Business in brief: Sephora to open two mall stores

Women’s fashion and beauty retailer Sephora will open two in-store shops at J.C. Penney locations in Spokane next week.

The Sephora stores will open Oct. 2 in Penney stores at NorthTown Mall and the Spokane Valley Mall.

Sephora is a national retailer selling beauty-related products, such as cosmetics, skin care, fragrance and hair care.

Staff reports

Beatles albums break records

Nearly 40 years after breaking up, The Beatles are still breaking records for album sales.

EMI Group PLC says consumers in North America, Japan and the U.K. bought more than 2.25 million copies of the Fab Four’s remastered albums in the first five days after their Sept. 9 release.

Most of the records were broken for most simultaneous titles in the top-selling charts by a single artist.

The Beatles’ original U.K. studio albums were remastered at Abbey Road Studios in London over four years and released to coincide with the sale of “The Beatles: Rock Band” on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii.

Associated Press

General Motors adds night shifts

General Motors Co. will go to 24-hour operations at factories in Kansas, Michigan and Indiana to handle an expected increase in demand and to make up for production lost from a large-scale factory consolidation announced earlier in the year.

About 2,400 production workers will be recalled as a result of the added shifts.

The affected plants will add new shifts in January and April; they make Chevrolet, Saturn, GMC and Buick models.

Associated Press

Intel CEO eyes PC comeback

The worldwide personal-computer market is pulling out of its slump quickly and could defy predictions by growing this year, Intel Corp. CEO Paul Otellini said Tuesday.

Otellini’s comments at a conference Tuesday were more bullish than many analysts have been. Market research firms IDC and Gartner have both predicted a year-over-year decline in PC shipments in 2009, which would be the first such drop since 2001.

The market has been dragged by a clampdown in corporate spending on new PCs, and some computer companies are already looking to next year for an upturn. Sales of cheap little “netbook” computers, used primarily for surfing the Internet, have been a bright spot, but those machines ring up low profits for PC and chip makers. Intel is the world’s top maker of microprocessors, the “brains” of PCs.

Associated Press