It may be a new year, but we’re still catching up on what happened during the last week of 2025. Here’s everything you may have missed.

"Consumers are conditioned to spend even when they're feeling pressured. Nearly a third of consumers were prepared and ready to take on debt this season to make their holiday purchases,” said our analyst Zak Stambor on a recent episode of “Behind the Numbers.”

Walmart recently bought Monroeville Mall near Pittsburgh, signaling either a massive retail expansion plan or a shrewd real estate grab. Either way, the purchase strengthens Walmart's market foothold while adding rental income. This isn't a random acquisition but a calculated move.

In January, the most interesting retailers capitalized on New Year’s trends like resolutions, lower-alcohol consumption, and an influx of holiday returns. Poshmark and Sephora introduced new partnerships, while Amazon and Temu increased their own retail media-related offerings. Here are the eight most significant retail developments of January 2024, ranked by their potential market impact.

JCPenney joins forces with Aeropostale’s owner to form Catalyst Brands: The new company aims to tap into its vast pool of customer data to cross-sell across its portfolio.

Last month, JCPenney announced it was partnering with Bazaarvoice Visual Syndication Network to collect and post user-generated content (UGC) on its website’s product display pages. The department store is hardly the first retailer to recognize the value of UGC—over a quarter (28.4%) of ecommerce marketers in North America believe that images/video from real customers (aka UGC) is the type of visual content that impacts purchase decisions the most, according to a May 2023 survey from Nosto.

Beware of the ‘retailpocalypse’ narrative: While retailers such as Gap and Macy’s shutter stores, there’s no sign that a broader bust is imminent.

A wave of store closures could hit in 2023: Slowing sales amid a broader economic slowdown could force mid-tier retailers to shutter brick-and-mortar stores.

Malls need to change: As department stores right-size and shift to smaller formats, mall operators need new types of businesses to drive people to their shopping centers.

While JCPenney saw some solid ecommerce gains pre-pandemic, it has struggled to keep that momentum going in the months that followed. The retailer’s market share not only fell significantly—and remained down—as its advances were dwarfed by competitors who proved to be more adept at ecommerce, but the company also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy mid-May, along with plans to close roughly a third of its 846 stores within the next two years.

It’s long been understood that US retail is over-stored. The US has more retail space per capita than any other country in the world, according to a 2018 analysis by Cowen and Company, at about 23.5 square feet per person compared to Canada, which is second on the list at 16.8 square feet.

The first-ever CMO of a young company has to do something slightly different from one stepping into the same role for a legacy brand. When DailyPay’s Jeanniey Mullen was appointed as the financial tech company’s first CMO in July 2019, she wanted to transform the payroll landscape.

2018 was a banner year for US holiday retail sales across both brick-and-mortar and ecommerce. But with more economic uncertainty ahead, the 2019 holiday season is not shaping up to be quite as strong.

Singles’ Day is the world’s biggest shopping event, and Black Friday is just around the corner. Holiday shopping is a major driver of retail and ecommerce around the world, but spending and which holidays drive the most activity vary by region.

Doom and gloom often surrounds discussion of brick-and-mortar retail. It's hard not to see the demise of traditional stores like Sears and Toys 'R' Us as bellwethers for the industry. Many stores are closing locations but is it as dire as it seems on the surface?

Amazon Prime Day has emerged as a fast-growing retail promotion that’s altered the mid-summer and back-to-school shopping landscape. This report examines what consumers shopped for and bought on Prime Day, and the implications for Amazon and competing retailers.