Tag Archives: Retail

Amazon’s automated grocery store of the future opens Monday

By Jeffrey Dastin

SEATTLE (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc will open its checkout-free grocery store to the public on Monday after more than a year of testing, the company said, moving forward on an experiment that could dramatically alter brick-and-mortar retail.

The Seattle store, known as Amazon Go, relies on cameras and sensors to track what shoppers remove from the shelves, and what they put back. Cash registers and checkout lines become superfluous – customers are billed after leaving the store using credit cards on file.

For grocers, the store’s opening heralds another potential disruption at the hands of the world’s largest online retailer, which bought high-end supermarket chain Whole Foods Market last year for $13.7 billion. Long lines can deter shoppers, so a company that figures out how to eradicate wait times will have an advantage.

Amazon did not discuss if or when it will add more Go locations, and reiterated it has no plans to add the technology to the larger and more complex Whole Foods stores.

The convenience-style store opened to Amazon employees on Dec. 5, 2016 in a test phase. At the time, Amazon said it expected members of the public could begin using the store in early 2017.

But there have been challenges, according to a person familiar with the matter. These included correctly identifying shoppers with similar body types, the person said. When children were brought into the store during the trial, they caused havoc by moving items to incorrect places, the person added.

Gianna Puerini, vice president of Amazon Go, said in an interview that the store worked very well throughout the test phase, thanks to four years of prior legwork.

“This technology didn’t exist,” Puerini said, walking through the Seattle store. “It was really advancing the state of the art of computer vision and machine learning.”

“If you look at these products, you can see they’re super similar,” she said of two near-identical Starbucks drinks next to each other on a shelf. One had light cream and the other had regular, and Amazon’s technology learned to tell them apart.

HOW IT WORKS

The 1800-square-foot (167-square-meter) store is located in an Amazon office building. To start shopping, customers must scan an Amazon Go smartphone app and pass through a gated turnstile.

Ready-to-eat lunch items greet shoppers when they enter. Deeper into the store, shoppers can find a small selection of grocery items, including meats and meal kits. An Amazon employee checks IDs in the store’s wine and beer section.

Sleek black cameras monitoring from above and weight sensors in the shelves help Amazon determine exactly what people take.

If someone passes back through the gates with an item, his or her associated account is charged. If a shopper puts an item back on the shelf, Amazon removes it from his or her virtual cart.

Much of the store will feel familiar to shoppers, aside from the check-out process. Amazon, famous for dynamic pricing online, has printed price tags just as traditional brick-and-mortar stores do.

(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in Seattle; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Rosalba O’Brien)

U.S. job growth speeds up, unemployment rate falls

FILE PHOTO: Job seekers listen to a recruiter at the Colorado Hospital Association job fair in Denver, Colorado, U.S. on October 4, 2017

By Lucia Mutikani

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. job growth accelerated in October after hurricane-related disruptions in the prior month, but a sharp retreat in annual wage gains and surge in the number of people dropping out of the work force cast a cloud over the labor market.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 261,000 jobs last month as 106,000 leisure and hospitality workers returned to work, the Labor Department said in its closely watched employment report on Friday. That was the largest gain since July 2016 but below economists’ expectations for an increase of 310,000 jobs.

Data for September was revised to show a gain of 18,000 jobs instead of a decline of 33,000 as previously reported. Some aspects of the report, however, were downbeat.

Average hourly earnings slipped by one cent, leaving them unchanged in percentage terms, in part because of the return of the lower-paid industry workers. That lowered the year-on-year increase to 2.4 percent, which was the smallest since February 2016. Wages shot up 0.5 percent in September, lifting the annual increase in that month to 2.9 percent.

Still, October’s job growth acceleration reinforced the Federal Reserve’s assessment on Wednesday that “the labor market has continued to strengthen,” and probably does little to change expectations it will raise interest rates in December. The U.S. central bank has lifted rates twice this year.

“The weakness in wages will not go unnoticed at the Fed, particularly for members that remained more concerned over the inflation outlook,” said Michael Hanson, chief U.S. economist at TD Securities in New York. “Overall, sustained job growth and labor market slack at pre-crisis lows keeps December in play.”

Although the unemployment rate fell to near a 17-year low of 4.1 percent, it was because the labor force dropped by 765,000 after a surprise jump of 575,000 in September.

The labor force participation rate, or the proportion of working-age Americans who have a job or are looking for one, fell four-tenths of a percentage point to 62.7 percent.

Prices of U.S. Treasuries rose after the data. The dollar <.DXY> gained against a basket of currencies and stocks on Wall Street were largely flat.

 

LABOR MARKET TIGHTENING

The sharp moderation in job growth in September was blamed on hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which devastated parts of Texas and Florida in late August and early September and left workers, mostly in lower-paying industries such as leisure and hospitality, temporarily unemployed.

Economists, however, remain optimistic that wage growth will accelerate with the labor market near full employment. Last month’s one-tenth percentage point drop in the unemployment rate took it to its lowest reading since December 2000. The jobless rate is now below the Fed’s median forecast for 2017.

A broader measure of unemployment, which includes people who want to work but have given up searching and those working part-time because they cannot find full-time employment, dropped to 7.9 percent last month, the lowest level since December 2006, from 8.3 percent in September.

Tepid wage growth supports the view that inflation will continue to undershoot the Fed’s 2 percent target and could raise concerns about consumer spending, which appears to have been largely supported by savings this year.

The economy grew at a 3.0 percent annualized rate in the third quarter. Growth has remained strong even as President Donald Trump and the Republican-led Congress have struggled to enact their economic program.

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday unveiled a bill that proposed slashing the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent, cutting tax rates on individuals and families and ending certain tax breaks. The plan has been met with opposition from small businesses, realtors and homebuilders.

A separate report from the Commerce Department on Friday showed the U.S. trade deficit increased 1.7 percent to $43.5 billion in September as rising exports were offset by a surge in imports. Exports, which were the highest since December 2014, are being buoyed by a weakening dollar and strong global growth.

Monthly job growth has averaged 162,000 over the past three months. The economy needs to create 75,000 to 100,000 jobs per month to keep up with growth in the working-age population.

The slowing job growth trend largely reflects employers’ difficulties in finding qualified workers. Some economists believe the impact of the hurricanes was still holding back employment growth.

Private payrolls surged by 219,000 jobs in October after falling by 3,000 in September. Manufacturing employment increased by 24,000 jobs. The retail sector lost 8,300 jobs last month.

Construction payrolls gained 11,000 in October, likely boosted by hiring related to the clean-up and rebuilding efforts in the wake of the hurricanes. There were increases in professional and business services payrolls. Healthcare employment also rose last month.

 

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Paul Simao)

 

Wal-Mart to create 10,000 U.S. jobs in 2017

A general view shows a Wal-Mart store in Monterrey, Mexico,

(Reuters) – Wal-Mart Stores said it would create about 10,000 jobs in the United States this year, adding to its near 1.5 million workforce in the country, by opening or remodeling stores and investing in its e-commerce business.

The number of jobs being created is consistent with previous years, said Lorenzo Lopez, a spokesman for Wal-Mart, the largest U.S. retailer and private employer.

Several U.S. companies, particularly automakers, have announced plans to create jobs in the United States since the U.S. election victory of Donald Trump.

Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, has repeatedly singled out and criticized companies across industries for not doing more to keep jobs in the United States.

General Motors Co will announce as early as Tuesday long-held plans to invest about $1 billion in its U.S. factories, a person briefed on the matter told Reuters.

(Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D’Souza)

Australians Calling For Bible Ban

A group of Australians are calling for the Bible to be banned at retail outlets that are refusing to carry a sexually explicit, violent video game.

The anti-Bible group is claiming that the Bible is just as bad as the video game and therefore should be banned at any location that does not carry the game.  They say that Christians are just trying to earn “God points” by obeying scripture that calls for violence against women.

Kmart and Target stores in the country announced they will not be carrying a new version of the video game Grand Theft Auto Five, which was released last month for two new game systems.  The ban came after a petition of 50,000 asked for the game to not be carried because it is a “sickening game that encourages players to commit sexual violence and kill women.”

“Games like this are grooming yet another generation of boys to tolerate violence against women. It is fueling the epidemic of violence experienced by so many girls and women in Australia—and globally,” reads the petition.

“We have firsthand experience of this kind of sexual violence. It haunts us, and we’ve been trying to rebuild our lives ever since,” the petition continues. “Just knowing that women are being portrayed as deserving to be sexually used by men and potentially murdered for sport and pleasure—to see this violence that we lived through turned into a form of entertainments is sickening and causes us great pain and harm.”