Home Depot Expands Penske Truck-Rental Pilot to Miami

Home Depot Inc. has expanded its moving-truck- rental collaboration with Penske Truck Rental to include five Miami-area Home Depots, taking the roughly three-month-old pilot program to nine stores in two states and perhaps signaling a wider-reaching deployment is in the offing.  If the program should be introduced more broadly, it could help Home Depot customers streamline the moving process by eliminating a separate trip on both ends to pick up and return the truck.

Nasdaq

Quebec Department Store Coming to Edmonton

Simons announces it will open up a 100,000 square foot department store at West Edmonton Mall. It will be its first store to open up outside of Quebec. Kevin Mullane, at National Bank Financial, says it's interesting the chain picked Edmonton to test the Western Canadian market.

I News

Big Retailers Fill More Aisles with Groceries

Reflecting a major shift in the way Americans shop for food, retailers better known for selling clothes or aspirin are expanding in a big way into the grocery business.  Target invested $500 million last year alone in a new push on groceries, retrofitting some of its general merchandise stores with full-blown food sections.  Walgreens began making over some stores in Chicago and New York a year ago, and added up to 500 food items. CVS/Pharmacy last year redesigned about 200 of its stores in urban areas like Boston, Detroit and New York, and expects to make over about 20 percent of its 7,100 stores in all. 

New York Times

Shopping Carts That Aren't Shopping Carts

When is a shopping cart not a shopping cart? When it's a car, a work of art, a mobile farm, or a piece of furniture.  Of course the original intention was for shopping carts to carry food, but some folks have adapted them to carry more precious cargo - people.  An MIT student, took an old cart and gave it new life in the form of his LOLrioKart, named in homage to the classic series of Nintendo games, Mario Kart.  But that's kid stuff compared to Britain's Andy Tyler and his rocket-powered shopping cart.  While there's no Shopping Cart 500 just yet, if it has wheels, there's bound to be someone who will race it. And shopping carts are no exception.

Mental Floss

X5 Retail, O'Key Report Strong Sales

Grocery chains X5 Retail Group and O'Key have reported strong sales growth for their fiscal fourth quarters, helped by expansion and resurgence in consumer spending.  X5 Retail said that sales in the quarter jumped up 35% to 106.3bn roubles (€2.65bn).  Meanwhile, the O'Key chain said its fourth-quarter revenue jump up 20.9% to 24.1bn roubles (€600m). 

Kam City

Tesco Targets Boots Via Health and Beauty Push

Tesco is planning a major drive into the health and beauty sector that could involve the creation of in-store services such as nail bars and hairdressers.  The supermarket's management has internally expressed a desire to become 'better than Boots', and is looking to introduce more upmarket beauty brands to stores.  It will roll out a 'beauty services' retail concept to at least 70 stores by 2012, with a view to creating a business that generates £15m turnover in its first year.

Marketing Magazine

Budget Chain 99p Stores Limited Targets North East

A BUDGET retail chain plans to create around 600 jobs in the North East as part of plans to open 20 shops in the region.  Family business 99p Stores Limited said it is looking to quadruple in size in order to meet the demands of the country's growing number of bargain hunters, and is looking to increase its number of UK stores from 146 to 600 over the next decade.  The firm said it was keen to grow into the North East, where it only has one store in Hartlepool, and said that it had already earmarked six sites.

NE Business

Kesa Warns on Profit after Disappointing Christmas at Comet

Kesa said like-for-like revenue at its stores fell 4% in the period from 1 November to 18 January with a 7.3% drop at its Comet chain dwarfing a 1.8% fall at Darty France. The group estimated that snow storms that hit Europe in the run-up to the Christmas holiday period had shaved about 2% off sales.

Kam City

Woolies, Coles in World's Top 25 Retailers

Australian supermarket giants Woolworths Ltd and Wesfarmers Ltd have moved up into the world's top 25 retailers.  The firm's latest Global Powers of Retailing report ranks Woolworths as 20th on the list of 250 top retail company's in fiscal 2010, up from 26th a year earlier, while Coles-owner Wesfarmers has moved from 28th position to 23rd.

Sydney Morning Herald

Suspects in Several Thefts Roll Cart Out of Superior Target and Into Cops

 
 A theft ring that made a habit of stealing from Target stores picked the wrong time to be fleeing their latest mark.  Boulder County deputies had just pulled into the parking lot of a Target store at 400 Center Drive in Superior on Friday to check out a stolen car when they saw three suspicious men, according to Sgt. Tom McGrath, a sheriff's spokesman.  The men were pushing a shopping cart bulging with stolen electronics equipment they had just swiped from the Target, McGrath said.  As it turns out, they were headed to the same car that had been reported as being stolen from Arvada, he said.  Deputies promptly arrested the three, McGrath said.

Denver Post