Discount Stores

The Mervyns department store chain said Wednesday that it planned to close nearly 15% of its stores -- including seven in Southern California -- as it attempted to rework its finances two weeks after filing for bankruptcy protection. The company will shutter 26 of its 176 mid-priced locations in California, Arizona, Idaho, Nevada and Texas by late October or early November.

The battle over banning grocery sales at big box stores in Long Beach will now be fought at the polls and could cost the state's fifth-largest city hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Long Beach City Council voted in September to ban grocery sales at stores larger than 100,000 square feet, including Wal-Mart, even though the discount retailer had no plans for a so-called Supercenter in the city.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Tuesday announced a deal to take over a big retailer operating in China by 2010, and a report out of Russia said the world's biggest retailer might also be looking at an acquisition there. Wal-Mart has struggled recently to increase sales in its home U.S. market, and emerging markets, like China, are seen as fertile areas for Western retailers to grow.

FRUGAL designer junkies have been wading through racks of ill-fitting overstock at discount chains for years, hoping to chance upon a classic Burberry peacoat or pristine Stella McCartney sweater. Find one of those marked down to wholesale, and it's the thrill of stumbling upon a lost continent. Now T.J. Maxx is promising to make that kind of discovery routine. Last year, the company launched Runway, an in-store boutique advertised to stock exclusively high-end designer apparel.

Call it a designer taste test. With a new cheap chic collaboration rolling out almost weekly, the question often comes to mind, how different is the real thing from the much less expensive alternative? Alice Temperley is the latest designer to bring a high-end aesthetic to the racks of Target. Her limited edition GO line, which debuts today, is an almost verbatim translation of her boho babe collection.

KARL LAGERFELD at H&M? Check. Proenza Schouler at Target? Check. Lela Rose at Payless Shoesource? Now, there's a head scratcher. Designers collaborating with mass-market retailers is nothing new, but some pairings are more surprising than others, and the dark horse in the race to win over the mainstream is the ubiquitous, help-yourself shoe store Payless Shoesource. Five seasons ago, Payless began with the first of its up-and-coming designer recruits, Abaet?.

Don't worry if you haven't started your Christmas shopping yet. You'll have plenty of time to get it all done before Tuesday as long as you don't need to sleep. J.C. Penney Co. stores will be open until midnight Friday and Saturday. At Mervyns, you'll be able to keep buying until 2 a.m. all weekend, and the chain will throw in $10 gift cards for the first 200 people through the doors each day at 5 a.m. In case you have nothing else to do, Kmart will stage a nonstop 64-hour sale beginning at 6 a.

Olive Kemp, 90, slowly stepped down the stairs toward the sales floor of the department store her family has owned since the 1920s. Her trusted deputy, Marta De La Hoya, 50, walked in careful lock step. Before them, the Christmas rush at the First Street Store in East Los Angeles was in full swing. Customers eagerly picked through dresses, undergarments and fabrics, through work pants and Levis. The store has served its working-class customers since 1924.

Three years after diving into one of the deepest retail pools in the country, Kohl's Corp. has proved at least one thing: It's buoyant. The retailer -- which made a splash in California by opening 28 stores on one day three years ago this week -- now has 73 here, about 10% of its total and more than in any other state. And it wants more.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which has struggled to expand into urban areas, said Tuesday that it would build 50 stores in big-city neighborhoods suffering from high crime, unemployment and other problems. At the construction site for a new store on Chicago's West Side, Chief Executive H. Lee Scott Jr. said the Windy City's first Wal-Mart also would anchor the company's first "jobs and opportunity zone."