BrandSnark: Good Week/Bad Week for the Big Brands

Good Week: Chobani The Greek yogurt goliath is planning a $20M expansion of its Idaho facility – already the world’s largest yogurt plant – to create a 70,000 square-foot global R&D center. Talk about a brand with an active culture.

Bad Week: Target The ubiquitous retail chain is under pressure from consumer and health advocacy groups to recall millions of those annoying fidget spinners sold at its stores after tests showed the items contain as much as 330 times the federal legal limit for lead in children’s products. Fidgety kids everywhere can now return to spending every available moment burrowed into their previous (and far more expensive) ants-in-the-pants opiate, their phones… risking only their eyesight and their brain cells.

Worse Week: Walmart – A jury ruled that the world’s largest retailer must pay $7.5M to a man who claims to have broke his hip after tripping on a display of watermelons in an Alabama store.  It’s a juicy story with deliciously seedy details showing that the man was disgruntled with Walmart and may have had an ax to rind.