Grainger Announces Agreement to Sell E&R Industrial Sales, Inc.

A number of big summer bestsellers, a surge in interest in books on social justice, and ongoing demand by parents for children’s books that both educate and entertain combined to continue to push up unit sales of print books through this year’s third quarter. According to NPD BookScan, print unit sales rose 6.4% for the nine months ended Oct. 3, 2020 over the comparable span in 2019. Unit sales jumped 29.1% in the juvenile nonfiction category, led by huge demand for Big Preschool Workbook, which sold nearly 649,000 print copies in the period, and My First Learn-to-Write Workbook by Crystal Radke, which sold almost 595,000 copies.

Kohl’s announced the opening of its sixth e-commerce fulfillment center in Etna, Ohio (10201 Schuster Way) to support the company’s continued online demand and digital sales acceleration. The 1.2 million square-foot facility is Kohl’s largest, most efficient fulfillment center and will be dedicated to processing, filling and shipping Kohls.com orders. The next-generation facility leverages automation and technology to make processing and delivering Kohls.com orders faster and more efficient. Construction of the facility began in 2019, was temporarily paused in 2020 due to the pandemic, and resumed in 2021. “Over the past five years, Kohl’s digital sales have grown more than 100 percent. Our investment in a highly efficient sixth e-commerce fulfillment center will meaningfully grow our peak fulfillment capacity,” said Paul Gaffney, Kohl’s senior executive vice president, chief technology officer and head of supply chain. “The new facility makes Kohl's more efficient at fulfilling orders via automation and modern technology, puts Kohl’s products geographically closer to our customers, and ultimately gets our great products to our customers faster.”

First quarter-to-date service performance scores covering the period Oct. 1 through Dec. 17 included: *First-Class Mail: 90.1 percent of First-Class Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, an improvement of 1.6 percentage points from the fourth quarter. *Marketing Mail: 91.8 percent of Marketing Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, consistent with performance from the fourth quarter. *Periodicals: 81.2 percent of Periodicals delivered on time against the USPS service standard, a slight decrease of 1.56 percent compared to performance from the fourth quarter. *Overall, the average number of days to deliver a mailpiece across the network was 2.7 days.