lot of homework — and legwork – -to do. Most would have to hire someone halfway around the world to check out the investment for them. An investigator might drive for hours over the empty plains of Inner Mongolia, China’s far northern region, to make sure a remote mining operation really existed. Others would literally hide in the bushes to count trucks coming and going from a factory, or count the number of trees owned by a lumber operation.

Now, companies have a much simpler solution: monitoring investments across the world through photographs taken from space.

Satellite images contain a wealth of information about how much business a company is doing, and how much a country’s economy is growing. A hedge fund interested in investing in a Chinese miner, for example, might use the satellite images below to see how much the mine is really producing. By watching how a mine changes over hours or days, analysts can figure out how active the mine is.

In the image below, taken by satellites owned by space and analytics company Planet Labs, you can see how a gold mine in northern China changes between September and October. (Move the slider on the image back and forth to see the mine get deeper over the course of the month.)

Analysts are now using satellite imagery to examine everything from the lights cast by cities in India, to black market activity in North Korea, to how many people are shopping at Home Depot. As satellite imagery becomes more available, it will reshape how companies monitor their own and competitors’ operations, and make investors huge amounts of money. It will also generate privacy concerns, as anyone’s activity outside is now visible to the highest bidder.

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Amazon had it’s ‘Prime Day’ last week and promises to continue annually

Source- Chicago Tribune

Amazon says its “Prime Day” sale led to a sales surge and “hundreds of thousands” of new signups for its $99 annual Prime loyalty program. The company said it plans to make the sale an annual event.

Tied to its 20th anniversary, Amazon promoted Wednesday’s sale for weeks by saying there would be more deals than during the busy winter holiday shopping season. Some shoppers took to social media and elsewhere to complain about the types of sales they were seeing and their limited nature.

Nonetheless, Amazon said Thursday that in the U.S. and nine countries around the world that offer the Prime program, shoppers ordered 398 items per second, surpassing the rate of ordering on Black Friday, the busy shopping day after Thanksgiving. It said worldwide order growth more than quadrupled over the same day last year, which is typically a sluggish sales day, and rose 18 percent more than Black Friday 2014.

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Amazon Dreams Up a Sale in a Calendar Bursting With Them

As seen in the New York Times:

 

Rollback. Doorbuster. Blowout prices. Do those words mean anything anymore?

Even Black Friday is fast getting lost in the blur of perpetual discounts as some of the nation’s biggest retailers go head-to-head Wednesday in a new midsummer event — yet another addition to an annual sales calendar packed with sales, sales and more sales.

Amazon, the online juggernaut that has been upending brick-and-mortar retailing for years, set off the latest sales frenzy by announcing a sale for the site’s 20th anniversary on Wednesday. Its AmazonPrime Day, meant to attract more shoppers to its $99 free-shipping membership plan, promises “more deals than Black Friday.”

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