Personnel Updates

• Apple Inc. (164) announced that Angela Ahrendts, Senior VP of Retail, will step down in April. She will be replaced by Deirdre O’Brien, who will take on an expanded role as Senior VP of Retail and People.

• The Container Store (29) announced Kip Tindell is retiring from the company as Chairman at the end of August. He will be succeeded by CEO Melissa Reif. Sharon Tindell, who serves as President and Chief Merchandising Officer, will also step down. John Gehre, Exec VP of Merchandising and Planning, will succeed her as Chief Merchandising Officer in September.

• Fred’s Inc. (36) announced several new appointments. Joseph Anto has been appointed as CEO. Ritwik Chatterjee has been appointed as CFO. The retailer also named Nathaniel Klein as its COO and Michael Ladd as Chief Sores Officer.

• Jo-Ann Stores Inc. (83) has named Wade Miquelon as its new President and CEO. In other appointments, Matt Susz was named CFO.

Mergers and Acquisitions

• Amazon.com Inc. has entered into an agreement to acquire San Francisco-based smart home products company Eero.

• Staples Inc. has signed an agreement to acquire DEX Imaging, a leading independent document imaging technology dealer in the United States.

Real Estate

• Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. has announced plans to close all eight of its Hemispheres furniture stores. The locations, which include six in Texas and two in Oklahoma, will be fully closed by the end of 2019.  The retailer plans to open 65 new Hobby Lobby locations this year, and will relocate an additional 16 stores.

• Michaels Stores Inc. announced that it will close all of its Pat Catan’s stores. The retailer plans to rebrand up to 12 of the 36 closed stores and reopen them under the Michaels banner.

• Things Remembered is preparing to file for bankruptcy protection in the coming days and close most of its stores.

• Shopko Stores Operating Co. LLC announced that it be closing 250 of its stores by mid-May.

Technology News

• Target Corporation will soon start allowing customers to complete transactions via the Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay mobile payment apps. In addition, the discount giant will accept contactless cards from Mastercard, Visa, American Express and Discover.

Just because we don’t mention it here doesn’t mean it didn’t happen – or we didn’t capture it. In the past four weeks, we’ve updated more than 477 companies in the Discount, Dollar, & Specialty Stores PLUS Database, with many of those companies’ records updated at multiple points.