Suppliers Worry About Kmart-Sears Merger
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is widely referred to among its suppliers as the 800-pound gorilla. What the giant retailer wants, it usually gets.
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Discount retailer Kmart Holding Corp.  will buy department store operator Sears, Roebuck & Co. in a  $11.5 billion deal unveiled on Wednesday, creating the  third-largest U.S. retailer.
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Kalamazoo-area Kmart customers say that store&#39;s merger with Sears could mean stiff competition for retail powerhouses such as Wal-Mart.
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LET&#39;S assume that the merger of Kmart and Sears is exactly what it&#39;s being sold as: a way to combine the remaining strengths of two well-known but struggling retailers.
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The fate of two local retail stores may not be known for months in the wake of the announcement Wednesday of the $11 billion merger of Kmart and Sears.
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Many Kmart and Sears employees in metropolitan Indianapolis strolled into their jobs Wednesday morning unaware that their companies&#39; planned to tie the knot in an $11 billion merger.
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Description: NPR&#39;s Liane Hansen speaks with retail analyst Lois Huff about last week&#39;s announcement of warehouse giant K-Mart&#39;s intent to purchase the aging department store Sears.
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Kmart, which emerged from bankruptcy just last year, announced yesterday it would buy Sears for $11 billion to create the country&#39;s third-largest retailer.
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Evidence of an abrupt slowdown in consumer spending mounted Monday as Sears Holdings, the owner of Sears and Kmart, warned that its profit would most likely plunge as much as 57 percent for the three months ending in early February.
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Kmart Holding Corporation and Sears, Roebuck and Co. said today that they are merging to form a new retail company called Sears Holdings Corporation that will be the nation&#39;s third largest
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The merger of Sears, Roebuck &#38; Co. and Kmart Holding Corp. will produce a retailer to be known as Sears Holdings Corp. The combined company has applied to list its stock on Nasdaq under a yet-to-be-announced stock symbol, the two companies said in merger documents filed Tuesday.
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Discount retailer Kmart Holding Corp. (KMRT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) will buy department store operator Sears, Roebuck &amp; Co.
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Kmart Holding Corp. may have found its best &quot;Blue Light Special&quot; ever: retailing rival Sears Roebuck &amp; Co. Still, many experts questioned whether the $11 billion buyout would keep the blue lights flashing
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Kmart Holding Corp. KMRT.O, the  discount chain pulled from bankruptcy by hedge fund operator  Edward Lampert, will buy Sears, Roebuck & Co. S.N for $10.85  billion in a bold play to revive two of America's best-known,  but long-struggling, retail brands.
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Discount retailer Kmart Holding Corp.  KMRT.O will buy department store operator Sears, Roebuck &  Co. S.N in a surprise $11 billion deal that creates the  third-largest U.S. retailer, the companies said on Wednesday.
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Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Kmart Holding Corporation announced an agreement to merge into a new retail giant named Sears Holdings Corporation by March 2005, in a deal worth some 11 billion dollars (8.4 billion euros).
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Sears and Kmart customers who sign up for a new marketing program may be giving up more private information than they&#39;d bargained for, a prominent anti-spyware researcher claims.According to Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Ben Edelman, Sears Holdings&#39; My SHC Community program falls short of U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) standards by failing to notify users exactly what happens when they download the company&#39;s marketing software.And given the invasive nature of the product, Sears has an obligation to make its behavior clearer to users. &quot;The software is not something you&#39;d want on your computer or the computer of anyone you care about,&quot; Edelman said in an interview. &quot;It tracks every site you go to, every search you make, every product you buy, and every product you look at but don&#39;t buy. It&#39;s just spooky.&quot;Edelman has written up an analysis of Sears&#39;s software, set to be made public on Tuesday.Problems with the retailer&#39;s My SHC Community program were first brought to light in late December, when CA senior engineer Benjamin Googins, wrote a blog entry criticizing the software, which was written by VoiceFive, a subsidiary of Internet measurement firm ComScore.Sears launched the My SHC Community in March, intending it to be a vehicle for customers who want a voice in the company&#39;s direction. &quot;It&#39;s still kind of in its early days,&quot; said Rob Harles, vice president of MY SHC Community, in an interview conducted prior to Edelman&#39;s post. &quot;It&#39;s mainly used right now for research, but what we want to do is open it up so it&#39;s creating dialogue with our customers.&quot;Sears Holdings, the owner of the Sears Roebuck and Kmart department stores is the third-largest retailer in the U.S.Sears offers members $10 and a chance to win one of several sweepstakes as an extra incentive to join the program.But in return, a small percentage of members must install extremely invasive software.According to Googins, the product monitors not only all of the user&#39;s Web traffic, but also keeps track of secure sessions like visits to bank sites, sniffs through e-mail headers, and then sends that information to a ComScore.While Googins called the software &quot;a significant threat to privacy,&quot; Harles doesn&#39;t see it that way. First off, he said that members can join the community with or without the tracking software and that less than 10 percent of the members have signed up for the tracking program.And those who get the tracking software installed have all personally identifying information scrubbed by ComScore and are informed of exactly what&#39;s going on, he added.Harles sent Googlins a detailed rebuttal to his claims, which the CA researcher has published on his blog.Edelman said Monday the Sears executive is simply wrong. &quot;The comments from ... Rob Harles are remarkable,&quot; he said. &quot;Exactly contrary to actual facts as best I can tell.&quot;Sears does disclose that it is installing tracking software, but doesn&#39;t do enough to make sure that users have seen these disclosures before they download the program, Edelman said in his analysis.&quot;The FTC requires that software makers and distributors provide clear, prominent, unavoidable notice of the key terms,&quot; he wrote. &quot;SHC&#39;s installation of ComScore did nothing of the kind.&quot;In an interview, Harles said that Sears had no immediate plans to change its disclosure policies, but he did say that My SHC Community would undoubtedly evolve in some ways.This isn&#39;t the first time ComScore&#39;s software has been in the news. In June, Edelman documented how they company&#39;s tracking software was being installed on some PCs without consent.&quot;Why so many problems for ComScore?&quot; Edelman wrote in his latest blog posting. &quot;The basic challenge is that users don&#39;t want ComScore software. ComScore offers users nothing sufficiently valuable to compensate them for the serious privacy invasion ComScore&#39;s software entails. There&#39;s no good reason why users should share information about their browsing, purchasing, and other online activities. So time and time again, ComScore and its partners resort to trickery (or worse) to get their software onto users&#39; PCs.&quot;