Free Republic

They were once the giants of American retail, strong enough to survive wars, the Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the rise of online shopping. But Sears, JCPenney, and others may not be able to survive the CCP virus crisis. “The retailers who were wandering around aimlessly pre-pandemic are going to be substantially less likely to muddle through than they were before,” said Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at the Columbia Business School. During the pandemic, stores have been shuttered. Retailers have furloughed hundreds of thousands of employees and are losing most of their sales. And shoppers have cut...

This month’s announcement from Party City that it’s closing more than 40 stores as it grapples with new challenges, including diminishing helium supplies, likely came as unwelcome news to customers who count on the store for their balloon and event planning needs. But for scientists like Mark Elsesser, the announcement was something of a relief, inflating hopes that the public, and the government, might start paying closer attention. “When it comes to helium, we’re at a tipping point,” said Elsesser, who is the associate director of government affairs at the American Physical Society, a nonprofit association of physicists. “Party City...

DALLAS -- A holiday shopping flier that's been distributed to thousands of households in north Texas is creating controversy because a message of hate is included within an advertisement. An ad for "Party City" was supposed to highlight a sale on Hanukkah items, but it also contained a hateful anti-Semitic message. The advertisement includes the sentence "CC Hates the Jews" in large, bold letters. According to ADVO, the company that printed the advertisement, a graphic artist working on the ad had left his desk for a moment, and a co-worker with the initials C.C. changed the text on the ad....