The coronavirus pandemic’s impact on the holiday shopping season is already underway. Amazon has delayed its annual sales event, Prime Day, from July to October 2020, while top e-commerce retailers, including Walmart, Target and Amazon, are becoming more powerful than ever. According to a new report from App Annie, mobile shopping apps are poised to ...

Walmart is taking on Amazon, launching a new membership service that includes free shipping (if you spend at least $35). Those grocery robots had better be ready. Announced Tuesday and launching Sept. 15, the long-rumored Walmart+ offers unlimited fr... ...

For one week in 1992, video and performance artist Christian Jankowski visited supermarkets to hunt down his groceries with a bow and arrow. From the description of "Die Jagd / The Hunt": To rebel against modern society, to return to nature: in pursuit of these primeval instincts, for one week, Jankowski lived off goods he ...

Harrods is a fancy department store in London and the largest in Europe, with an illustrious history to go with its sprawling floor plan—and similarly enormous catalogues. The 1912 Harrods for Everything book is 1,525 pages long, illustrates more than 15,000 products, and was backed by a then cutting-edge logistics operation that included telephone ordering ...

Following Walmart’s pandemic-fueled earnings beat posted on Tuesday, Target today also handily beat Wall St. expectations to deliver a record-setting quarter across a number of key metrics. The retailer on Wednesday announced its strongest quarter to date for comparable sales, which grew 24.3% in Q2, driving Target’s profit up 80.3% year-over-year to $1.69 billion. Online ...

Walmart’s investments in e-commerce, including online grocery delivery and pickup, are continuing to pay off for the retailer. In the company’s Q2 earnings, released this morning, Walmart reported its U.S. e-commerce sales were up 97% — an increase attributed to more customers shopping online during the pandemic, stocking up on household supplies, and shopping for ...

The UK generally lacks space for big-box stores that sell everything, a la Wal-Mart. That niche in the ecology of consumerism was occupied instead by Argos, which crams a similarly vast inventory into basement warehouses and allows shoppers to order from a showroom. In this showroom are dozens of laminated catalogs featuring all the stuff ...

Yesterday, five large department stores in the towns of Lindsay and Whitby, Ontario, Canada had to temporarily stop ringing up customers because every item scanned at the register showed up as Mr. Potato Head.

"A point of sale downloading error caused item names to appear incorrectly," said Cathy Kurzbock, manager of external communications for department ...

Microsoft is to shut shop on the high streets and malls of America, permanently closing its 116 retail stores. Only 10 were overseas; flagship stores in New York City, London, Sydney, and Redmond will be remain as showrooms that do not sell the products. There will be no layoffs, Microsoft reports.

Alarm bells rang when ...

A man in Beijing, where everyone is told to stay home due to the coronavirus, visited a mall and took a video camera. It's all but deserted: you can get served, but you're not allowed to hang around. Jump a third of the way in for the "action".

P.S. This is basically every mall in Pittsburgh ...