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After opening about 250 warehouses in the U.S. this year, Amazon will open another 100 this month, bringing distribution even closer to every American home, and adding another 125,000 blue-collar workers, the company announced. The company will entice new workers in a tight labor market by raising the average wage in its merchandise caverns to...

Some say that one meaning of Shakespeare’s phrase “Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion” is that those in a position of power and influence should take special care to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. But perhaps some Federal Reserve officials, including even Chairman Jerome Powell, never studied Shakespeare. CNBC reports, on 17 September, that...

The recent ethics outcry over stock trades by Robert Kaplan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, which we detailed in “Bankster Bandits Get Rich Playing the Inside Track” (14 Sep 2021), were foretold by information in his financial disclosure forms covering 2020, Wall Street on Parade (WSOP) reported. Kaplan reported in the document...

The COVID War has sped retailers’ conversion to automation, permanently dooming many of the 1.7 million jobs in leisure and hospitality and 270,000 retail slots that disappeared during 2020’s economic crisis. The Toast restaurant group and other eateries are moving to order management software that lets diners order from their tables over their phones instead...

The wave of diners returning to U.S. restaurants this summer has receded, leaving the industry dealing with labor shortages, rising prices for scarce supplies, and would-be customers who have chosen to bunker at home again amid the surging Delta virus, as we reported in “Worker Shortages, Virus Hobble Restaurants’ Recovery” (14 Sep 2021).  Eighty-four percent...

U.S. retail sales rose 0.7 percent in August from July, despite the Delta virus’s surge, Forbes reported. Sales were expected to slip 0.85 percent, according to a consensus of economists polled by FactSet. However, more of that spending was done online and less at restaurants. Online sales bumped up 5.3 percent, month over month, while...

U.S. apartment rents jumped an average of 10 percent in August, year over year, after climbing 13 percent from January through July, as we reported last week in “Rents Soar as Investors Buy Properties and Raise Rates” (14 Sep 2021). August’s hike, the first year-on-year double-digit increase in more than two decades, was reported by...