Costco Wholesale Corporation Reports June Sales Results

The U.S. ad market has fully recovered from the recession of 2020-21, with full calendar-year spending rising 18% vs. 2020, and 9% vs. 2019, according to a Standard Media Index analysis of the U.S. Ad Market Tracker, a collaboration with MediaPost indexing total U.S. ad spending from the pool of agency holding companies and independent agencies' actual media buys. A separate analysis of month-by-month data by MediaPost, however, reveals that the expansion has been decelerating through year-end 2021 (see related story). As robust as the recovery has been, SMI's analysis indicates it has been far from even across the major media.

Shoe Carnival acquired Rogan’s Shoes, the retailer announced Feb. 13. The deal was worth $45 million, it said in a statement. Shoe Carnival is No. 335 in the Top 1000. The Digital Commerce 360 database ranks North America’s leading retailers by online sales. The footwear retailer expects to see benefits from the acquisition in its 2024 fiscal year. Adding Rogan’s to Shoe Carnival’s portfolio will generate approximately $84 million in sales and $10 million in operating income in 2024, the retailer said. That doesn’t include transaction and integration costs. Rogan’s is 53 years old, with 28 locations across Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota. The acquisition makes Shoe Carnival the market leader in Wisconsin and establishes a store base in Minnesota.

Staying connected in the digital world relies more and more on having the latest and greatest devices at your disposal. Consumers who do not, or cannot afford to keep up with the most current technology, are increasingly finding themselves left as roadkill on the digital superhighway. Phones, tablets, computers and other connected devices have shorter and shorter lifespans, and the factors conspiring to render them obsolete are numerous. The latest killer stalking millions of devices more than a few years old is the termination of 3G cellular networks, which is set to begin in January 2022. One of the growing pains to get to faster, better 5G networks deployed nationwide involves the major carriers – AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon – decommissioning their older networks in order to repurpose critical spectrum. The sunsetting of 3G will start happening early in the new year, with each company operating on its own schedules, which will also impact smaller carriers that rely on their networks.