Tag: dec 14 2021

Urban storefronts left dark by the COVID-era shutdown are being taken over by online grocery retailers in their quest to deliver customers’ orders the same day or, in some cases, within an hour. Start-ups including Getir, Gopuff, Gorillas, Jokr, and now Doordash, are claiming the empty stores and turning them into mini-warehouses, closed to the...

About 74 percent of U.S. hotels are dealing with shortages of key supplies and paying more for those they can find, reducing their margins, according to a report by the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA). Eighty-six percent of lodging establishments the AHLA surveyed reported supply-line disruptions are posing moderate to significant problems for their...

Driven by labor shortages and inflation running at a 30-year high, U.S. wages will rise 3.9 percent in 2022, the biggest one-year jump since 2008’s Great Recession, the Conference Board (CB) predicted in its annual Salary Increase Budget Survey. Last April, the board had forecast a 0.9-percent bump next year. Already, hourly pay rates have...

American workers continue to quit their jobs in record numbers, one factor in a labor market in which the number of job openings continues to dwarf the number of workers available.  The Wall Street Journal reports, on 9 December, that both the U.S. Labor Dept. and the job search site ZipRecruiter put the number of...

In the week ending 4 December, 184,000 new claims for state unemployment benefits were filed, the fewest since 1969, the U.S. labor department reported, well below economists’ estimates averaging 220,000 in a Bloomberg survey. The four-week moving average of new claims fell to 218,750, the lowest since March 2020. At the same time, hiring was...

Companies’ leaders are selling their stock at record rates, some for the first time, ahead of possible hikes in capital gains rates, other changes in tax structures, and the growing likelihood of a stock market correction, The Wall Street Journal reported. This year to date, 48 corporate leaders have each raked in at least $200...

Investors began dumping high-yield or “junk” bonds in November when inflation continued strong and the U.S. Federal Reserve made clear its plan to raise interest rates next year (see “Junk Bond Slump,” 7 Dec 2021). The selloff accelerated when the Omicron virus variant appeared. During the last two weeks of November, investors took $6 billion...