Target

Target may have been knocked down by a huge holiday season data breach last year, but its most recent quarterly earnings report and continuing replacement of top management show the retailer has other, bigger problems to address. Target's Canadian expansion has suffered from poorly managed inventory planning and a lack of understanding of the Canadian market. Meanwhile, merchandise even in U.S. stores has lost its gotta-have-it quality, and foot traffic had been slowly declining even before the breach happened. "They're behind the curve right now," says Sandy Skrovan, U.S. research director for Planet Retail, a retail research and advisory firm.

In the ongoing retail war of brick vs. click, subscription ordering is now a key part of the strategy to grow e-commerce sales. Few consumers enjoy shopping for basic household items such as laundry detergent, toothpaste and vitamins, but everyone has to do it, and do it regularly. Retailers of all kinds are hoping to seize the opportunity to make shopping for consumables more convenient — and win the consumer over and over and over again as a result.

At no point in the last several decades has a company's chief information officer been more important to the overall organization. That's because if CIOs can effectively manage their customers’ privacy, they'll be able to enhance loyalty, drive sales and improve a company's stock price in the midst of this challenging new environment. The recent hacking of millions of credit cards and other confidential customer information at major retail chains has put information security on the front page. A proactive, savvy CIO can put his company's safeguards on the front page as well.

A recent Bloomberg poll suggests that most Target customers are willing to forgive the company for its massive data breach. The theft of data concerning more than 40 million payment transactions did hurt the company's reputation, as evidenced by a drop in sales in the fourth quarter, as well as the Congressional hearings and flood of lawsuits. However, the poll taken in early May showed that 85 percent of customers expect to shop about the same amount at Target over the next year. Only about 7 percent planned to reduce spending at Target in that period.

More than three-quarters of consumers don't trust what you're doing with their information. At least that's the case if you're one of the many retailers today using in-store tracking to gather information about shoppers in an effort to target sales and promotions. Yet technology firms continue to roll out new options for in-store tracking and a growing number of retailers are adopting them. Why would retailers persist if the majority of consumers object to these practices? As they say, there are two sides to every story. We set out to investigate both perspectives and find out whether there's any middle ground to be had.

Some of the nation's largest retailers are banding together in hopes of protecting consumers' personal and financial information from hackers and thieves. The Retail Industry Leaders Association, along with several top retailers, like Gap and Walgreens, on Wednesday opened an intelligence-sharing center focused on the prevention of cybercrimes against retailers. According to the retail group, the center will allow retailers to share

It seems that beleaguered yoga-apparel retailer Lululemon has now become a potential takeover target in the apparel retail industry, given the drastic decline in share price and the ongoing troubles in its operations. Lululemon is likely to fall prey to the acquisition aspirations of giant sports-related apparel retailers like Nike Inc., V.F. Corp. and Columbia Sportswear Co, all of which are looking to expand into the yoga product line. Though a

A week after Gawker published an anonymous rant from a Target corporate employee that further revealed the extent to which the retailer's massive data breach has affected both employee and customer morale, the retailer's Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Jones responded with a LinkedIn post titled "The Truth Hurts." In the letter, which Gawker says was emailed to the website by a current midlevel employee at Target headquarters in Minneapolis, the employee writes about Target's unproductive staffing strategy that

The brick-and-mortar storefront is no longer the only place customers can see the personal face of the business. Today's e-commerce is graduating into a new phase of personalization where customer segmentation capabilities and the ability to serve targeted content in real time are a viable reality for most online businesses.

They were both reared in cold Midwestern towns: Steinhafel in Milwaukee and Johnson in Edina, Minn. They both worked at Target: Steinhafel joined the Minneapolis-based retailer in 1979 as a merchandising trainee, and Johnson had been the chain's vice president of merchandising until he left in 2000. They both suffered an economy that continues to impoverish retail customers.