The list is highly subjective, obviously, but here's the thinking behind it:

24/7 Wall St. editors reviewed a variety of metrics measuring customer satisfaction, stock performance, and employee satisfaction. This included total return to shareholders compared to the broader market and other companies in the same sector in the last year. We considered customer data from a number of sources, including Consumer Reports, the MSN Money/Zogby customer satisfaction poll, ForeSee's Holiday E-Retail Satisfaction Index, and the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index. We also included employee satisfaction based on worker opinion scores recorded by Glassdoor. Finally, we considered management decisions made in the past year that hurt company image and brand value from marketing research firms BrandZ and Interbrand.

And here's the list:

1. J.C. Penney
2. Dish Network Corp.
3. T-Mobile USA
4. Facebook
5. Citigroup, Inc.

Seeing J.C. Penney on the top of the list makes me sad. I started going to J.C. Penney for the basics—socks, t-shirts, that sort of thing—when they didn't back down from the Five or Six Moms boycott, and I liked what I saw. I liked that someone was trying to re-imagine the big box retail store, even if not all the ideas worked. Wall Street does tend to punish the different and the new, so this list isn't all too surprising. But I especially hate that the Five or Six Moms will claim this as a victory for their homophobic cause, against all evidence to the contrary.

This morning, Jen Graves linked to a story about Glenn Beck's latest stunt, an Obama statue he placed in a jar full of flat beer and called "Obama in Pee Pee." Beck tried to sell the "artwork" on eBay, but the Daily Dot reports that eBay pulled the auction. So now Glenn Beck is trying to sell his little "artwork" via Twitter. Remember when Beck was on the cover of Time? Seems so long ago, now.

As Walmart employees go on strike today, Slate explains why this is so important:

Part of why the recent actions are so remarkable is that Wal-Mart is one of the most notoriously anti-union companies in the country. Based in right-to-work Arkansas, the retailer has maintained an almost entirely union-free workforce for most of its existence, even once resorting to shutting down a store in Quebec shortly after a successful union drive there. The company has never before dealt with coordinated labor protest on this scale. “In the past, Wal-Mart would fire people, would threaten people … and that would be enough to stop people in their tracks,” said Dan Schlademan, director of Making Change at Walmart, another organization backed by the UFCW which works closely with [the Organization United for Respect at Wal-Mart]. “The difference now is workers are using Wal-Mart’s own tactics to challenge the company and not backing down. Really, for the first time in Wal-Mart’s history, the tools that are used to keep people silent and under control are now being used against them. That’s significant.”

ThinkProgress has some video of an anti-Walmart protest from Fox News if you're interested. Meanwhile, this PDF, which is an internal document that details how Walmart managers should respond to the protests, is making the rounds:

• Click to enlarge.

But none of this is getting in the way of sweet, sweet commerce: Walmart is announcing that this is their biggest Black Friday ever, with 5,000 items sold every second.

ThinkProgress posted this great video of David Tovar, Walmart's Vice President of Communications, being forced to address his company's shitty treatment of workers on CNN:

This is noteworthy because Walmart has been called upon to publicly address their terrible policies many times in the past, but they've never actively tried to combat those charges before. And for the record, Tovar's claims that Walmart has a "very strict retaliation, um, anti-retaliation policy" smells like bullshit to me. When I worked there (for a month when I was 19), I had to watch a terrible anti-union video in the first few hours of my employment. Walmart is as actively anti-employee as a business can be without inciting all-out revolt. I hope the Black Friday employee walkout brings more attention to the shameful way this company does business.

From Bloomberg:

Fashion brands are deploying mannequins equipped with technology used to identify criminals at airports to watch over shoppers in their stores. Retailers are introducing the EyeSee, sold by Italian mannequin maker Almax SpA, to glean data on customers...

The EyeSee looks ordinary enough on the outside, with its slender polystyrene frame, blank face and improbable pose. Inside, it’s no dummy. A camera embedded in one eye feeds data into facial-recognition software like that used by police. It logs the age, gender, and race of passers-by...

The mannequin, which went on sale last December and is now being used in three European countries and the U.S., has led one outlet to adjust its window displays after revealing that men who shopped in the first two days of a sale spent more than women, according to Almax...

To give the EyeSee ears as well as eyes, Almax is testing technology that recognizes words to allow retailers to eavesdrop on what shoppers say about the mannequin’s attire.

It's like this old nightmare come to life—but with a profit motive. Spoooooky!

Why even bother closing on the day before Thanksgiving?

Target employees are seeing red after the retailer announced its stores will open at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving night, cutting into holiday time for workers. An online petition asking Target to not open on Thanksgiving has over 179,000 signatures, and the number continues to rise.
...
This year, Walmart, Toys R Us, Kmart, and Sears are all opening their doors at 8 pm Thursday. Together with Target, that's two to four hours before they kicked things off last year.

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, because there's so little to it: No costumes, no gifts, very few traditions besides gathering together with loved ones over a meal. I guess it stands to reason that retail chains hate Thanksgiving because there's no money in it for them, so now they're encroaching on the holiday in some disgusting ways. This is just incredibly disappointing.

"'Effortlessly Creepy' is the name of my perfume!"

Last night, Slate published a story about Amazon's surrender in the local sales tax war, and how their next move could be even more disruptive for local businesses:

But now Amazon has a new game. Now that it has agreed to collect sales taxes, the company can legally set up warehouses right inside some of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation. Why would it want to do that? Because Amazon’s new goal is to get stuff to you immediately—as soon as a few hours after you hit Buy...It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly this move will shake up the retail industry. Same-day delivery has long been the holy grail of Internet retailers, something that dozens of startups have tried and failed to accomplish. (Remember Kozmo.com?) But Amazon is investing billions to make next-day delivery standard, and same-day delivery an option for lots of customers. If it can pull that off, the company will permanently alter how we shop. To put it more bluntly: Physical retailers will be hosed.

This story probably sounds histrionic to a lot of you, but it seems pretty reasonable to me. When the Great Walmart in the Sky starts offering near-instant gratification, a lot of small retailers are going to feel the same Amazon pinch that bookstores started feeling a decade ago.