Amazon Wants to Help Its Employees Quit and Start Delivery Businesses
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Amazon announced that it wants to help its employees quit — so they can start their own delivery businesses. Tthe e-commerce giant said that it’s expanding its Delivery Service Partner program to include an incentive for current Amazon workers
The program promises up to $10,000 in startup costs for employees who partake in the program. Amazon is also throwing in the equivalent of three months of an employee’s most recent salary to help soon-to-be entrepreneurs get their fleet of delivery cars off the ground.
The program is Amazon’s solution to its last-mile delivery problem where the company is trying to compete with legacy players like UPS and FedEx.

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Post Office Wants to Shift Focus from Mail to Ecommerce Deliveries
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USPS has floated a new proposal to Congress that would see it reducing mail delivery from six to five days a week while expanding packaging deliveries to seven days.
The shipping world has changed dramatically over the past decade. Since 2007, total U.S. mail volume has declined 31% to 146 million pieces, including a 41% drop in first-class mail, its most profitable product. At the same time, ecommerce has exploded, offering a way to plug the lost revenue while also adding burden to USPS operations as it handles more packages. USPS has already started to dip its toes into 7-day a week delivery to manage the 20 million packages it averages daily. It now delivers some Amazon.com packages on Sundays and also other ecommerce retail fulfillment during the busy Christmas holiday season.
The agency lost $3.9 billion in 2018, its 12th straight year of losses. According to the agency, this move better reflects the market conditions and would save it billions of dollars per year. Republican and Democratic members of Congress, however are opposed to making a change to mail deliveries.

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70% of Consumers Worry About the Environment, While 52% Have Changed What They Buy
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American consumers are prepared to reward manufacturers, retailers, and others offering products that benefit the environment as long as any additional costs associated with providing those benefits are not transferred to them in the form of higher prices.
Earth Day 2019, an A.T. Kearney study of 1,000 US consumers’ sentiments on environmental benefit claims found that more than 70% of consumers consider their impact on the environment when shopping. But, even as topics like climate change continue to make headlines, only 52% have shifted their purchase decisions—although this is improving, with 66% intending to shift within the year. Why haven’t they changed? The answer is they want the businesses that serve them to change first.
While nearly 80% of respondents would consider delayed shipping if the environmental benefit was clearly articulated, they are unlikely to settle for higher costs in exchange for environmental benefits.
“What we see in these findings is that the consumer market may be more receptive to buying green products than they were in years past,” said Greg Portell, an A.T. Kearney partner involved in the study. “But, they don’t want to sacrifice quality or pay higher prices to benefit the environment.”

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Ongoing Labor Shortage Underscores the Need for Optimization
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A national unemployment rate hovering around 4% is a good thing for the economy but makes life difficult for managers of distribution and fulfillment centers. Finding sufficient staff is a problem that’s not likely to go away soon, so companies are looking to maximize productivity and reduce inefficiency.
This special report from Multichannel Merchant explores ways ecommerce and direct-to-customer merchants are creating optimized warehouses to address labor shortages. This includes tactics like incentives, space optimization and investment in a modern warehouse management system (WMS).
In the MCM Special Report you will learn:
- About the shift from centralized DCs to smaller regional fulfillment centers
- About leveraging existing WMS capabilities like labor management and order flow
- About the advantages of a modern WMS, including granular KPIs and volumetric data
- How more efficient space utilization can fuel opportunistic buys that capture more sales

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The Green New Deal Solution To Climate Change Risks
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Whether it’s a deadly cold snap or a hole under an Antarctic glacier or a terrifying new report, there seem to be constant reminders now of the dangers that climate change poses to humanity.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., think they have a start to a solution.
What is the Green New Deal?
The Green New Deal is an ambitious proposal in the US to combat climate change. Named after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to combat the Great Depression, the Green New Deal is a massive stimulus package aimed to address climate change, as well as the rising social, economic, and political inequality in the US that comes with it. It calls for economic mobilization not seen since World War II and the New Deal and aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in half by 2030, shift 100 percent of national power generation to renewable sources, upgrade all infrastructure and transportation for energy efficiency, decarbonize the largest polluting industries (manufacturing and agriculture), fund the capture of GHGs, and virtually eliminate poverty in the US by including everyone in the prosperity that this transition would provide.

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Teamsters Vote Down UPS Contract but Negotiations Continue
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While the majority of UPS workers represented by the Teamsters union voted against a new contract, negotiations will continue as turnout was low and the no votes didn’t meet the threshold for killing the deal.
According to the Wall Street Journal, 54.3% of 243,000 Teamsters members that include UPS drivers, sorters and other workers voted against a new five-year contract Friday, while 62.1% of 11,000 freight workers voted down a separate agreement; several regional and local deals were voted down as well.
Union rules require a two-thirds vote to reject a contract when less than 50% of members vote.

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Now Bankrupt, Sears Was Once the Amazon and Walmart of Its Day
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Creative destruction. The term was coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter to name the process of businesses eliminating one another as they evolve. Today, no company better represents this evolution than Sears Holdings (NASDAQ: SHLD), the parent of Sears and Kmart.
Now a retail dinosaur and officially bankrupt, Sears was the largest American retailer as recently as the 1980s, and it dominated over the postwar era and much of the 20th century. Many of the innovations and strategies the company pioneered were borrowed by Walmart (NYSE: WMT), the biggest American retailer of the last generation, and later Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), the defining retailer of the e-commerce era — and there are more than a few similarities among them.

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Walmart to expand shipping perks for shoppers ahead of the holidays
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In the fight for shoppers’ holiday dollars, retailers are increasingly touting perks like free shipping and easy returns.
Walmart said Tuesday it is expanding two-day shipping and in-store returns to many items sold by third parties on its website next month, just ahead of the busy holiday shopping season.
The move comes as rivals Amazon and Target have been improving their own shipping perks to persuade shoppers to pick them over the competition. When it gets down to the last minute, shoppers who procrastinate later this year will be flocking to the retailers that can get items to them fastest before Christmas.

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Global Postal System Fast-Tracks Rate Review After Trump Pullout Threat
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By Heidi Vogt
Discounts established to help less-developed countries have continued to apply even as China has become a major e-commerce shipper.
WASHINGTON—A Trump administration threat to pull out of a global mail system over its discounted shipping rates from China could spur a change in those rates as early as April, the head of the United Nations agency that oversees the system said.The U.S. last week started a year long process to withdraw from the 144-year-old Universal Postal Union because it had failed to eliminate international discounts. Those discounts, aimed at helping developing countries, have continued to apply to China even as it has grown to become the world’s second-largest economy. They can make it cheaper to ship small packages from China to the U.S. than from locations within the U.S.
The move was the latest salvo by the Trump administration against China and a reminder of the president’s willingness to abandon international organizations that he says don’t help U.S. interests. American manufacturers welcomed the move, saying the flood of cheap goods from China undercut their business. The UPU, which is now holding previously scheduled council meetings, commissioned a report Tuesday that is the first step toward fast-tracking new rates, Director General Bishar Hussein said in an interview.
“If we work fast enough, and the member countries are all in consensus on these issues and decisions are made, by April next year I think it is a possibility,” Mr. Hussein said.The discounts also benefit countries including Russia and Mexico. The U.S. has stressed that its decision isn’t only about China, though that obviously is a large factor. Administration officials have said the lower rates cost the U.S. Postal Service some $300 million a year, with discounts ranging from 40% to 70%. Mr. Hussein said he welcomed the move by the U.S. if it manages to reform the group’s “archaic” rates.
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I'm Interested in Saving Time and Money“Now with the U.S. coming in and saying, ‘Sorry, enough is enough,’ I think this is going to take the conversation to another level, and I’m very happy to see that,” Mr. Hussein said.
Mr. Hussein stressed that even a fast-tracked process has many steps, including the research report, a proposal and a vote by members. At least half of the organization’s 192 members have to vote for a proposal to be considered, and it can pass only with a two-thirds majority.
If the U.S. were to withdraw from the UPU, it would lose access to global processing and coding systems that make international mail possible, and it would have to negotiate bilateral postal agreements with every individual country, Mr. Hussein said. The U.S. has said it hopes to negotiate a solution that keeps it from having to withdraw from the UPU, but also has said it is proceeding with a plan to institute “self-declared” rates that could take effect within six months.

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Target Rolls Out Free 2-Day Delivery Ahead of the Holidays
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The big-box brand with the bullseye dog are at it again, putting a target on competitors’ backs.
In the never-ending pursuit of Amazon and seeking separation from other foes like Walmart, Target has announced the availability of same-day delivery in 46 states ahead of the peak holiday season from Thanksgiving through Christmas. The company is also offering free two-day shipping plus curbside pickup on hundreds of thousands of items with no purchase threshold, from Nov. 1 to Dec 22.
Frank Poore, CEO of ecommerce software firm CommerceHub, said the continual push toward “free” and “fast” by the big three just raise the pressure on the rest of the field to keep up, citing Walmart’s non-subscription-based program and incentives for store pickup, in addition to Target.

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