Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart has acquired Stylr, the 13th tech move in three years as the retailer works to build infrastructure to support the next generation of retail. The deal was announced on Monday. "As we continue to integrate digital and physical retail to create new and unique experiences for customers, we're thrilled to add Stylr to our mobile team. Over half of Wal-Mart smartphone users have used their device in-store to assist with their shopping, and with 80 percent of our customers under the age of 35 owning a smartphone, we expect this to grow dramatically."

Is that television-size box of graham crackers at Costco really a better deal than a standard box at Wal-Mart? Soon, online consumers won't have to do the math to figure it out. Some of the country's largest supermarkets and drugstores have agreed to display prices by unit of measurement, as well as by item, on their websites and mobile apps, to help shoppers slice though the confusion that sometimes arises from different packaging and discounts. Major retailers including Wal-Mart, CVS and Costco have agreed to the deal.

At the end of the 2014 fiscal year (January 2014), Wal-Mart had 3,285 supercenters in the United States that vary in size from 180,000 square feet to 230,000 square feet. It also had 508 discount stores that were around 140,000 square feet, smaller than the supercenters because they sell very little food. There were also, according to Wal-Mart's annual report, 407 even smaller units, of which 359 are the Wal-Mart Marketplace concept. These stores average around 43,000 square foot in size and have been around since 1998.

You've probably heard that a stunning 95 percent of the gains the United States economy has made in the years since the Great Recession have gone to the top 1 percent. What you may not know — but which plays no small role in explaining that phenomenon — is that most of the jobs created in the same time period have been low-wage, service sector gigs (or McJobs, as some people call them). In fact, according to a 2012 study from the National Employment Law Project, McJobs make up 58 percent of employment growth we've seen during the recovery.

The largest private employer in the U.S. continues to exploit tax breaks to reward its executives, according to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a D.C. based think tank which has researched executive compensation, and Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), a tax reform coalition. That finding was published in a report released yesterday, Walmart's Executive Bonuses Cost Taxpayers Millions, focusing on the retail giant's tax strategy.

Wal-Mart workers and union organizers say they'll hold strikes in more than 20 cities Wednesday in their campaign to raise wages. The job actions are timed in conjunction with Wal-Mart's annual shareholder meeting, which takes place Friday in Fayetteville, Ark., near the company's Bentonville headquarters. OUR Wal-mart, a group backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, helped orchestrate a candlelight vigil Monday night outside the Phoenix home of Rob Walton, Wal-Mart's board chairman. 

It's springtime in Texas. The weather is warming up and the air is thick and humid as students count down the days until summer break, but inside one Houston-area high school, a group of students isn't exactly tied to their desks. They aren't in the gym, in home economics class or studying math. These students are inside Scarborough High School's mock Wal-Mart store. The store is a lab of sorts, set up and paid for by the retail giant, complete with a cash register, shelves of inventory and those familiar "rollback" pricing signs on each display.

There's been a lot of talk recently about the eyebrow-raising pay gap between retail company CEOs and the store employees below them. At last week's Code Conference, Wal-Mart's CEO (who reels in $10 million per year) said he was no different then Wal-Mart's store employees, including the 30,000 who are paid at minimum wage. Two days before that, the Los Angeles Times ran an unforgiving piece on the subject, saying that "… many CEOs now pull down so much more than their own employees that it's an ugly insult to working families." 

Wal-Mart is refusing to budge an inch after critics bashed the retail giant for overpaying its executives while they mishandled a probe into charges that it systematically bribed officials in Mexico. Proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) "misconstrues" Wal-Mart's executive compensation policies, the discounter said in a regulatory filing last Thursday. ISS based its analysis on information from CtW Investment Group, a union-backed group that's long opposed Wal-Mart, the filing charged. The Bentonville, Ark., retail giant said its pay practices are "intended to closely align the interests of our named executive officers with the interests of our shareholders."

In one of his first public appearances as Wal-Mart's new CEO, Doug McMillon talked respectfully about its giant competitor Amazon.com, but explained why physical retail is here to stay. He also talked about how digital platforms and sales channels will become increasingly important to the retailer's business, including the need to improve its presence in digital media.