Retail Stores

Stung by a new breed of sophisticated thieves, the nation's major retailers are fighting back. These well-organized crime rings have added tough new challenges for merchants who have long contended with petty shoplifters and their own light-fingered employees.

Discount beauty retailer Ulta Salon Cosmetics and Fragrance announced it will be rolling out men's grooming boutiques inside most of its stores by early August. Ulta’s CEO Chuck Rubin said at the Reuters Consumer and Retail Summit that creating space for men should increase sales of those items. Rubin said men’s grooming items were “spread around different parts of the store,” and that pulling the items together for a grooming boutique is “appropriate."

rue21, a specialty apparel retailer, announced the opening of its 700th store. The company has opened 63 stores and is on target to open 110 new stores and convert 35 existing stores to its larger etc! format in fiscal 2011.

John Malkovich has launched a new clothing label called Technobohemian. "I am inspired by the appearance of a bohemian of the new millennium," Malkovich said. "I thought it was necessary to update the figure of the bohemian but not in the traditional way. It was necessary to make it cosmopolitan, present and fully engaged in the technological world we live in today."

You may have thought that Seven has become all but invisible, its entrance obscured by heavy scaffolding and a series of barricades erected for the renovation of a neighboring building. Foot traffic has dropped from about 40 customers a day to 10, said Steve Sang, a founder of the store. Sales now average less than half of what they were before the recession. At this rate, he said, Seven won't survive another six months.

Wal-Mart employs more than 2 million people and controls about 13.4 percent of the consumer market in the U.S. But Amazon controls one-third of e-commerce sales in the U.S. and could put up a fight.

Several major retailers plan to keep opening new stores even as e-commerce gathers steam, arguing that physical locations go hand in hand with their websites.

Fashion editors and department store buyers have long had the biggest say in what parts of designer collections make it to market. This pattern is changing, however, thanks to a more social web culture and better tools to facilitate online voting, purchasing and even customization.

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.