Amazon.com Inc. is speeding the delivery of USB cables, smartphone screen protectors, cosmetics and other small, flat items in its continuing push against rival marketplaces that help overseas manufacturers and suppliers sell directly to U.S. shoppers.
U.S. intelligence officials are planning to provide information including classified threat reports to companies about the risks of hacking and other crimes tied to the supplies and services they buy.
Amid the gloom and doom that's set in all along America's shale fields these past two years, there has been one small, but consistent, bright spot. Sand.
The U.S. Surface Transportation Board has proposed a rule allowing shippers to switch cargo among large railroads if there's reasonable access to competing tracks.
Amazon has about 30,000 Kiva robots scuttling about its warehouses across the globe. Dave Clark, the retailer's senior vice president of worldwide operations and customer service, estimated the addition of the bots reduced operating expenses by about 20 percent.
It's been 11 years since hedge fund magnate Edward Lampert merged Sears with another ailing company, Kmart Holding, which he bought out of bankruptcy in 2003, to form Sears Holdings. Sales have plunged by almost half, the result of defecting customers and the sundering of assets such as the Lands' End clothing brand in 2014.
Electric-bike sales are expected to total $15.7bn globally this year and reach $24.3bn in 2025, according to Navigant Research. "It's a category that is wide open," says Edward Benjamin, senior managing director of ECycleElectric Consultants in Fort Myers, Fla., and chairman of the Light Electric Vehicle Association. "Little guys are jumping into a business that no one's been paying attention to," he says.
Over the past year, prime warehouse rents are up 9.9 percent across the U.S. and up by double-digit amounts in some large urban areas, according to a recent report. E-commerce and Amazon are in no small way responsible for the development.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Coca-Cola Co. and 73 other companies that together buy more than $2tr of goods and services are unprepared for climate shocks because suppliers are ignoring requests for data on their exposure to rising temperatures and climate regulation.
Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, likes to play a game he calls Find the Robot. As he goes about his everyday life - shopping, traveling through airports - he looks for machines performing tasks that humans once handled. Most of what he sees doesn't impress him.