Amazon is putting veteran leaders in charge of its big grocery delivery plans by Jason Del Rey at Recode. “Earlier this year, longtime Amazonian Ben Hartman was chosen to run Amazon Fresh, Recode has learned. Hartman was most recently the technical adviser or “shadow” to Jeff Wilke…Amazon lifer Steve Kessel, a member of Bezos’s leadership team, is also involved in the planning for Amazon grocery store experiments, two sources told Recode.” Read more

 

In a Wal-Mart First, the CEO Turns Pitchman by Sarah Nassauer at Wall Street Journal. “Google searches for ‘Wal-Mart CEO salary,’ spiked during the summer when the commercial aired to the highest levels since Mr. McMillon was announced as chief executive. Searches for ‘Wal-Mart CEO’ and ‘Doug McMillon’ also rose. He gained about 10,000 followers on his Instagram account, where commenters call him “commercial guy.” Read more (subscription)

 

Report: Dick’s Prepares Bid for Golfsmith’s U.S. Stores at Fox Business. “…challenging an offer by rival retailer Worldwide Golf Shops, people familiar with the matter said on Monday. While bids for Golfsmith, owned by OMERS Private Equity, the buyout arm of one of Canada’s largest pension funds, were due earlier on Monday, Dick’s was given an extension until Tuesday morning to submit its offer, the people said.” Read more

 

NBC’s Today Show: Drugstore vs. designer makeup: Can you save money and still get a great look? “Do you really need to spend a fortune to get a flawless look with makeup? TODAY national investigative reporter Jeff Rossen, with the help of identical twins, puts drugstore and designer brands to the test to find out if you should splurge, or save your cash.” See the video

 

Amazon amps up fashion push with $15M ad campaign by Monica Nickelsburg at GeekWire. “Over the past month, Amazon has aired a TV spot entitled “Delivering Fashion,” more than 2,500 times.” See the spot / Read more

 

Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Give Gen Z Girls a Standing Ovation by Erika Fry at Fortune. “Each young woman conducted five, 5-minute one-on-one interviews with high-profile business leaders, including Johnson & Johnson Group Worldwide Chairman Sandi Peterson, Instagram COO Marne Levine, Ulta Beauty CEO Mary Dillon, and Build-A-Bear Workshop founder Maxine Clark…The participants also got a dose of inspiration from (Ann-Marie) Campbell, the Home Depot EVP, who told the young ladies of her own improbable trajectory.” Read more

 

Apple Retail Chief Angela Ahrendts on Turning Stores Into Town Squares by Leena Rao at Fortune. “Ahrendts views the company’s newly redesigned retail outlets not just as stores, but as the company’s next big products, she explained at the Fortune Most Powerful Women conference in Laguna Niguel on Monday night, in her first interview about Apple’s retail redesign.” Read more / See the video

 

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Target’s Bullseye Logo and the Minneapolis PR Man Who Created It by Robert Klara at Adweek. “Stewart K. Widdess probably didn’t think he was making history. For the time being, all he had to make was a name and a logo. It was 1961, and Widdess was the publicity man for Dayton’s in Minneapolis. A downtown landmark since 1902, Dayton’s was a fancy department store that sold things like fine jewelry and cashmere sweaters. But its owners had decided to go into the discount business with a new store for the suburbs—and charged Widdess with naming it.” Read more

 

Under Armour inks baseball-related deal with online retailer Fanatics by Terry Lefton at Baltimore Business Journal. “The deal would mean the end of MLB’s longtime licensing relationship with both Nike and Majestic Athletic. Starting in the spring of 2020, all jerseys would feature UA branding.” Read more

 

eBay’s new high-end furniture shop, eBay Collective, includes a visual search engine by Sarah Perez at TechCrunch. “…the technology has been integrated to power a “Shop the Room” feature which lets online shoppers hover over an image of a fully designed space, and then the tool will search across eBay inventory to surface items that are close matches to that portion of the image.” Read more

 

Supervalu to sell Save-A-Lot to Canada’s Onex for $1.37 billion via St.Louis Post Dispatch. “Analyst Ajay Jain of Pivotal Research Group in New York thought Save-A-Lot could fetch as much as $1.8 billion, but sales in the last four quarters declined between 1.4 percent to 3.4 percent. “We are not entirely surprised that the sale proceeds were lower than expected,” he said in a research note.” Read more | Press release

 

Here’s Why Visa CEO’s Resignation Is Shocking via Fortune. Read more

 

New Staples Canada president sees company shifting to services amid digital onslaught by Hollie Shaw at Financial Post. “Though Office Depot has no stores in Canada, it owns the Grand & Toy business that remains a major supplier to corporate offices across the country. “We compete with Grand & Toy, but we also have a unit that focuses on (business-to-business) and it’s doing well. We were anticipating the merger, so that made us change focus a little bit.” Read more

 

Women are buying more leggings than jeans online by Lisa Fickenscher at NY Post. “For the first time, in the third quarter, women purchased more leggings than jeans online…In fact, over the past year, demand for the tight-fitting pants has increased by 41 percent, compared with a paltry 3 percent growth rate for jeans.” Read more

 

Walgreens Introduces Ship to Store Offering, with Free Shipping for Online and Mobile Orders Press release

 

Phil and Penny Knight give $500 million to University of Oregon by Matthew Kish at Portland Business Journal. “The money will create the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, which will work to take science from the laboratory to the real world.” Read more

 

Inside Amazon’s Prime Air secret drone testing facility by Cambridge News. “In a world exclusive, the News was given a tour of their workshop today in Castle Park, just off Castle Street, along with eight children from the Year 5 class at Steeple Morden School. We were shown around the laboratory which has been nestled just a stone’s throw from the city centre unbeknown to the general public for several years.” See the pics / Read more

 

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Pabst Blue Ribbon Wins Gold Medal at 2016 Great American Beer Festival

Profitable online retailer Etailz sells for $75M

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