📦 the amazonification of retail.
on the agenda this week: paywalls, oatly, & the physics behind the beirut explosion.
📖 reading time: 4m 02s.
hey, hi, hello there. happy monday :)
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👂 earworm: listen to sales’ track on spotify or apple music.
📚 word of the week:
“axiomatic”.
self-evident or unquestionable.
it’s axiomatic: reporters run to the story. they don’t sit it out.
- the new york times, 2020
🧠 brain candy:
📰 many of the best sources of quality journalism & academic writing are paywalled (think WSJ, NYT, FT). although that is a necessity to employ those who write. sadly, a lot vital information will end up locked behind those paywalls, with free clickbait articles available to all.
🥛 i drink oatly every morning. they've built an incredible marketing engine and raised 100s of millions of dollars convincing me that i should put sugar and vegetable oil into my coffee each morning instead of milk.
🍷 a cool tradition has found its place in the world yet again... wine windows in florence, italy. in tuscany during the 1630s — during the black plague — buchetta del vino popped up in the city for the safe sale of wine, without direct contact between client and seller.
🚚 uber eats takes the big slice. the pandemic has hit uber’s core ride-hailing business hard. revenue from uber rides (before paying driver wages and other fees) declined 73 percent from a year earlier. revenue from uber eats has totalled $1.2 billion, while uber rides shrank to $790 million.
📕 it can be difficult to tell exactly what your data can be used to predict (in aggregate). however, businesses can be startlingly predictive when using large datasets. target — the american retail chain — can successfully identify when someone is pregnant even before their family is aware. as an aside, did you know that target has an in-house forensic services lab?
🤪 mildly humorous:
💡 longer reads:
📦 the amazonification of retail
.
simon property group inc., the biggest mall owner in the u.s., has been in talks with amazon.com inc. to turn some of its anchor department-store spaces into amazon fulfillment centers, according to people familiar with the matter.
for amazon, more fulfillment centers near residential areas would speed up the crucial last mile of delivery. for simon, turning over what was once prime mall space to fulfillment centers shows it would be willing to relinquish an essential way to bring in more mall traffic to secure a steady tenant.
simon’s discussions with the online retailer have been under way for months and began before the coronavirus pandemic, these people said. the two companies have explored converting stores formerly occupied by j.c. penney co. inc. and sears holdings corp. into amazon distribution centers; in some cases, simon and amazon explored buying out occupied space from the retailers, these people said.
the talks reflect the intersection of two trends that predate the pandemic but have been accelerated by it: the decline of malls and the boom in e-commerce.
it wasn’t clear how many stores are under consideration for amazon, and it is possible that the two sides could fail to reach an agreement, people briefed on the matter said. simon malls have 63 penney and 11 sears stores, according to its most recent public filing in may.
👉 read more via the wall street journal.
🇱🇧
the physics behind the beirut explosion
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on august 4, 2020, a massive explosion blasted deadly waves through downtown beirut. then, video of the fireball rippled around the world almost as quickly. now, details of the blast that started in a fireworks storage area by a small storage building at the end of a beirut pier trickle in as the world waits to hear what the final death, injury, and destruction tallies will be. however, in a way, the world already has some idea what to expect, because similar blasts have occurred before.
as a biomedical engineer with a doctorate in the patterns of injury and trauma that follow an explosion, scraping together information from accidental blasts is part of my daily work. the more mundane explosions are rarely this size, but the same principles of physics and chemistry apply. science, along with a few case studies from history, let me do some preliminary calculations to puzzle out this explosion, too.
in 1917, an accidental detonation of 6 million pounds of hodgepodge high explosives in the harbor of halifax, nova scotia, left a swath of wreckage that, at least until tuesday, was the largest nonnuclear explosion ever created by humanity. as we learn more about beirut, which could possibly challenge that record, the story of halifax tells us what we might expect to learn about the ensuing trauma, and the modern cell phone videos, along with the blast physics gleaned by scientists in the intervening century, tell us why those patterns of trauma occurred in quite the way they did.
🚑 please make a donation to the lebanese red cross here.
👉 read more via wired.
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