Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart has high hopes for the holidays, in part because lower gas prices and unemployment rates are putting more money in the hands of its shoppers this year, said U.S. Chief Marketing Officer Stephen Quinn in an interview after his appearance at the Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference in Orlando last week. To keep up with the demand for thousands of pieces of content, largely video, the retailer has established a single "holiday hub" for producing all of its holiday work, led by Senior Vice President, Creative, Andy Murray, Quinn said.

While the quest for faster shipping is an ongoing struggle for retailers and fulfillment companies, it's unlikely that drones or anticipatory shipping alone will be the key to faster deliveries. Instead, these services will be the gateway into a new shipping model — one that's customer centric, highly personalized and characterized by the following:

As proponents of higher pay for Wal-Mart workers prepare for a day of protests against the retailer, its CEO is making the vague pledge that the company will eventually no longer have employees making only the national minimum wage. CEO Douglas McMillon was quick to point out to reporters on Wednesday that only about 6,000 of Wal-Mart's 1.3 million U.S. employees earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25 (we don't know if that number included those employees in cities and states with minimum wages that are higher than the federal minimum). 

The way in which ground shipping charges are derived is about to change in 2015. Are you prepared? Both FedEx and UPS announced plans to apply dimensional weight pricing on all packages. The two companies already use this pricing on many of their other services, but have now opted to expand this practice further. Both companies believe these changes will help to reduce excess packaging materials and overall package sizes in order to better optimize loads, which may ultimately lead to related reductions in fuel use, vehicle emissions and transportation costs.

Nike's Converse sued Wal-Mart and Hennes & Mauritz (H&M), along with other retailers and shoe importers, accusing them of selling knockoffs of its iconic Chuck Taylor All-Star sneakers. Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, and H&M, Europe's second-biggest clothing chain, sell shoes that are "confusingly similar imitations" of the trademarked All-Star shoes that date back to 1917, Converse said in separate complaints filed in federal court in Brooklyn, New York. The distinctive high-top sneakers were renamed in 1934 for Chuck Taylor, a Converse salesman and basketball player, according to court filings. 

Wal-Mart is eliminating health benefits for about 30,000 employees to control its rising health care costs. The cut applies to part-timers who work fewer than 30 hours a week, Wal-Mart — about 2 percent of

Wal-Mart is taking one-stop shopping to another area: health insurance. The world's largest retailer plans to work with DirectHealth.com, an online health insurance comparison site and agency, to allow shoppers to

Wal-Mart was ordered by a federal judge in Arkansas to face a pension fund's claims the retailer defrauded shareholders by concealing corruption tied to bribes allegedly paid by officials of its Mexican unit. U.S. District Judge Susan Hickey in Fayetteville rejected Wal-Mart's bid to throw out the Michigan-based fund's lawsuit accusing it of making misleading statements to regulators about claims it paid bribes to facilitate Mexican real estate deals. Wal-Mart said it's spent $439 million since 2012 in connection with investigations into allegations that employees paid bribes in Mexico, China, India and Brazil.

On Monday, Wal-Mart delivered its answer in a New Jersey federal court to "30 Rock" actor Tracy Morgan's lawsuit arising from a six-car accident on the New Jersey Turnpike. Among nine affirmative defenses, Wal-Mart says that injuries "were caused, in whole or in part, by plaintiffs' failure to properly wear an appropriate available seatbelt restraint device." Morgan was among several people injured who are now suing Wal-Mart for negligence. In particular, their lawsuit filed in July questions whether Wal-Mart driver Kevin Roper was fatigued at the time of the crash. 

Even by the anything-goes ethical code of the corporate jungle, Amazon.com's alpha male Jeff Bezos is considered a ruthless predator by businesses that deal with him. As overlord of Amazon, by far the largest online retailer in the U.S. (with more sales than the next nine U.S. online retailers combined), Bezos has the monopoly power to stalk, weaken and even kill off retail competitors, going after such giants as Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart, and draining the lifeblood from hundreds of smaller Main Street shops.