Starbucks, which has stocked organic milk at U.S. shops since 2001, plans to stop offering it next month. Drinks with organic milk account for less than 1% of Starbucks' beverage sales, says Michelle Gass, the company's senior vice president of global strategy. Starbucks spokesman Brandon Borrman says the original reason for offering it was to cater to customers who wanted milk from cows that weren't given recombinant bovine growth hormone. Earlier this month, Starbucks completed the switch to serving milk only from cows that weren't given the artificial growth hormone, which helps cows produce more milk. Starbucks has said …

Retail experts say it is now clear that Sears Holdings chairman Edward S. Lampert must engineer a radical makeover of the 121-year-old retailer to prove it can thrive alongside bigger rivals. To halt sales and profit declines, the company's Sears and Kmart stores must forge new roles that will distinguish them in customers' eyes from competitors, such as Kohl's, J.C. Penney, Target and Wal-Mart. The retailer yesterday warned that results for its fiscal fourth quarter and year would fall well below its expectations, continuing a sharp slide in sales and profit. Lampert, a 45-year-old billionaire whose ESL …

A 968-page Food and Drug Administration "final risk assessment" concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals. The impending release of the report will remove the last regulatory barrier to the marketing of meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats. The agency report includes hundreds of pages of raw data so that others can see how it came to its conclusions. The report also acknowledges that human health concerns are not the only issues raised by the emergence of cloned farm animals. "Moral, religious and …

Auto executives say the technical hurdles to meeting a 35-m.p.g. standard by 2020 will be less difficult than getting customers to accept the changes and extra costs that will accompany the accomplishment. They know how to build environmentally conscious vehicles--from plug-in hybrids to biofueled supercars--but don't know how many customers will buy them, and at what price. "There's a piece of this that the customer has to help with," says Robert Lee, Chrysler's vice president of powertrain product engineering. "It can't be a tax on the manufacturer without some reimbursement." Ford is backing a range of four- …

In a move that signifies the end of the Sam Walton era to many observers, Wal-Mart is reducing the frequency of its fabled Saturday morning meeting to once a month. And executives won't be funneling into the home office any more either, but will gather down the road at Bentonville High School where a larger auditorium can house the growing crowd of managers required to attend. Walton strongly believed in the value of the Saturday morning meetings as a time to communicate, plan strategy and gain a competitive advantage. The Wal-Mart Web site describes the meetings as part entertainment, …

Merck and Schering-Plough--which make the drug, Zetia, and a pill that contains it, Vytorin--say that Zetia failed to benefit patients in a two-year trial that ended in April 2006. The companies, which repeatedly missed their own deadlines for reporting the result, blamed the complexity of the data for the delay. The House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the delay, says that the negative results add to suspicion that the companies deliberately sat on the findings. Millions of patients have continued taking Zetia and Vytorin. Dr. Steven E. Nissen, chairman of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic, calls …