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      Spirit Halloween Will Experiment With Spirit Christmas

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      Known for its pop-up stores — and its army of seasonal workers — Spirit Halloween will try its hand at a longer run and a bigger holiday.For many fall enthusiasts, the season’s start is marked by the arrival of autumn leaves and apple picking. For others, it is marked by the emergence of the Borg-like retail empire that is Spirit Halloween, a Halloween goods purveyor that opens more than 1,500 locations across North America, only to shutter them in the days after Halloween.The script has remained constant: Spirit Halloween outlets appear in strip malls, and just about any abandoned storefront, selling vast inventories of costumes, wigs, vampire fangs, fake blood, devil pitchforks and ghoulish animatronics. Year after year, its stores create a dependable seasonal economy for thousands of workers before disappearing as quickly as they materialized.But this week, Spirit, which was founded in 1983, announced that it intends to test the waters of the Christmas season, too, with the introduction of a new retail concept, “Spirit Christmas.” Ten test locations will open across the Northeast, starting on Oct. 18 with a store in Mays Landing, N.J., which will be followed in November with outlets in locations like Albany, Poughkeepsie and Erie.At these locations, Spirit’s Grim Reaper-like mascot will be replaced with a winking Santa, and its stock will be replaced with gingerbread houses, wrapping paper, ugly sweaters, elf hats, reindeer ears and stocking stuffers. Locations will also offer family photo ops with resident bearded Santas.“Spirit Christmas is a new concept for us, and we’re hopeful it will resonate with our customers,” Kym Sarkos, Spirit’s executive vice president, said in a statement. Her statement added that customers will be able to wander through a “life-sized gingerbread village, where you can mail your letter to Santa at the North Pole and find out whether you’ve been naughty or nice.”The storefronts change, but the Spirit Halloween signage remains the same.Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn recent years, as Spirit Halloween’s seasonal retail empire has grown, the ephemerality of its business structure has made it the subject of endless parody. In the recent season premiere of “Saturday Night Live,” the sketch show aired a prerecorded spot that poked fun at Spirit Halloween’s impending, yet ultimately temporary, emergence.In the skit, an employee played by Heidi Gardner walks through the aisles of a busy Spirit store while she tells viewers about the company’s seasonal aid to depressed local economies around the nation.“Since 1983, Spirit Halloween has been helping our struggling communities by setting up shop in every vacant building in the country for six weeks,” she says. “And then bouncing.”After the skit aired, Spirit shot back at “Saturday Night Live” in a post on X.“We are great at raising things back from the dead @nbcsnl,” Spirit’s social team wrote alongside a photo of a Spirit costume package titled “Irrelevant 50-year-old TV show.” The package’s description noted that the outfit came with “Dated references,” “Unknown cast members” and “Shrinking ratings.”The joke landed well online, and now the company will find out if its customers are interested in having Spirit stick around through the holiday season. More

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      David Liederman, Who Found Sweet Success With David’s Cookies, Dies at 75

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      His innovative version of the chocolate chip cookie, studded with irregular pieces of dark Swiss chocolate, led to a chain of more than 100 stores worldwide.David Liederman, whose confections redefined the chocolate chip cookie and whose chain, David’s Cookies, eventually grew to more than 100 stores nationwide, died on Thursday in Mount Kisco, N.Y., near his home in Katonah. He was 75.His wife, Susan Liederman, said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was a heart attack. He was also being treated for myelofibrosis, a type of blood cancer.Mr. Liederman’s innovative version of the chocolate chip cookie will keep his name alive.The cookie’s unique feature was that it was not made with standard Toll House chocolate chips but was studded with irregular pieces of dark Swiss Lindt chocolate. He chopped the chocolate by hand, the way Ruth Graves Wakefield did when she created the Toll House cookie in 1938 in Whitman, Mass., before Nestlé took over and began manufacturing its little chocolate drops. Mr. Liederman called his cookies chocolate chunk, a term that has become widely understood and used in the world of baking and confections.But long before his revisionist cookie came on the scene, creating his reputation and cranking up his income, his career in food, as a chef, was starting to simmer like a good pot-au-feu.He was 19, still an undergraduate, when he went to France. Intrigued by Michelin three-star restaurants, of which there were but a handful at the time, he decided to eat at Troisgros in Roanne, near Lyon, because it seemed to be the cheapest. The meal set him back $19 (the equivalent of about $172 today); the food was an epiphany.He persuaded the Troisgros brothers to let him hang out in the restaurant’s kitchen and work for the next few summers, despite his lack of culinary training. While he was studying for a degree at Brooklyn Law School and clerking for Judge Maxine Duberstein of the New York State Supreme Court, he began taking classes at night in the culinary program at New York Technical College (now the New York City College of Technology) in Downtown Brooklyn.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 Tests an A.I. Tool to Help Its Workers Aid Shoppers

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      The retailer is rolling out a chatbot to help workers answer questions from shoppers — and workers.Target is the latest retailer to put generative artificial intelligence tools in the hands of its workers, with the goal of improving the in-store experience for employees and shoppers.On Thursday, the retailer said it had built a chatbot, called Store Companion, that would appear as an app on a store worker’s hand-held device. The chatbot can provide guidance on tasks like rebooting a cash register or enrolling a customer in the retailer’s loyalty program. The idea is to give workers “confidence to serve our guests,” Brett Craig, Target’s chief information officer, said in an interview.Target is testing the device in 400 stores and plans to make the app available to most workers across its nearly 2,000 locations by August.As the retail industry experiments with generative A.I., some see its potential to eventually make in-store shopping feel more like online shopping, said Roy Singh, the global head of Bain & Co’s advanced analytics practice who works with retailers on generative A.I. initiatives.Retailers have personalized online shopping for customers with things like predictive technology, which suggests items to buy. Shoppers also see e-commerce as more convenient than having to walk in a store and track down workers. The Target app is meant to help workers assist shoppers with their questions faster.Mr. Craig is often asked if these sorts of tools will replace workers, he said. “I believe the relationship between people and technology is so very important,” he said. “We’re here to make sure that they get the right tools to do their work.”Walmart recently expanded access to the A.I. tool it had started using in its corporate offices last summer for use in its retail stores, rolling it out to 13,000 managers of its Sam’s Club stores.While there is significant investment and hype around generative A.I., some retailers have also rolled back experiments with the technology that have failed.“We are still in that growth curve — learning, failing and relearning — and trying to get through adoption at scale,” said Duleep Rodrigo, who leads the U.S. consumer and retail sector for KPMG. More

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      Martha’s Vineyard Will Have Enough Pot This Summer

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      For the island’s cannabis dispensaries, a sudden change in regulations came just in time.Until recently, Geoff Rose, the proprietor of a cannabis business on Martha’s Vineyard, believed he was in for a bleak summer.That was because his marijuana dispensary, Island Time, had run out of product — and it seemed as if he would be unable to replace it during the busy tourist season on the 96-square-mile Massachusetts island that has long been a haven for vacationers.But on Thursday, state regulators issued an order that would allow cannabis products to be transported across the ocean to licensed businesses.Mr. Rose closed his shop — temporarily, as it turns out — on May 14. At the time, the display cases were empty. No gummies. No tinctures. No pre-rolls. The only item of interest to some of his customers was the chocolate.“I believe there were 14 chocolate bars left,” Mr. Rose said in a phone interview. “They were the last to be sold. More than 14 people came in. Some were disappointed: ‘I don’t want chocolates.’ But some said, ‘OK, I’ll take it.’”The shortage, first reported by The Associated Press, had to do with conflicting laws surrounding the sale and transport of marijuana.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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      Companies Counter Pushback on Price Increases With Promotions

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      “The consumer was a fat pig — now there’s nothing left, and they need to feed the pig again,” one banker told DealBook.The president of McDonald’s USA, Joe Erlinger, pushed back on “inaccurate” reports this week that said the chain had more than doubled its prices on some items over the last decade. But his retort wasn’t exactly reassuring: The average price of a Big Mac is up 21 percent from 2019.Erlinger’s rebuttal underlines the heat that some companies are facing as the news media, politicians and consumers focus on steadily rising prices. Whether persistent price increases reflect price gouging, or simply companies’ own rising costs, is a matter of fierce debate. Either way, one thing is clear: Consumers are becoming fed up.McDonald’s first-quarter earnings fell short of analyst expectations on sales, as “consumers continue to be even more discriminating” with their dollars, the chain’s chief executive, Chris Kempczinski said. Starbucks, Target and Yum Brands, the parent company of Pizza Hut and KFC, also reported earnings misses, each acknowledging increasingly cautious customers among other factors like the war in the Middle East.Consumer spending remained surprisingly resilient in the face of stubbornly fast inflation, but now savings from the coronavirus pandemic have dried up, economic growth has slowed and many companies are working to counteract the belief that their prices have gotten out of control.As one banker told DealBook: “The consumer was a fat pig — now there’s nothing left, and they need to feed the pig again.”The message: Consumers have hit their limit. During periods of rapid inflation, companies tend to push to see how far they can raise prices. “We’re taking smaller, more frequent price increases because it gives us the flexibility to be able to see how consumers are reacting and then adjust if or when necessary,” Kevin Ozan, the chief financial officer of McDonald’s, told analysts in 2022.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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      Who Was Bruce Nordstrom? The Force Behind the Multibillion-dollar Empire

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      Bruce Nordstrom was both the force behind his family’s multibillion-dollar retail dynasty and a stealth godfather to the fashion trade.“Nice” tends to be dirty word in business. The cliché holding that nice guys finish last has seldom seemed more true than in the landscape of contemporary retailing, where business is dominated by corporate consolidation, monopolistic practices and shareholder returns as the ultimate value.Yet nice, as it turns out, may not be altogether pejorative — at least judging by the career of Bruce Nordstrom, who died May 18 at age 90. It may even be a key to success.For decades, Mr. Nordstrom helped lead the Nordstrom retail empire, which was founded in Seattle in 1901 by his grandfather, an immigrant from Sweden. The fashion retail colossus began as a shoe store, and ultimately expanded to include 150 locations worldwide.Publicly traded since the 1970s and still family-run, the Nordstrom chain was predicated on an ethos of decency and niceness, Robert Spector wrote in “The Nordstrom Way,” his 1996 book about the company’s vaunted reputation for customer service.“I came at the reputation with skepticism,” Mr. Spector said by telephone from his home outside Seattle. “I wish it were more complicated, but they are who they say they are, decent and humble and focused on the customer first.”The Nordstrom culture of customer care is not only real, it originated from a family tradition of bottom-up managerial training. Bruce Nordstrom may have run a multibillion-dollar company, but he never forgot his beginnings sweeping floors and breaking down boxes for 25 cents an hour. “It may be the biggest competitive advantage they have,” Mr. Spector said of Nordstrom’s unusual company structure.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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      Bruce Nordstrom, Who Helped Lead His Family’s Retail Empire, Dies at 90

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      Though he was the company’s president, he opted for joint leadership with family members as they made Nordstrom, starting as a string of shoe stores, into an international fashion retail brand.Bruce Nordstrom, who along with three other members of the Nordstrom family transformed a small chain of Pacific Northwest shoe stores into an international fashion retail giant with more than 150 locations worldwide, died on Saturday at his home in Seattle. He was 90.His death was confirmed by a company spokeswoman.As a grandson of John W. Nordstrom, the company’s Swedish immigrant founder, Mr. Nordstrom was part of the third generation of the family to run the company jointly, sharing power and making decisions by consensus, an unusual but successful Nordstrom tradition that continues to this day.He shared leadership with his cousins John N. Nordstrom and Jim Nordstrom, who were brothers, and Jack McMillan, who was married to their cousin Loyal Nordstrom.Management by committee is considered a business school formula for disaster, but the Nordstrom family, starting with Bruce’s father, Everett, and Everett’s brothers Elmer and Lloyd, decided that they could be more effective as co-leaders of the company, which was founded in 1901 in Seattle.When Lloyd Nordstrom called 30-year-old Bruce into his office in 1963 and named him president of the company, the younger Mr. Nordstrom accepted the post but soon decided that he would emulate his father’s generation and share leadership with his three relatives.“Obviously, the arrangement worked out great,” Bruce Nordstrom wrote in a 2007 autobiography, “Leave It Better Than You Found It.” “It was marvelous for them and it was marvelous for me because it felt like a weight had been taken off my shoulders.”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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      Walmart Is Shutting Health Centers After Plan to Expand

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      The 51 locations, next to Supercenters, proved too costly to be profitable, the retailer said.Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, said Tuesday that it was shutting down its health care centers, a network that only last year it said it planned to expand.The retailer said in a blog post that its 51 health centers across five states would close. The centers were next to Supercenter locations. The plans won’t affect the more than 4,600 pharmacies and more than 3,000 vision centers within Walmart stores.Walmart started the health-care clinic initiative in 2019 in Dallas, Ga., with centers providing primary care, labs, X-rays and electrocardiograms, counseling, and dental, optical and hearing services. Many were in smaller towns where customers might lack access to quality care, and the company had said it was focused on affordability. In 2021, Walmart started offering a virtual option when it acquired MeMD, a telehealth provider.“This is a difficult decision, and like others, the challenging reimbursement environment and escalating operating costs create a lack of profitability that make the care business unsustainable for us at this time,” the company said Tuesday.Walmart said it was still deciding when it would close each center. In addition to Georgia, centers are in Arkansas, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Workers within the centers will be paid for 90 days and will be eligible to transfer to other Walmart or Sam’s Club locations, the company said.Offering health care is more difficult than selling consumer goods like laundry detergent and car parts, said David Silverman, a retail analyst at Fitch Ratings, noting the layers of government and insurance providers involved.“The attempts to enter these spaces and some of the failures of doing so really underscore the challenges and complexities of operating in the U.S. health care space,” Mr. Silverman said.In March 2023, Walmart said it planned to double its health center locations. It said that by the end of 2024, it expected to have more than 75 Walmart Health Centers and expand to states like Missouri and Arizona.In 2021, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase ended their high-profile joint health care venture, which sought to explore new ways to deliver health care to their employees. In March, Walgreens said it had closed 140 of its VillageMD clinics and planned to close 20 more. More