Bed Bath & Beyond plans to close at least 40 stores this year but open 15 new locations - USA TODAY

Kelly Tyko USA TODAY

Published 1:00 AM EDT Apr 12, 2019

Bed Bath & Beyond will be closing and opening stores this year.

The New Jersey-based home goods retailer, which also operates Buy Buy Baby, Harmon Face Values and World Market, announced mixed results during its fourth-quarter call with financial analysts this week.

"We expect to open approximately 15 new stores in fiscal 2019. This will be offset by a minimum of approximately 40 stores we expect to close," Robyn D'Elia, chief financial officer and treasurer, said during Wednesday's earnings call. "This number will grow unless we are able to negotiate more favorable lease terms with our landlords."

D'Elia said most of the "planned closures are for Bed Bath & Beyond stores."

Fred's store closings: Discount chain to shutter 159 stores and start clearance sales at 360 locations

Store closings 2019: Payless, Gymboree and Victoria's Secret are just some of the brands closing stores

In the fourth quarter, the company opened three stores and closed 21 stores. The company has more than 1,500 stores across all of its brands, which also includes Christmas Tree Shops.

Bed Bath & Beyond officials also discussed updates on some new initiatives, including its "next generation lab stores." During 2018, D'Elia said, the company "initiated 21 next generation lab stores, in which we are testing new and different assortments and visual merchandising to reimagine the in-store experience."

Those stores experienced higher sales, the company reported.

The year has been off to a rough start for all retail. Based on figures from global marketing research firm Coresight Research, bankruptcy filings and company earnings reports, more than 6,500 stores are slated to close in 2019.

The brick-and-mortar downturn is expected to continue, according to a report released this week from UBS Securities. Investment bank analysts said 75,000 more stores would need to be shuttered by 2026 if e-commerce “penetration rises from 16% currently to 25%.”

Follow USA TODAY reporter Kelly Tyko on Twitter: @KellyTyko

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2019-04-12 05:00:00Z
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Walmart slams Amazon tax payments in corporate catfight - Fox Business

Corporate giants Walmart and Amazon took aim at one another on Thursday, in an escalating fight over worker benefits and tax payments.

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After Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos may have taken a jab at rival Walmart in his annual letter to shareholders, a Walmart executive struck back on Twitter, asking its rival to pay its tax bill, tagging Bezos and using similar language.

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As previously reported by FOX Business, paid zero dollars in federal income tax in 2018, according to filings with the SEC – despite nearly doubling its profits.

Amazon has refuted that claim, however.

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“Amazon pays all the taxes we are required to pay in the U.S. and every country where we operate, including paying $2.6 billion in corporate tax and reporting $3.4 billion in tax expense over the last three years,” the company said. “Corporate tax is based on profits, not revenues, and our profits remain modest given retail is a highly competitive, low-margin business and our continued heavy investment.”

Walmart said it paid more than $3 billion in federal taxes.

Walmart was responding to Bezos’ letter, where he challenged his “top retail competitors” who “know who [they] are” to match its employee benefits and $15 minimum wage. He even went a step further urging competitors to up the ante with a $16 minimum wage.

Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour late last year, following a campaign of pressure from Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. The company has also said it would work with Congress to change the federal minimum wage.

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Sanders has similarly targeted Walmart, which pays a minimum wage of $11 per hour -- implemented in January 2018. The company has not committed to implementing a $15 minimum wage.

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https://www.foxbusiness.com/retail/walmart-slams-amazon-corporate-catfight

2019-04-11 17:35:08Z
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Jeff Bezos snubbed eBay in his annual shareholder letter, sending the stock sliding - CNBC

Shares of eBay fell nearly 5% on Thursday, after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos snubbed the rival e-commerce giant his annual letter to shareholders.

In the letter, Bezos compared the growth in merchandise sales of third-party sellers between Amazon and eBay from 1999 to 2018. His comparison showed that Amazon has clearly outperformed its rival.

"Third-party sales have grown from $0.1 billion to $160 billion — a compound annual growth rate of 52%. To provide an external benchmark, eBay's gross merchandise sales in that period have grown at a compound rate of 20%, from $2.8 billion to $95 billion," said Bezos.

EBay's shares slid to $36.00 on Thursday afternoon. Its market cap was $32.94 billion.

Bezos cited the Fulfillment by Amazon and Prime memberships as the company's two "very best selling tools" to secure Amazon's success with third-party sellers over rivals like eBay.

"We invested in both of these programs at significant financial risk and after much internal debate," Bezos said in the letter. "We could not foresee with certainty what those programs would eventually look like, let alone whether they would succeed, but they were pushed forward with intuition and heart, and nourished with optimism."

In response, eBay CEO Devin Wenig took to Twitter defend the company.

"While I appreciate the ink dedicated to @ ebay from the ceo of the company not focused on competition, think I"ll dedicate my letter to customers, purpose and strategy. We don't compete with our sellers. We don't bundle endless services to create barriers to competition."

eBay CEO tweet

Bezos also challenged rival retailers to match Amazon's minimum wage of $15 per hour. Bezos did not call out competitors by name, but it prompted a response from Walmart's executive vice president of corporate affairs, Dan Bartlett, who challenged Amazon to pay more taxes.

Read Bezos' 2018 annual letter here.

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https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/11/ebay-stock-slides-on-bezos-comments-in-shareholder-letter.html

2019-04-11 18:16:00Z
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Fred's closing 159 stores nationwide, including Monroe & El Dorado stores - Knoe.com

(KLTV/Gray News) - The company, Fred's, Inc., announced on Thursday it is closing 159 stores.

According to a press release, the company plans to close the stores by the end of May.

The company made the decision to close "underperforming stores" following an evaluation of the stores' portfolios, "including historical and recent store performance and the timing of lease expirations, among other factors."

"After a careful review, we have made the decision to rationalize our footprint by closing underperforming stores, with a particular focus on locations with shorter duration leases," Fred's Chief Executive Officer Joseph Anto stated in a press release. "Most of these stores have near-term lease expirations and limited remaining lease obligations. Decisions that impact our associates in this way are difficult, but the steps we are announcing are necessary. We will make every effort to transition impacted associates to other stores where possible,"

Locations affected include stores in Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Kentucky, Illinois and Tennessee.

The stores closing in Louisiana are:

· Baton Rouge: 10710 Greenwell Springs Road
· Bossier City: 5751 Shed Rd
· Carencro: 806 Veterans Dr
· Franklin: 1801 West Main Street
· Gonzales: 228 W Highway 30
· Hammond: 125 Hwy 51 North
· Jonesboro: 310 E Main St
· Lafayette: 2490 W Congress St
· Monroe: 2350 Sterlington Rd
· Natchitoches: 400 Dixie Plz
· Pineville: 4628 Highway 28 E
· Shreveport: 5907 Old Mooringsport Road
· St. Martinville: 1114 South Main Street
· Westlake: 1514 Sampson Street

The store on 430 S. Bradley Ave. in El Dorado is also on the list for closure.

The Memphis-based retailer operates about 600 general merchandise and pharmacy stores, including 13 franchised locations.

Copyright 2019 KLTV via Gray Television Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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2019-04-11 17:37:30Z
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5 Things We Learned From The Jeff Bezos Annual Letter - Investopedia

Under founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) has become a retailing and cloud computing colossus, making him the world's wealthiest man with a net worth of $151.8 billion, as calculated by Forbes, nearly all of that from his stake in Amazon, now one of the world's largest companies with a market value of $910 billion. The stock has risen nearly 6-fold in five years. But Bezos made one thing very clear in his letter to shareholders released today along with Amazon's annual report: the company's growth has only begun, and he plans to make Amazon even bigger.

All this despite rising calls from critics that Amazon should be broken up due to anti-trust concerns.

Below are five takeaways from Bezos's letter, summarized in both the table below and discussed in further detail in this story.

5 Takeaways From Jeff Bezos

• "Third party sellers are kicking our first party butt. Badly."
• "We knew we wanted to create a culture of builders" and employees with "customer obsession."
• "Amazon today remains a small player in global retail."
• "As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments."
• "Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage...It's a kind of competition that will benefit everyone."

Third Party Sellers

From 1999 to 2018, Bezos says "the share of physical gross merchandise sales sold on Amazon by third party sellers--mostly small- and medium-sized businesses--as opposed to Amazon's own first-party sales" has skyrocketed from 3% of the total to 58%.

First-party sales grew from $1.6 billion to $117 billion over that period, for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25% Third-party sales, meanwhile, surged from $0.1 billion to $160 billion, representing a 52% CAGR. By contrast, Bezos notes that eBay inc. (EBAY) posted a gross merchandise sales CAGR of only 20% in that same time frame.

"Why did independent sellers do so much better selling on Amazon than they did on eBay?...We helped independent sellers compete against our first-party business by investing in and offering them the very best selling tools we could imagine and build." In particular, regarding Fulfillment by Amazon and Amazon Prime, Bezos says that "these two programs meaningfully improved the customer experience of buying from independent sellers."

Culture of Builders

Bezos says that Amazon values "people who are curious, explorers," who "like to invent," and possess what he calls "customer obsession." He adds, "success can come through iteration: invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again."

"The outsized discoveries--the 'non-linear' ones--are highly likely to require wandering." In this vein, Bezos cites Amazon Web Services (AWS), its cloud computing division, with $30 billion in annual revenues "and growing fast." He says, "Much of what we build at AWS is based on listening to customers," and asserts that the key to its success is "customer obsession." Moreover, he adds, "The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don't know to ask for."

Small Player in Global Retail

Bezos tries to counter growing concerns that Amazon is becoming a retailing monopolist. "We represent a low single-digit percentage of the retail market, and there are much larger retailers in every country where we operate. And that's largely because nearly 90% of retail remains offline, in brick and mortar stores."

With respect to their Amazon Go stores, of which there are now ten, the "clear vision" is to "Get rid of the worst thing about physical retail: checkout lines." He says that customers call the Amazon Go experience "magical."

"Failure needs to scale too"

"If the size of your failures isn't growing, you're not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures."

Challenge to Top Retail Competitors

Amazon has been criticized in many in-depth news stories for its long hours and inflexible, extremely demanding and stressful work environment. Bezos indirectly addressed these points in his letter.

"Our focus is on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees who can think like owners. Achieving that requires investing in our employees." Bezos also says that Amazon's $15-an-hour minimum wage applies to all full-time, part-time, temporary, and seasonal workers in the U.S. He points out that Amazon pays up to 95% of the fees and tuition for "a certificate or diploma in qualified fields of study" and that more than 16,000 employees have taken advantage of it so far. He also says Amazon will be "upskilling" 50,000 U.S. hourly employees through training programs.

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2019-04-11 16:14:05Z
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PagerDuty, the 3rd unicorn IPO of the year, rockets higher by 50% in its trading debut (PD) - Business Insider

PagerDuty

• The tech "unicorn" PagerDuty began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.
• The initial public offering priced at $24 a share, and opened for trading at $36.75 - more than 50% above the IPO price.
• At $36.75 per share, PagerDuty would be worth more than $2.75 billion.

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PagerDuty debuted on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday at $36.75 a share — more than 50% above the initial public offering price. Thursday's opening surge gave PagerDuty a $2.75 billion valuation.

The cloud-computing company priced its initial public offering at $24 a share, above the range of $21 to $23 that had been expected.

PagerDuty was the third "unicorn" — or tech company with a valuation of $1 billion or more — to debut on the public markets this year. The IPO raised more $200 million.

The huge demand for the offering shows the IPO market continues to be wide open despite the early trading difficulties of ride-sharing company Lyft, which has seen shares plunge more than 16% from its IPO price of $72. Lyft's share price suffered in the wake of rival Uber's announcement that it was seeking a "conservative" $100 billion valuation for its own IPO.

PagerDuty, which provides early warning signs of disruptions and service outages, is a stand out in the red-hot "software-as-a-service" industry. According to the firm's website, it has over 11,000 clients, including one-third of the Fortune 500.

PagerDuty is a rare unicorn in that it is led by female CEO, Jennifer Tejada. She has run the company since 2016 after joining from Keynote, which she also led and sold to Thoma Bravo.

PagerDuty trades under the ticker PD.

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2019-04-11 15:55:16Z
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'How about paying your taxes?'—Walmart responds to Amazon's challenge over pay - CNBC

Amazon and Walmart are in war over worker pay — and now corporate taxes.

After Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Thursday issued a challenge to other retailers, not naming which ones specifically, to match Amazon's pay and benefits, Walmart has responded, albeit quietly.

"Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage. Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It's a kind of competition that will benefit everyone," Bezos wrote in his annual letter to shareholders.

Walmart's EVP of Corporate Affairs Dan Bartlett then shared an article on Twitter Thursday morning about Amazon paying $0 in federal taxes on more than $11 billion in profits last year. He wrote: "Hey retail competitors out there (you know who you are) how about paying your taxes?"

tweet

A representative from Amazon wasn't immediately able to comment on Bartlett's tweet.

Walmart's minimum wage of $11 an hour, set in January 2018, is still below Amazon's, which was hiked to $15 in November. But Walmart has said its average worker earns $17.55 an hour with wages and benefits. To stay competitive in the marketplace for talent, taking into consideration such a low unemployment rate in the U.S., Walmart has added perks like subsidizing the cost of higher education for its employees who've yet to earn a college degree. And it started loosening its dress code to let staffers in its stores wear blue jeans.

Meantime, before raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour, Amazon had been facing heightened criticism for its own pay disparity. Sen. Bernie Sanders went as far as introducing legislation called the "Bezos Act" to tax corporations for every dollar that their low-wage workers receive in government health-care benefits or food stamps.

When Amazon last year announced its plans to raise pay, Sanders said: "What Mr. Bezos has done today is not only enormously important for Amazon's hundreds of thousands of employees, it could well be, and I think it will be, a shot heard around the world."

But clearly, Amazon continues to come under attack for not having to pay anything to the IRS.

In 2018, Amazon paid $0 in U.S. federal income tax on more than $11 billion in profits before taxes. It also received a $129 million tax rebate from the federal government. Amazon's low tax bill mainly stemmed from the Republican tax cuts of 2017, carryforward losses from years when the company was not profitable, tax credits for massive investments in R&D and stock-based employee compensation, CNBC previously reported.

In 2018, Walmart paid over $3.2 billion in U.S. federal corporate income taxes.

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2019-04-11 15:15:13Z
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