Americans rebounded from a weak holiday season and stepped up spending on retail goods in January. The latest government report on retail sales pointed to a slowly improving economy. Retail sales rose at a seasonally adjusted 0.NEW YORK – Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is upping the ante heading into the holiday season, trimming the online preorder prices of some upcoming DVDs following last month’s price cut on books.
The move led rivals Amazon.com Inc. and Target Corp. to reduce the prices of some online preorder DVDs, which pushed Wal-Mart to take a few more cents off.
The world’s biggest retailer said late Thursday that it would lower the online prices of new DVDs such as “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince” and “Star Trek” to $10.
But when Amazon reduced some of its DVD prices to $9.99, Wal-Mart shot back by lowering its to $9.98 as of Friday morning.
The retailer, which generated more than $400 billion in sales last year, was embroiled in a book price war with Target and Amazon.com last month that saw the companies lower the online preorder prices on titles such as “Under the Dome” by Stephen King and “Ford County” by John Grisham. Prices dropped as low as $8.98.
As books in the price war have come to market, prices have gone up, though the sellers are still discounting them heavily.
