Ulta Beauty to Close All Stores on Thanksgiving Day 2020

Gap has what it takes to win again. With strong brand awareness and a large, active customer base, we are focusing on harnessing the power of Gap brand in asset-light ways. Going forward, we will look to transform our business model through partnerships that grow and amplify our global reach. Today, we shared with our team that we are starting a strategic review of options for our Gap business in Europe. One of the options being explored is the possible closure of our company-operated Gap stores in the United Kingdom, France, Ireland and Italy at the end of the second quarter in 2021. In addition, we are reviewing our warehouse and distribution model and our Gap and Banana Republic company-owned e-commerce operations in Europe. A possible outcome is the closure of our EU distribution center in Rugby.

First quarter-to-date service performance scores covering the period Oct. 1 through Dec. 10 included: *First-Class Mail: 90.6 percent of First-Class Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, an improvement of 2.1 percentage points from the fourth quarter. *Marketing Mail: 92.1 percent of Marketing Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, consistent with performance from the fourth quarter. *Periodicals: 82.0 percent of Periodicals delivered on time against the USPS service standard, a slight decrease of .74 percent compared to performance from the fourth quarter. Overall, average days to deliver a mailpiece across the network was 2.7 days.

Skyrocketing demand for boxes and packing materials during the pandemic has slashed paper production across North America, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time for retail companies. “We’re starting to hear, ‘We’re out of paper,‘” said Polly Wong, president of San Francisco-based direct-marketing firm Belardi Wong, noting that some of her clients already missed their fall advertising campaigns due to issues at the printers. Ms. Wong estimates that 100 million catalogs will not be printed or reach U.S. homes in time for the year’s biggest spending season as a result. “It kind of put our industry up in a panic.” With some mills converting to cardboard to meet the spike in e-commerce deliveries and others shutting down altogether, more than 2.5 million metric tons of North American printing and writing paper capacity — or nearly one-fifth of 2019 levels — has come offline since the start of last year. more at source