Retail: Lord & Taylor landmark to permanently close

“Looking for another sign of how tough it is in the world of retail?” asked Paul La Monica in CNN.com. Fashion conglomerate Hudson’s Bay is shuttering Lord & Taylor’s century-old Manhattan flagship early next year, along with 10 other Lord & Taylor stores. Although WeWork purchased the landmark site last year, Hudson’s Bay held an option to lease several floors for Lord & Taylor, but will now decline. The company this week also offloaded the “once hot” website chain Gilt Groupe—owner of Gilt.com—which it purchased for $250 million in 2016. It had already written down the acquisition by $116 million. A British survey investigating the lack of women on U.K. corporate boards received a few cringeworthy excuses from some of the country’s top executives, said Amie Tsang in The New York Times. “All the ‘good’ women have already been snapped up” was one tone-deaf response, as were “We have one woman already on the board, so we are done” and “Most women don’t want the hassle or pressure.” Overall, about a quarter of the board members at Britain’s 350 biggest public companies are women. There has been some progress: The number of all-male boards among firms in the FTSE-350 stock index has fallen to just 10 companies last year from 152 in 2011. Still, the survey responses “illustrate that much remains to be done.” Reading the executives’ excuses, “you might think it’s 1918, not 2018,” Amanda Mackenzie, chief executive of the charity Business in the Community, said. “It reads like a script from comedy parody.”