Wal-Mart announced a series of restructuring moves on its Web site yesterday that "touch nearly every aspect of the company and are intended to created a new organizational framework to drive growth." One major development is a restructuring into three geographic business units in the West, the South and the North. The company's previous structure consisted of five major regions. Former Walmart.com president and CEO Raul Vasquez will oversee the Walmart West area. Rosalind Brewer was named president of Walmart South after previously serving as president of Walmart's Southeast division. Hank Mullany, previously president of …

David Sarno and Alex Pham tell us that funeral preparations for Amazon's Kindle e-reader are way premature despite the initial response of some bloggers. It has a longer battery life, a screen that's supposedly easy on the eyes, it's cheaper to buy and will have less costly and more plentiful downloadable books at its online bookstore, which is available via a free wireless connection. And it's lighter. Among other things. "If the user is interested in buying a device for books," says iSuppli analyst Jagdish Rebello, "the Kindle is a no-brainer." Adds the not-disinterested Russ Wilcox, …

Kraft's DiGiorno brand may be king of the icy mozzarella in the rest of the U.S., but the leading frozen pizza brand in the Chicago area is the home-grown Home Run Inn label, Mike Hughlett reports. Joe Perrino, who worked in his dad's Home Run Inn as a youth, is responsible for the explosive growth of its frozen pizza line since taking over the company in 1990. He opened a new plant in 1995 just as a major competitor entered the market with a big promotional effort, igniting a price war. But after one tough year of declining …

They're back. Did you really think they wouldn't be? We didn't, but that didn't stop us from re-reporting that they might not be yesterday. We won't go so far as to say that's why Anheuser-Busch's original Super Bowl lineup left the Clydesdales on the bench. We're just sayin' it wouldn't have been a bad idea to roil up the legions of equine loyalists, even if vp-marketing Keith Levy tells Jeremy Millman "he's not that smart." Millman points out that most of the media coverage mentioned the Clydesdale absence, drawing negative reactions. Even hard-bitten marketing …

Stefani Germanotta, aka Lady Gaga -- who graduated from Manhattan's Convent of the Sacred Heart School, attended NYU for a bit and, in the past year or so, has captivated us with "outfits that make her look like a refugee from a sci-fi film" -- will open the Grammys Sunday doing a piano duet with elder rock statesman Elton John, John Jurgensen reports. Perhaps our fascination with a performer who has framed her face in what looked like a bird's nest tells us more about us than about her -- "us" meaning the new audience of digital-savvy consumers …