Amazon.com Inc’s 20-percent hike in the cost of Prime membership should deliver more than $1bn in extra revenue this year and cover any “rational” hike in United States Postal Service delivery fees, Wall Street analysts said on Friday.

We never seem to lack for proposals to fix the nation’s broken transportation infrastructure. But the money to make it happen is always missing.

Decades ago, Bradley Jacobs studied math and piano (classical and jazz) at Bennington and Brown before dropping out to make money. Now the balding 61-year-old CEO of XPO Logistics invokes that background to explain how he's parlayed sequential roll-ups in the gritty businesses of garbage collection, heavy equipment rentals and delivering stuff into a $2.6bn net worth.

Selling apparel and other merchandise over the internet is difficult enough for retailers as it is. Now they want to make it even tougher on themselves.