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Media maven Oprah Winfrey sold a quarter of her shares of Weight Watchers in early March, according to reports, making a substantial profit over what she initially paid for them.
Winfrey became a spokesperson for Weight Watchers in 2015, and initially, she purchased about 10% of the company, with an option to buy another 5 percent at a future date for a price tag of $6.97 per share, according to USA Today. She exercised that option in early 2018, buying an additional 1.4 million shares before selling a hefty portion, making almost nine times the amount she paid for them.
Winfrey’s shares of Weight Watchers sold for a range of $58.29 to $63.94 over the course of several days.
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Retail giant Walmart is aiming to compete with Amazon and Target for affordable clothing that appeals to young and fashion-conscious consumers. The company announced the launch of three new fashion brands and a complete overhaul to one of their current labels, which will all be available online and in stores for purchase.
The brands Walmart is debuting include Time and Tru, catering to women, Terra & Sky for plus-size women’s apparel, and Wonder Nation for kids. The company is also doing a major overhaul of its George apparel brand. All are set to replace older Walmart labels.
Walmart is focusing on customers’ in-store experience by remodeling parts of their stores to enhance the look of their apparel areas, including putting in new floors, removing walls, and creating more space between racks to offer a more boutique-like shopping experience. They are also overhauling their fitting rooms and lighting, to imitate higher-end stores.
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Gluten-free eating is becoming more popular as more and more people have developed sensitivities and intolerances to wheat. As someone diagnosed with celiac disease, I know the struggles of gluten-free eating on a daily basis. Shopping for food is a stressful experience when packages aren’t specifically labeled, and many people can’t take chances with what they eat.
Luckily, some tools have been created to help discern what’s what. A new search engine called The Gluten Project is aimed at helping folks with gluten intolerances determine whether or not that box of soup or turkey jerky they buy at the store contains traces of gluten.
According to an article on website CNET, The Gluten Project catalogs 35,000 products that have been certified as gluten-free by the Gluten-Free Certification Organization. It’s simple to navigate – just type in a food into the search box and see if it appears in the results. You can click on links to gather more information about the product, but if you don’t find your food listed, chances are it does contain gluten.
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More people are doing business and sharing information online than ever before, but the security of our information is also increasingly at risk.
According to a recent study by Menlo Security, 42 percent of the top 100,000 websites ranked by Alexa are potentially compromised, making them risky for users, especially when many sites have sign-up forms and other ways of collecting personal information. Even more concerning is that 4,600 phishing sites use legitimate hosting services, making them difficult to track and identify.
The report found 49 percent of news and media sites, 45 percent of entertainment and arts sites, 41 percent of travel sites, 40 percent of personal sites and blogs, 39 percent of society sites, and 39 percent business and economy were at risk of being a phishing site or a typosquatting site.
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Weight Watchers announced this week that it plans to bring in more than $2 billion in revenue over the next two years, up fifty percent from its estimated sales last year according to the Chicago Tribune.
The weight loss giant has made some bold marketing moves in the last few years that have paid off well, including bringing Oprah Winfrey into the fold to help promote their new points system. Most recently, they signed DJ Khaled as a spokesperson, who is documenting his weight loss journey over social media.
To help attain the sales goal and attract new customers, Weight Watchers announced that it will remove artificial ingredients from their foods and also begin offering free memberships to teens ages 13-17 this summer. Childhood obesity has hit epidemic levels in recent years, so the response from Weight Watchers comes at a critical time.
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Whole Foods has implemented a new inventory management system across all its stores, aimed at cutting waste and making stores operate more efficiently. But employees are complaining that the new system is creating unnecessary problems and causing widespread shortages of food on its shelves.
The new system, dubbed OTS or “order-to-shelf” has strict rules, which has been the source of problems for many store employees, from managers to supervisors to cashiers. According to Business Insider who broke the story, it’s not unusual to see a Whole Foods employee crying due to stress. Some employees who have worked with the company for over twenty years are leaving it behind as employee morale is at an all-time low.
Amazon purchased Whole Foods last summer, and since, there’s been much speculation about plans for the high-end grocery chain, including launching a Whole Foods meal kit service. The new inventory system however wasn’t initiated by Amazon executives.
