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lululemon athletica's focus on e-commerce is paying off for the yoga-inspired apparel retailer. E-commerce now represents 10.4 percent of lululemon's total revenue, which rose 31 percent this quarter to $230.2 million.

Gap is piloting a new social music mobile application called Roqbot at a store in San Francisco. The app enables shoppers to request music played in Gap stores while they shop, in addition to receiving a 25% discount on their purchases when they check-in to the store on

Framingham, Mass. -- Staples announced the appointment of Cynthia Pevehouse to senior VP general counsel, effective Jan. 3, 2012. She will have global management responsibility for the company’s legal team and report to Ron Sargent, Staples’ chairman and chief executive. Pevehouse joins Staples from international law firm Steptoe & Johnson LLP.

In a follow-up to its Shoppers Trend Report released prior to Black Friday, RetailMeNot.com issued updated information showing metrics that measure the online retail industry's performance and consumer purchase behaviors during the start of the 2011 holiday shopping season.

According to the Department of Labor, the retail industry added nearly 50,000 jobs in November, the second highest increase since September 2007. However, the Retail Industry Leaders Association warned that new regulations could impede the continued pace of job growth.

The Las Vegas chapter of the Occupy Wall Street movement against corporate greed wants to trademark its name and make a fashion statement, it seems, in the process.

Charming Shoppes said it's conducting a strategic review of its operations, which includes the divestiture of its Fashion Bug business and the expansion of its Lane Bryant brand.

NEW YORK — Increases in Nook products helped offset a decline in physical book stores at Barnes & Noble during the second quarter. Total sales for the period ended Oct. 29, 2011, slipped 0.6% to $1.89 billion from $1.90 billion in the year-earlier quarter, with the biggest drop occurring at the chain’s college stores. Online revenue grew 17% in the quarter to $206 million, which the company attributed to increases in sales of ebooks and its Nook line of e-reading devices. The company posted a worse-than-expected net loss of $6.6 million for the second quarter, compared with a net

All retailers are taking price increases where they can these days, especially in food, but the pace of increases at Walmart has slowed, and its price gap relative to most competitors has widened, according to the most recent pricing survey conducted by Credit Suisse. The firm looks at prices monthly on a basket of 60 comparable items in such categories as health and beauty, food and household products at seven mass-channel retailers in the Dallas/Fort Worth and Chicago markets. The findings of the survey are never in doubt with Walmart offering the lowest prices, but what is interesting is