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Millions of Americans love using their credit cards – the most secure, hassle-free, and worry-free way to pay. Credit cards alert customers to potential fraud, giving them financial safety and peace of mind. They also provide convenient payment options and rewards families use to pay for everyday goods like gas and groceries or trips to see friends and family, all supporting our nation’s economy.The Durbin-Marshall Credit Card Bill would mandate your credit cards can run on alternative networks – not the trusted and stable networks you probably use today – and there is no guarantee the convenience, zero-liability fraud protection,...

America is bracing for a mass exodus of retail stores across the nation this year, with more than 800 big box locations set to close from California to New York. Among the iconic names to announce they are downsizing includes Bed Bath & Beyond, Walmart, Gap and Party City. At least 803 stores are set to be shuttered over the rest of 2023, with many forced into desperate cost cutting measures amid rampant inflation and declining bottom lines.

Excerpt - As part of its plan to realign the organization, CompUSA has announced a comprehensive strategy to improve the company's financial status. The realignment includes a cash infusion, store closures, major expense reductions and a corporate restructuring. As part of CompUSA's realignment strategy, the company will receive a $440 million cash capital infusion. The financial boost will be designated to improve the company's balance sheet. "Based on changing conditions in the consumer retail electronics market, the company identified the need to close and sell stores with low performance or non strategic, old store layouts and locations faced with market...

Chicago would become the nation's first major city to establish a wage and benefit standard for "big-box" retailers, under a watered-down ordinance advanced Wednesday that threatens to undermine Wal-Mart's urban expansion plan. Wal-Mart said last week that Chicago could be home to as many as 20 new Wal-Mart stores over the next five years, but only if the big-box ordinance is defeated. On Wednesday, the City Council's Finance Committee ignored that warning, emboldened by a new poll that shows 84 percent of Chicagoans favor wage and benefit standards for retailing giants, even at the risk of losing jobs. The version...

As soon as rumors floated that Federated Department Stores would be shuttering Filene's in Downtown Crossing, dismayed Boston officials started thinking about who next would occupy the magnificent 1912 Beaux-Arts building. Two names quickly surfaced: Wal-Mart and Target. This summer, Wal-Mart signaled it might be interested. The reaction was swift and negative. At a Labor Day breakfast, politicians ranging from the mayor to city councilors to members of Congress vowed to thwart the company. Rich Rogers, executive secretary-treasurer of the Greater Boston Labor Council, told the Globe at the time that the 90,000-member group would "do everything in its power...

Activists in Fairbanks, Alaska are engaging in a little Saul Alinsky type organizing. To show their true feelings about Wal-Mart, Fairbanks residents are going to shop at Wal-Mart-—but instead of picking something up, they’re leaving something behind. While other activists have taken up the idea of just pushing around an empty cart at Wal-Mart, in Alaska they’re filling those carts up with merchandise. Here’s their report: “A modification of the 'shop 'till you drop' action is to not push around empty carts, but to stuff them full of hard-to-reshelve items and then simply leave the cart in the aisle. This...

With Wal-Marts come tough choices BY PAUL HAMMEL WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER NEBRASKA CITY - From the wooden aisles of his 51-year-old hardware store downtown, Walt Wenzl calls Wal-Mart a greedy corporation that mainly sells foreign-made products. Hardware store owner Walt Wenzl isn't afraid of a new Wal-Mart planned for Nebraska City, Neb. "As long as the good Lord is willing, I'll be here," said Wenzl, 77. "To hell with Wal-Mart." Yet others in this river town of 7,228 say they welcome the building of a Wal-Mart Supercenter here. They say it may provide better paying jobs and keep shoppers from...

Oh my yes, there is indeed one force that is eating away the American soul like a cancer. Do you want to feel like you might as well be in Tucson or Boise or Modesto or Wichita or Muncie and it no longer freakin' matters, because we as a nation have lost all sense of community and place? Why, just pull over, baby. Take the next exit. Right here, this very one. Ah, there it is, yet another massive big-box mega-strip mall, a giant beacon of glorious community decay, a wilted exclamation point of consumerism gone wild. This is America....

Wal-Mart faces a class-action lawsuit that claims it knew full well its cleaning contractors were hiring illegal immigrants, paying them slave wages and locking them inside the stores at night. All in the name of everyday cheap prices by Brita Brundage - December 23, 2004 Wal-Mart. That boxy behemoth with its neatly stacked rows of toilet paper and DVDs, trampolines and hooded sweatshirts, cheese balls and wrapping paper. With its employees wearing the signature bright-blue smocks emblazoned with sunny yellow smiley faces. Here, shoppers push carts piled high with discount electronics, cookies and XXL T-shirts along endless waxed aisles that...

Thinking Outside The “Big Box” Brief Analysis No. 501 Friday, Frebruary 18, 2005 by Pamela Villarreal Neighborhoods, city councils and the media are debating whether to welcome or discourage big-box retailers. While Wal-Mart comes to mind, big-box retailers are defined as any free-standing store greater than 50,000 square feet, and most big-box stores now range in size from 90,000 to 200,000 square feet. Critics claim that large retailers crowd out mom-and-pop competitors and replace them with windowless warehouses filled with minimum wage workers. Big-box retailers promise economic benefits such as sales tax revenues, jobs, competitive wages and low prices. But...

CONCORD - Colossus retailer Wal-Mart drains government resources because its low-paid, under-insured or non-insured workers have to rely on public subsidies, such as school lunch programs and Section 8 housing, according to a congressional report Rep. George Miller released here Monday. With supporters of a March ballot measure to ban Wal-Mart superstores and other "big-box" businesses in unincorporated Contra Costa County flanking him, Miller, D-Martinez, ripped the Arkansas-based corporation for creating "downward spirals in communities," violating child labor and workplace safety laws and "paying wages below industry averages." The report, which the Democratic staff of the House Education and Workforce...

<p>Oakland has become the latest California community to ban Wal-Mart "Supercenters" that sell discount groceries alongside other bargain goods.</p> <p>The Oakland City Council voted 7 to 1 Tuesday night to approve a measure to limit the size of "big-box" grocery stores allowed in the city. The ordinance bars discount retail stores with full-service supermarkets that exceed 100,000 square feet, or about 2.5 acres.</p>