International food and beverage giant Nestlé has announced some major changes to its product line this year, with the divestiture of its ice cream and water businesses.
Under the leadership of CEO Philipp Navratil, the Switzerland-based company that produces a range of products from chocolate bars to cat chow will now focus on its four “powerhouse” businesses: coffee, petcare, nutrition, and food and snacks.
I'm not a big candy eater. i'm more of a cookie- cake girl. Probably have about 4 or 5 candy bars I would even eat if I were in the mood. Every now and then I'll have a miniature reeses cup or 2. But I haven't really noticed what they were talking about with the flavor maybe I just don't eat them often enough to have noticed, have you noticed any change in them over the past ten years like that post says?Love Peanut Butter Cups, they're far and away my favorite!! I rarely buy candy for myself, but when I do, they're Peanut Butter Cups.
...And Gannon isn't the only one. Local video rental stores like Vidiots, the Highland Park-based Vidéothèque and the Westside's Cinefile video store on Sawtelle are reporting higher rentals, purchases and foot traffic. Even Barnes & Noble, one of the last major retailers selling movie discs, sees sales growth in that area.
Before streaming platforms dominated at-home entertainment, consumers relied on places like Blockbuster, the now nearly erased movie rental chain and RedBox, the defunct movie vending machines, to watch newly released films. So, when Netflix and others launched streaming services, physical distribution eventually waned.
Similar to vinyl records that saw a resurgence among millennial customers, DVDs are enjoying a comeback with some Gen Z buyers, even though the discs no longer drive significant studio profits...
A debt-free retailer with 850 stores got a leveraged buyout. A failing electronics chain got a CEO. Thirteen years later, only one is still standing
Walk into a Best Buy today and the experience is fine-ish. The floors tend to be clean. The displays work. A blue-shirted employee can probably point you toward the right laptop, and if you’re lucky, the one who helps you actually knows the difference between the models. The Geek Squad desk may or may not have a line. The store-within-a-store sections for Samsung and Apple are slick and impersonal, but without the feel you get at a real Apple Store. It is competent, not revelatory. Best Buy became good enough, and in brick-and-mortar retail, good enough is a high bar.
Now try to walk into a Joann Fabrics. You can’t. The last store closed on May 30, 2025. All 800-plus locations were liquidated. Nineteen thousand workers lost their jobs. But in the years before the end, former employees and customers described what it was like to watch the chain disintegrate from the sales floor: bare shelves, skeleton crews, fabric bolts in disarray, nobody at the cutting counter who knew what they were doing. A former district manager told Fortune the problem was self-inflicted: “the business is there.” What was missing was the capacity to run it properly. The stores had been hollowed out underneath the customers.
Best Buy’s customer experience didn’t transform. It stabilized. The company stopped the bleeding, restored basic competence, matched Amazon’s prices, and gave vendors a reason to invest in its stores. That was enough. Joann, meanwhile, didn’t lose to some technological revolution that made fabric stores obsolete. It collapsed because it could no longer afford to stock its shelves, staff its cutting counters, or maintain the store experience that had sustained a loyal customer base for decades. Ninety-six percent of Joann’s stores were cash-flow positive when it first filed for bankruptcy in 2024. The demand was there. The business worked. Something else killed it...
That was really interesting. I don't necessarily understand all of the elements of it. But I always wondered what happened to that chain as the former hq was not far from me and those stores were a steady presence for many years.