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    Macy’s Earnings Report Details Multimillion-Dollar Accounting Error

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    Analysts see much bigger challenges for the retailer than lax accounting.With just two weeks until Christmas, Macy’s has been operating under a cloud. The retailer shocked Wall Street last month when it said that an employee had “intentionally” hidden more than $150 million over the past few years, forcing the company to delay an earnings report that analysts use to gauge its health as it enters the most important selling season.On Wednesday, Macy’s gave investors a full look at its financials and provided more information about the accounting snafu that involved how it measured the cost of delivering small packages. It found “no material impact” on its previous results, but nonetheless had to revise its accounts going back a few years and lower its forecast for profits this year.Macy’s confirmed in a filing that a single employee, who is no longer with the company, “intentionally made erroneous accounting entries and falsified underlying documentation, to understate delivery expenses” from late 2021 through the third quarter of this year. On a call with analysts, Adrian Mitchell, Macy’s finance chief, said the error was not made for personal financial gain.“This was not theft,” he said. “There was no impact to revenues, and there was no impact to cash or inventories as all vendors were fully paid.”Macy’s said it was taking measures to improve its financial controls, including “re-evaluating the risk of employee circumvention of controls.”Concerns still remain about how the company will turn around its falling sales and fend off activist investors pushing for major changes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With Discounts on Offer, Shoppers Seem to Bite

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      Early data on online spending this week shows consumers are being drawn to discounts. A clearer picture of Black Friday sales, including in-store spending, will emerge in the days ahead.For weeks, businesses have been sending consumers endless offers of discounts on all sorts of items. Finally, on this long weekend, it appears that consumers bit.Preliminary data released on Friday suggests that Americans took advantage of big deals on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, opening their wallets, though they were selective about what they bought.Consumers spent $7.9 billion in online shopping on Friday, an increase of 8.2 percent compared with last year, according to incomplete numbers from Adobe Analytics. That’s on top of $6.1 billion online on Thanksgiving Day, around 9 percent more than the previous year. The increases were driven by large discounts on items like toys, electronics and apparel. These numbers offer an early look at how the holiday shopping season has gone so far. The Adobe data doesn’t include in-store buying. Mastercard will release data that includes in-store sales on Saturday, and the National Retail Federation is set to update its figures on the holiday shopping season next week.Ahead of the holiday weekend, as retailers issued forecasts for the coming months, they painted a picture of shoppers who have grown choosy, holding off on large purchases after years of faster-than-usual price increases and with interest rates still high.“Consumers have been waiting all of 2024 for this moment to buy the goods they want and need at a lower price, and they seem to be pleased with the discounts they’re seeing this week,” said Caila Schwartz, the director of consumer insights at Salesforce, which also tracks spending data.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Peggy Caserta, Who Wrote a Tell-All About Janis Joplin, Dies at 84

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      Her Haight-Ashbury clothing store was ground zero for the counterculture. But she was best known for a tawdry book — which she later disavowed — published after Ms. Joplin’s death.Peggy Caserta, whose funky Haight-Ashbury clothing boutique was a magnet for young bohemians and musicians, and who exploited her relationship with Janis Joplin in a much-panned 1973 memoir that she later disavowed, died on Nov. 21 at her home in Tillamook, Ore. She was 84.Her partner and only immediate survivor, Jackie Mendelson, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.The Louisiana-born Ms. Caserta was 23 and working at a Delta Air Lines office in San Francisco when she decided to open a clothing store for her cohort, the lesbians in her neighborhood. She found an empty storefront on Haight Street, near the corner of Ashbury, which she rented for $87.50 a month.At first Ms. Caserta sold jeans, sweatshirts and double-breasted denim blazers that her mother made. Then she added Levi’s pants, which a friend turned into flares by inserting a triangle of denim into the side seams. When the friend couldn’t keep up with the orders, Ms. Caserta persuaded Levi Strauss & Company to make them.She named the place Mnasidika (pronounced na-SID-ek-ah), after a character in a poem by Sappho. “It’s a Greek girls’ name,” Ms. Caserta told The San Francisco Examiner in 1965, for an article about the “new bohemians” colonizing the Haight-Ashbury district.Ms. Caserta was 23 when she opened a clothing store, Mnasidika, in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.via Wyatt MackenzieWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Walmart Pulls Back on D.E.I. Initiatives Amid Conservative Pressure

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      The retailer is the largest company to be targeted by the conservative activist Robby Starbuck.Lowe’s. Tractor Supply. Harley-Davidson.Now Walmart.The company, which is the nation’s largest retailer with some two million employees, is pulling back on some of its initiatives for diversity, equity and inclusion, known as D.E.I.Robby Starbuck, an anti-D.E.I. activist and a social media influencer, declared victory on Monday, saying that Walmart, the country’s largest private employer, was taking several actions in response to his threatened conservative consumer boycott before the holiday shopping season. A spokeswoman for Walmart confirmed the changes, some of which were already in motion.The retailer, like many other companies, has been reviewing its practices since the Supreme Court knocked down affirmative action at colleges last year.“We’ve been on a journey and know we aren’t perfect, but every decision comes from a place of wanting to foster a sense of belonging, to open doors to opportunities for all our associates, customers and suppliers, and to be a Walmart for everyone,” the company said in a statement.As a result of the changes, third-party merchants will no longer be able to sell some L.G.B.T.Q.-themed items on Walmart.com that are marketed to children. The company will also stop funding the Center for Racial Equity, a nonprofit initiative that Walmart has backed with $100 million, when the agreement expires next year. And the company will stop sharing data with the Human Rights Campaign, a nonprofit that tracks businesses’ L.G.B.T.Q. policies. It will also stop using the terms D.E.I. and Latinx in official communications.Mr. Starbuck has waged online campaigns against several companies whose policies he deems to be too “woke.” While Mr. Starbuck is benefiting as much from a trend to reverse D.E.I. policy as he is instigating it, companies across the United States have been preparing for the potential of possible attacks by activists. Walmart’s actions underline the risk it may see in a public fight, particularly as the anti-D.E.I. agenda gets a boost after Donald J. Trump’s election.In a post on social media, Mr. Starbuck said he had told executives at the company that he was working on a story about “wokeness” at Walmart, but instead the two sides had “productive conversations.”Mr. Starbuck initially focused on companies with customers whom he thought would most likely be sympathetic to his cause, like Tractor Supply and John Deere. Walmart represents a different kind of company: one with employees and customers on both sides of the political divide.“America just voted, and we voted against ‘wokeness,’” Mr. Starbuck said in a video posted on X, as he announced his next targets: Amazon and Target. More

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      Kohl’s Picks C.E.O. of Michaels to Help It Turn Around

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      Ashley Buchanan will be the third chief executive of the department store chain since 2018.Kohl’s has hired Ashley Buchanan, chief executive of the crafts retailer Michaels, to be its next chief executive, the department store chain said on Monday. Mr. Buchanan, who has run Michaels since 2020, will start on Jan. 15.Mr. Buchanan will be the third chief executive at Kohl’s since 2018. Tom Kingsbury has served as interim chief executive since Michelle Gass left in December 2022 to run Levi Strauss & Company. Mr. Kingsbury will retain his seat on the board of directors until he retires in May.Mr. Buchanan, 50, is a familiar name in the retail industry. He joined Michaels at the start of 2020, not long before the Covid pandemic forced millions of Americans to stay at home and led them to pick up a hobby. He helped Michaels increase its digital presence with its online marketplace, improved its merchandising and focused on smaller format stores.Previously, Mr. Buchanan spent 13 years at Walmart, holding several senior roles, including chief merchandising officer and chief operating officer for Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce. He was on Macy’s board of directors from October 2021 until Monday, when he resigned as part of his new role at Kohl’s.“I am thrilled to join Kohl’s, a storied and respected brand in the retail industry,” Mr. Buchanan said in a statement. “We have the privilege of serving millions of families all across the country, and I’m excited to work with the teams to evolve our business — building off the strength of our brand and loyal customer base while also creating a compelling retail experience for the future.”Kohl’s is facing a decline in comparable sales and challenges with profitability as customers pull back on discretionary spending. Its tie-up with the beauty retailer Sephora has helped buoy sales by bringing in younger customers. Still, the retailer has said it expects sales for this year to be down 4 to 6 percent.The retailer is set to announce its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday morning. More

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      Macy’s Discovers Employee Hid Millions in Delivery Expenses

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      The department store chain said it had found the erroneous accounting entries while preparing its results for the third quarter.Macy’s said Monday that an employee had misstated up to $154 million in delivery expenses over the past few years, forcing the retailer to delay a much-anticipated earnings report that Wall Street uses to gauge the strength of holiday shopping.The department store chain rushed to release an abridged set of financial results, which were a mixed bag, with signs of weakness and pockets of strength.Macy’s shares fell by more than 8 percent in premarket trading after the surprise preliminary report. But it quickly pared back some of its losses, as investors tried to make sense of the mixed results along with the company’s reassurance that the employee error did not affect its cash flow management or vendor payments.Macy’s sales in the third quarter fell 2.4 percent — below analysts’ expectations — to $4.74 billion. The company’s overall sales were dragged down by weak sales at Macy’s stores and its digital business.But comparable sales at 50 locations that represent the company’s future — based on geography, staffing and other factors — rose 1.9 percent, the third consecutive quarter of growth. And comparable sales rose at both Bloomingdale’s and Bluemercury, the company’s luxury brands. Those results are early signs that Macy’s latest strategy of investing in these parts of the business may be working.Macy’s said it had found the accounting error while preparing its results for the quarter, which ended Nov. 2. The results had been set to be released on Tuesday. An investigation was opened and the employee was no longer with the company, Macy’s said. The investigation has not identified involvement by any other employee.In the same time period of the accounting issue in which the employee hid up to $154 million, the retailer said it had incurred about $4.36 billion of delivery expenses. Macy’s declined to comment further.The chain said it would report earnings by Dec. 11.As part of a turnaround plan announced in February, Macy’s said it would close 150 of its stores over the next three years. The company said it had recorded asset gains of $66 million from the sale of closed stores. That was more than the company had expected.Macy’s decision to delay its full-year guidance added to uncertainty about winners and losers in the upcoming holiday shopping season. U.S. consumers are still spending, but executives at some of the biggest retailers, including Target, have recently flagged consumers’ continuing cautious spending patterns, with many shoppers trading down to lower-priced items. The National Retail Federation projected U.S. holiday sales to grow as much as 3.5 percent this year, in line with averages before the pandemic. More

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      Connecticut Couple Charged in $1 Million Theft of Lululemon Goods

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      Investigators said the couple used trickery and misdirection to steal merchandise from Lululemon stores in at least five states.A Connecticut couple were charged with being part of an organized retail theft operation that is suspected of stealing about $1 million in Lululemon merchandise across several states, the authorities said.The couple, Jadion Anthony Richards, 44, and Akwele Nickeisha Lawes-Richards, 45, of Danbury, Conn., were each charged with one felony count of organized retail theft this month in connection with crimes that began in September, according to the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office in Minnesota.They were arrested at a Lululemon store in Woodbury, Minn., one day after they went to a Lululemon store in Roseville, Minn., where they and an unidentified man stole 45 items worth nearly $5,000, according to the charges.An investigator for Lululemon, who is identified in court documents only by the initials R.P., said that the couple began by stealing from Minnesota stores in Edina, Minneapolis and Minnetonka.The investigator said that the couple had also hit Lululemon stores in Connecticut, Colorado, New York and Utah.After their arrest, the police searched a hotel room in Bloomington, Minn., where the couple had been staying, and found a dozen suitcases with $50,000 worth of Lululemon attire, with price tags still attached, according to court records.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yelloh, Formerly Schwan’s Home Delivery, Closes

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      Yelloh, the frozen food delivery service formerly called Schwan’s Home Delivery, which had once been known for its reach with rural Americans and its direct-to-consumer business model, is closing its doors on Friday after decades of decline.Minnesota-based Yelloh was born on March 18, 1952 when its founder, Marvin Schwan, delivered 14 gallons of ice cream. The service’s popularity exploded over the years and later foods frozen at their peak made it onto the menu. At its peak, the company delivered meals and ice cream across 48 states, but critics and experts said the company became frozen in time, ceding ground to competitors and modernity.The Schwan’s name lives on in frozen foods (Red Baron, Freschetta, and Mrs. Smith’s are among their many brands) — that side of the business was sold to CJ CheilJedan, a South Korean company, in 2019. But on Nov. 8, Yelloh permanently parked its fleet of refrigerated trucks that, with their yellow décor, were once instantly recognizable in small towns across America. Friday’s closure means that about 1,100 people across 13 states will be out of a job.In a statement, the company said it made its decision because of “multiple insurmountable business challenges,” including “economic and market forces, as well as changing consumer lifestyles.”Michael Ziebell, a Yelloh board member who spent 22 years with the company and previously held leadership roles, said the shuttering was devastating, calling it a very hard and very emotional decision.But, he said, it was not sudden.In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Ziebell said demographic and market issues began plaguing the company in the late 1980s and early ’90s; with fewer people home as drivers came, the relationships between drivers and customers that had been built over decades began to diminish. Then came membership stores like Costco, which could compete on frozen food price and quality, and on top of that regulatory changes added restrictions to their truck operations. It was “the perfect storm,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Target’s Stock Sinks on Weak Sales Ahead of Holiday Shopping Season

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      The retailer’s downbeat earnings report, which included lower profit and larger inventory, fell far short of Wall Street’s expectations.Target rattled Wall Street on Wednesday with a downbeat earnings report showing a sales decline, lower profit and an unwelcome buildup of unsold inventory. The company also cut its forecast for the full year, a bad omen ahead of the critical holiday shopping season.Target’s stock plunged more than 20 percent in early trading, putting it on track for its biggest daily decline in more than two years.Sales at Target stores fell 1.9 percent last quarter, from the same period last year, offset somewhat by a 10.8 percent rise in online sales. The company said it expected sales to be flat this quarter and cut its forecast for full-year profit, almost entirely reversing an increase announced just three months ago.Jim Lee, Target’s chief financial officer, told analysts on a call that it was “prudent to take this conservative approach” and that the company would take “swift and disciplined action to position ourselves to win during the holidays and in 2025.”Target had recently made improvements that drew shoppers to its stores, but the earnings setback suggests that there is more work to do. Brian Cornell, Target’s chief executive, said in a statement that the retailer was navigating through “a volatile operating environment.”The weaker-than-expected report covered the period of back-to-school shopping and Halloween, which can signal more challenges during the holiday season, a crucial final weeks of the year. Retailers look to those seasonal events as indicators of how shoppers might spend around Thanksgiving and Christmas. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More