%1

Instant Brands on Wednesday said a bankruptcy court approved motions related to its chapter 11 petitions filed earlier in the week, MarketWatch.com reported. The company behind products including Pyrex and CorningWare said the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas authorized it on an interim basis to access and use financing from its existing lenders. This gives Instant Brands access to financing under a $125 million debtor-in-possession asset-based revolving credit facility, and a $132.5 million debtor-in-possession term loan credit facility, up to $100 million of which will be immediately funded on an interim basis. The interim approval granted by court enables Instant Brands to pay employee wages and benefits without interruption and pay vendors, suppliers and distributors in full under normal terms, the company said. "While we continue our efforts to strengthen our financial position, this court-approved financing gives us the ability to continue," said President and Chief Executive Ben Gadbois. Instant Brands on Monday said the company and certain of its affiliates initiated a voluntary chapter 11 process as it works to strengthen its financial standing.

Americans stepped up their spending in May, including at car dealerships and hardware stores, showing still solid demand as they faced high interest rates and rising prices, the Wall Street Journal reported. Retail sales increased 0.3% in May from the month before, after sales rose 0.4% in April, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Consumers spent more at many of the types of retailers tracked by the report including grocery stores, furniture purveyors and electronics sellers. They spent less at gasoline stores, which can reflect declining prices at the pump. The figures are closely watched because consumer spending accounts for about two-thirds of economic output. If shoppers pull back, that would further slow the broader economy. Overall retail spending, including restaurants, rose 1.6% in May from a year earlier, a slower gain than price increases. But when excluding gasoline stations, spending gains matched closely with inflation.

Overstock.com will buy certain assets of bankrupt home goods retailer Bed Bath & Beyond for $21.5 million, the online retailer said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The deal, designated a stalking-horse bid under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, will include intellectual property, business data and rights to mobile applications, and will also assume certain liabilities of Bed Bath & Beyond. Bed Bath will continue to solicit other bids until the expected deadline on Friday and will undertake an auction next week to determine the winning bidder if additional bids are received, the company said. The retailer had delivered 10% of the purchase price in cash to an escrow agent in immediately available funds, Overstock said in a regulatory filing. Bed Bath & Beyond filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in April after struggling with dwindling sales and a failed merchandising strategy.

Instant Brands Inc., the maker of Instant Pot and Pyrex kitchenware, will solicit offers to sell the business in bankruptcy while considering alternative transactions to restructure more than $500 million in debt on its balance sheet, a company lawyer said yesterday, Bloomberg News reported. Instant Brands lawyer Brian Resnick said during a virtual court hearing that company advisers will explore both options as the company tries to figure out how to get out of chapter 11. The company, which is owned by private-equity firm Cornell Capital, could use chapter 11 to restructure its balance sheet if it can find an investor to fund a chapter 11 plan; a buyer could purchase Instant Brands’ assets or lenders could take over the business in exchange for debt relief, Resnick said. “All those options are on the table,” he said. Instant Brands wants parties to submit indications of interest by July 27 and is targeting an Aug. 23 bid deadline, according to a slide show company lawyers played during Tuesday’s hearing. In the meantime, Instant Brands will continue operating its business as normal, Resnick said. The company already cleared an initial hurdle in its chapter 11: It won court approval for a roughly $133 million chapter 11 financing to fund the business and keep its factories running during bankruptcy. The structure is “somewhat unusual,” Instant Brands lawyer David Schiff said, necessitated by a complex debt deal the business used to raise new money early this year.

Consumer prices rose just 0.1 percent in May and are up 4 percent over the past year, according to key inflation data released yesterday by the Labor Department, The Hill reported. Inflation as measured by the consumer price index (CPI) dropped sharply last month, bringing annual price growth down to its slowest pace since March 2021. The drop in inflation will likely keep the Federal Reserve on track to pause its aggressive run of interest rate hikes today. The Fed has hiked interest rates in consecutive meetings dating to March 2022, but it is likely to announce a temporary halt today following a two-day meeting in Washington, D.C. The annual inflation rate has dropped sharply since peaking at 9.1 percent in June after the Fed raised its baseline interest rate range by 5 percentage points since March 2021.

Ships are piling up in some West Coast ports, and commercial shipping prices are spiking, amid a labor fight between port operators and workers that is threatening to trigger a new round of supply-chain disruptions that could lead to shortages or higher prices, The Hill reported. The fight is sparking concerns among lawmakers who worry surging container prices could ripple through the economy and hit all sorts of consumer goods in a repeat of supply-chain problems following pandemic shutdowns. Data from logistics platform Go Comet shows median delay times trending upward this week in several key West Coast ports, including Los Angeles, Long Beach and Seattle. Wait times at the port of Seattle are now more than a week. “Container rates for importing 40-foot containers to the United States’ West Coast over the past week have jumped 20 percent week over week, likely as a result of the anticipated congestion at the ports. This follows a dramatic lull in rates after last year’s highs,” said Eytan Buchman, who works with logistics booking company Freightos. In the port of Oakland, Calif., operations were shut down over the weekend due to a labor strike but resumed Monday, “with heavy traffic experienced at the gate,” according to German shipping company Hapag-Lloyd.

Mattress maker Serta Simmons Bedding yesterday said that its chapter 11 reorganization plan has been confirmed by a U.S. bankruptcy court, bringing the bedding company one step closer to emerging from bankruptcy, Reuters reported. The Doraville, Ga.-based company, whose roots date to 1870, filed for chapter 11 protection from creditors in January with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of Texas, in a bid to eliminate most of its debt. The mattress manufacturer, which accounts for nearly one-fifth of U.S. bedding sales and whose brands include Serta, Simmons, Beautyrest, and Tuft & Needle, said it is operating normally as usual. Serta Simmons, backed by Apollo Global Management and Gamut Capital Management through its restructuring plan, aims to reduce its debt to $315 million from $1.9 billion, in addition to which it projects that the company's annual cash interest expense will fall by more than $100 million. The company during the COVID-19 pandemic had added $200 million of new capital to weather higher raw material costs and supply chain disruptions. However, significant amounts of debt maturing in 2023 have made the company's capital structure unsustainable, necessitating a comprehensive restructuring that is now supported by more than three-quarters of its key lenders.

Lawmakers plan to re-up proposed legislation that would give merchants the power to process many Visa and Mastercard credit cards over different networks, the Wall Street Journal reported. The new bill is expected to be introduced as soon as this week with two additional co-sponsors, Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). A nearly identical bill was introduced last summer by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.). That bill was referred to the Senate Banking Committee but didn’t get voted on. Vance, who joined the Senate this year, is a junior member of the committee. Currently, when a consumer pays with a credit card that has Visa or Mastercard listed on it, merchants generally have to route the payment through that network. The bill would mandate that merchants in many cases have the right to route payments through an unaffiliated network. That could lower the fees that merchants have to pay. Visa and Mastercard set and pocket network fees that merchants pay when consumers shop with the cards. They also set interchange fees that merchants pay to the banks that issue credit cards.

Bed Bath & Beyond is in talks to keep its Buybuy Baby chain open through a possible sale to the private-equity owner of children’s apparel retailer Janie and Jack, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Go Global Retail, the owner of Janie and Jack, is bidding to acquire Buybuy Baby from its bankrupt parent company and planning to keep the baby-focused chain of stores operating. While Bed Bath & Beyond and Buybuy Baby have both been shrinking, the baby business has held up better than the larger home-goods chain, which filed for bankruptcy in April to close stores and look for last-ditch buyers. The company has been conducting going-out of-business sales at hundreds of Bed Bath & Beyond and Buybuy Baby locations in recent weeks. Bed Bath & Beyond is also shopping its assets in bankruptcy and last week pushed back the deadline for final bids to Thursday, court filings show. The company also is fielding interest from Overstock.com, the online discount retailer, for the intellectual property behind the main Bed Bath & Beyond banner.