Top Retailers

“If your brand was delisted tomorrow, would anybody care?”

That’s the cold, hard question retailers and manufacturers need to confront. That was a key message Shannon Curtin, Walgreens group VP beauty, personal care and seasonal, had for attendees of a special one-day summit co-hosted by The Drug Store News Group and the Mack Elevation Forum in August. “Care equals long-term revenue potential. When there is no care, brands simply do not exist,” she said.

Rite Aid’s efforts to convert the chain to the new Wellness store format have been running smoothly for a couple of years now, but it was this year that the chain reached two key milestones.

In May, the company announced that it had converted a majority of its stores in the Buffalo, N.Y., area to the format, for a total of nearly 100, marking the occasion with an event featuring John Standley, the company’s chairman and CEO, and Ken Martindale, the president and COO, as well as celebrity fitness expert Denise Austin.

CARLISLE, Pa. — Ahold USA is encouraging pork suppliers to start using open housing for pregnant sows by 2022, the supermarket retailer said Friday.

The company, which owns the Stop & Shop, Giant-Landover and Giant-Carlisle chains, as well as the Peapod online grocery service, said it wanted suppliers to transition from gestation crates to open housing, with the option of using gestation crates during appropriate times to keep sows and piglets healthy and safe.

ISSAQUAH, Wash. — Sales at Costco Wholesale in October were up by 6% over last year, the club retailer said Thursday.

Costco said sales for the month were $8.15, compared with $7.66 billion in October 2012. For the nine-week period that ended Sunday, sales were $18.01 billion, a 6% increase over the $17 billion the chain had during the same period last year.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Meijer will match donations to a program to provide food for poor families later this month to mark the program's fifth year, the mass merchandiser said.

The Midwestern retailer said it would match two-to-one every customer's $10 Simply Give donation made between Nov. 15 and Nov. 16 to celebrate the program's five years of existence. The program has generated more than $6.5 million for local food pantries, equal to 39 million meals. One-in-six families in the country is considered food-insecure, according to Feeding America.

CHICAGO — Target will play host to a new series of educational events sponsored by Bump Club and Beyond, an event company focused on educating mothers and expectant mothers.

WOONSOCKET, R.I. — CVS Caremark announced on Thursday that its Pharmacy Advisor Counseling program has been awarded Health Call Center accreditation from URAC, a Washington, D.C.-based health care accrediting organization that establishes quality standards for the healthcare industry.

This represents the first time that CVS Caremark has received the Health Call Center accreditation and the second accreditation that the Pharmacy Advisor Counseling program has received this year.

NEW YORK — From Sears Holdings' perspective, opening Kmart stores on the morning of Thanksgiving gives customers a convenient way to shop for holiday gifts. But many customers see things differently, and the retail giant is taking some flak for the decision.