Management

Following botched holiday web orders and a scathing media critique about the brand's strategy posted on Forbes.com, Best Buy has been feeling the heat lately. The consumer electronics retailer's CEO, Brian Dunn, posted a frank response on the company blog to address critics and reassure employees.

One of the toughest parts of running any business is recruiting top talent and getting that talent to stick around. But when you oversee a small business, the challenges become a little bit bigger: How can you compete with the bigger companies' deeper pockets to give your employees an experience that makes them want to stick with you?

Liz Claiborne today announced it's changing its name to Fifth & Pacific Companies to better communicate its strategic focus on growing its three global lifestyle brands (Juicy Couture, kate spade and Lucky Brand) and reflect the sale of the Liz Claiborne namesake brand to J.C. Penney, among other recent transactions.

In a hiring campaign for an Ikea megastore in Australia, agency The Monkeys decided to focus on the retailer's customers and came up with an idea which cleverly suited the brand. Pieces of paper resembling its standard assembly instructions but with “career instructions” to “assemble your future” were inserted into the packaging of flat-pack products sold at nearby locations.

A former Apple retail employee has fired a departing salvo at Apple CEO Tim Cook in the form of an email outlining many internal developments at Apple retail stores and the employee's dissatisfaction with those developments. The email, reproduced at the employee's website, describes a devolution of the internal organization and treatment of Apple Retail employees in recent years.

Lou D’Ambrosio, chief executive officer of Sears, said creatively combining technology with spending on stores is the best way to turn around the largest U.S. department store chain. On Dec. 27, Sears announced it was closing as many as 120 locations after same-store sales slipped 5.2 percent in the eight weeks ended Dec. 25.

After a slew of online orders were cancelled in November and December when Best Buy couldn’t keep up with demand, the company issued the following statement: “What was wrong is that there was an unacceptable delay between order confirmations and cancellations, and for that we are very sorry,” said Susan Busch, senior director of Best Buy’s public relations.

Last week, RIS News brought you the top 10 retailers to work for based on the Good Company Retail Index in which 52 of the nation's biggest retailers are ranked by how they treat employees, customers and the planet. This week we present the retailers that didn't quite make the grade — ranking 42 to 52 — or the bottom 10 retailers to work for.

When Kmart acquired Sears in 2005, Chairman Edward Lampert said the new company would have the geographic reach and scale to compete with Wal-Mart.

A homeless dog in Wisconsin named L.L.Bean has found a new home in Maine, thanks to the company he's named after. The Dunn County Humane Society in Wisconsin received a call from an employee at L.L.Bean's Freeport headquarters after a local TV station ran a story featuring an 80-pound Coonhound named L.L.Bean that had been in the shelter for more than a year.