Retail Stores

Sears plans to spin off its home improvement unit, Orchard Supply Hardware Stores, as a separate publicly traded company. Often called OSH, Orchard Supply is a San Jose, Calif.-based chain that operates 89 stores, all in California. Shares of OSH, which plans to be traded as OSHS on the Nasdaq once it becomes a standalone company, will be distributed to Sears Holdings shareholders.

Retailers never give up fighting the bad guys. They’re adopting new technologies to protect against credit card fraud and counterfeit bills. They’re hiring firms to conduct background checks on job applicants. Distribution centers are putting smaller, harder-to-detect GPS devices in cargo shipments.

Online retailer Gifts That Give has launched a new website to make it easy for consumers to donate to their favorite nonprofit causes just by shopping. Combining online shopping with social good, Gifts That Give lets shoppers purchase upscale products at regular retail prices and give $1 out of every $5 they spend to the cause of their choice.

In this exclusive interview, Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel shows it's almost full-speed-ahead for the chain, in contrast to the jitters for many other retailers. Steinhafel's presiding over the company's record number of remodeled locations this year (about 400), the opening of smaller urban stores, plans for an expansion into Canada and an overhaul of its website, which will soon operate independently of Amazon.

Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn said this week that the electronics retailer is launching plans to wall off parts of its big-box stores and sublease the space to smaller retailers such as grocers, beauty supply stores, home furnishing outlets and others. According to a Thursday report in the Los Angeles Times, Dunn said at the company’s annual shareholder’s meeting that the chain can “reduce our overall square footage while actually increasing our presence. It's an opportunity to capture cost savings and get ourselves 'rightsize,'" he said.

Even in today’s digital world, a store’s physical appearance matters — and significantly. A new study shows that consumers form an opinion of a business based on physical presence, which heavily influences their decision whether to shop at a location.

Oprah Winfrey's flagship Oprah Store has closed its doors. The shop had been open since 2008, across from Harpo Studios where Oprah's show filmed for years. The store dished out goods featured on Oprah's show including her illustrious "favorite things," as well as T-shirts, trinkets and more. Before closing last week, everything in the store except for items from "Oprah's Closet" was marked down to $1.

A report released by the National Retail Federation said that import cargo volume at the nation’s major retail container ports is expected to remain at about the same levels as last year through July before starting to resume increases later this summer.

Ultra-affluents, those with incomes of $250,000 and above, are the wealthiest 2 percent of U.S. households who spend the most in the consumer economy. Life is good for the retailers who can capture this market. However, as data from Unity Marketing shows, holding onto the ultra-affluent market is a job even the top retailers struggle with.

The e-commerce landscape is shifting so quickly that keeping an online retail site updated and accessible has become a time-consuming and costly task for companies of all sizes. With tablets, touchscreens and an increase in mobile browsing, improving a company’s site can mean adding a multitude of new features and upgrades.