Sam’s Club has outlined a series of planned partnerships designed to optimize buying and advertising campaigns across its retail media network. 

The warehouse club retailer will now provide its Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP) retail media network access to the MAP Partners Club, which includes three technology companies — CommerceIQ, Pacvue, and Skai — and two managed service partners — Flywheel and Stackline. 

Participating advertisers will have access to a full spectrum of media network resources, including advanced campaign analytics, real-time, intelligently retargeted display advertising, bidding and budget optimization, as well as sponsored product ads and promotional technologies. 

• See Also: Hottest Retail Loyalty Plans of 2023

The platform will provide access to Sam’s Club partners through a self-service interface. Approved participants will be given color-coded badges, making it easier for advertisers to connect with relevant partners. 

MAP retargeting automatically links ads to membership data, delivering tangible results, including incremental ROAS (return on ad spend), all 3rd party verified by IRI. Advertisers on the network are then able to track insights such as iROAS with the MAP’s reporting feature.

“One of the pillars of our mission here at MAP is to make it “Easy to Buy” for our advertisers. We know that our advertisers often work with multiple partners for media planning and execution across multiple networks and ad tech providers,” said Austin Leonard, head of sales at Sam’s Club MAP, adding that the new partnerships will enable advertisers to consolidate their campaigns into one place, allowing for greater visibility into tracking performance and sales.

Consumer electronics retailer Best Buy is leveraging the latest threat detection solution, looking to strengthen its customer security by investing in a machine learning-powered technology. 

The company is working with Amazon Web Services, expanding its existing partnership to utilize three new capabilities under AWS’ GuardDuty offering:

• New container runtime protection: A fully managed, lightweight security agent profiles and monitors on-host operating system–level behavior such as file access, process execution, and network connections. Through this offering, Best Buy can more easily identify an attack and contain potential security threats before the threat escalates to a widespread data breach. 
• Extended coverage for data stored in Amazon Aurora: Best Buy can identify potential threats to data stored in Aurora databases without compromising performance, productivity, or availability. 
• Support for serverless applications in AWS Lambda: Best Buy can continuously monitor serverless workloads, analyzing network communications to detect potentially malicious communications and other risky behavior like cryptocurrency mining.

The technology taps into machine learning to identify highly suspicious data access and potential compromise, leveraging threat intelligence to easily find and stop malware and malicious container, database, and serverless access.

• More security news: CVS Health Completes Florida Rollout of Time Delay Safes

“Security is always top of mind for us, especially as we expanded our use of Amazon Aurora for our migrated and cloud native applications,” said Vaibhav Sonawane, enterprise risk and compliance cloud security engineer at Best Buy, in a statement. “With GuardDuty RDS Protection, our security posture around legitimate and non-legitimate login attempts remains strong thanks to its machine learning and intelligent threat detection capabilities. We are excited to see Amazon GuardDuty expand into new categories in AWS environments like databases because of its seamless integration, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use.”

CVS Health has completed the installation of time delay safe technology in all 838 CVS Pharmacy locations throughout Florida, including those in Target stores.

The safes help prevent pharmacy robberies and the potential for associated diversion of controlled substance medications — including opioid medications such as oxycodone and hydrocodone — by electronically delaying the time it takes for pharmacy employees to open the safe.

The company's rollout of time delay safe technology is in support of partnerships with local and state law enforcement and the retail community to fight back against escalating organized retail crime. 

[See also: CVS Health Fights Crime With Time Delay Tech]

"Supporting law enforcement efforts in their battle against organized retail crime remains a key focus for our company," said CVS region director Ricardo Lopez during a news conference. "Criminal activities that organized retail crime rings fund are a clear danger to our communities, so it is important that retailers, law enforcement and political leaders work together to solve this problem."

"I am very proud of our private sector partner for thinking and implementing innovative ways to fight organized retail crime. Local, state, and federal law enforcement partners continuously collaborate with our retail industry to minimize the economic impact to all of our residents. We strive to encourage all of the members in the retail industry to join the fight against organized retail crime," said director Alfredo "Freddy" Ramirez, Miami-Dade Police Department.  

"We are proud to support CVS Health in its endeavor to make our retail pharmacies a safe place to shop and work. Time delay safes will not only work to combat the opioid epidemic and prevent criminal activity, but it will also save lives. Thank you for helping to safeguard your CVS Pharmacy stores to strengthen safety at retail pharmacies in Florida," said Scott Shalley, CEO of Florida Retail Federation. 

CVS Health first implemented time delay safe technology in 2015 in CVS Pharmacy locations across Indianapolis, a city experiencing a high volume of pharmacy robberies at the time. The company saw a 70% decline in pharmacy robberies in that area. Since then, there has been a 50% decline in robberies at CVS Pharmacy locations with the safes.  

On April 25, 2023, the convenience store retailers will host a mass hiring event across more than 13,000 locations in the U.S. and Canada. The family of companies hopes to collectively recruit over 50,000 new employees ahead of the busy summer season. 

Interested applicants can apply in-store on the day itself between 10 am - 4 pm local time, or apply online by visiting the retailers’ career pages. 

• See Also: Managing Talent: Win-Win Workforce Management Strategies for the Retail Frontline

“Every year, National Hiring Day marks an exciting time for our brands. Expanding store teams with the addition of 50,000 new roles will help our brands gear up for the busy summer season and our favorite day of the year, Slurpee Day,” said Treasa Bowers, senior VP of human Resources at 7-Eleven. “We're proud to offer our newest employees at corporate-owned locations a variety of career benefits including flexible work schedules and competitive pay, and we're looking forward to growing our 7-Eleven, Speedway and Stripes family.”

It’s crunch time for many retailers staring down a busy summer season and ongoing labor shortages. The hourly in-store retail employee turnover rate in 2022 was 76%, according to Korn Ferry, and companies continue to strategize in order to retain and attract hard-to-find staff. Common tactics include raising hourly wages; offering increased schedule and pay flexibility; career development and learning opportunities; and equipping and empowering employees with intuitive new technologies to make their jobs less repetitive. 

Grocery retailer SpartanNash has promoted David Sisk to executive vice president, chief customer officer. In the new role, Sisk will manage customer engagement for national accounts, independent and chain grocers, e-commerce retailers, and the U.S. Defense Commissary Agency and global military exchanges. 

Sisk was first hired in 2020 as president of the company’s military arm before being promoted to chief customer officer in May 2022. Prior to joining the company, he served as president and COO of OSC-WEBco, where he managed global strategic plans, P&L, personnel, and global operations for the company's military divisions and more than 100 retail categories. 

He also brings a background with P&G, overseeing U.S. and global shopper-based design and conceptual platform innovation.

"David's role is vital to delivering on our signature strength to be the most customer-focused, innovative food solutions company," said SpartanNash CEO Tony Sarsam in a statement. "He and his team have greatly enhanced the support and services we provide to our customers, helping the company grow market share in our wholesale distribution business."

The Vitamin Shoppe has chosen to deploy HughesON Managed Network Services across its 700-plus U.S. retail outlets. The Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) solution from Hughes Network Systems provides The Vitamin Shoppe with a secure Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) that supports the company's vision for growth across retail, digital and franchise outlets.

"Hughes designed, deployed and manages our enterprise network with the flexibility, scalability, security and dependability we require to best empower our customers on their journeys of lifelong wellness," said Andy Laudato, chief operating officer, The Vitamin Shoppe. "The Hughes team met our needs for secure, cloud-centered digital operations at every store, cost effectively and with an eye to the future."

With elements of a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework, the HughesON managed solution for The Vitamin Shoppe protects the network with security at every endpoint and transport, provides redundant transports for reliability and maximum uptime and employs automated policy orchestration for scalability, among other features.

"We consider it a privilege to support The Vitamin Shoppe in their digital transformation with a high-performing, next generation network that meets the company's business requirements today and into tomorrow," said Dan Rasmussen, senior vice president, Enterprise Division, Hughes. "With 'as-a-service' delivery combined with 24/7 end-to-end management, the Hughes network for The Vitamin Shoppe seamlessly operates and optimizes business applications – enabling the retailer to focus on its lifestyle offerings instead of worrying about its network."