What we’re reading (11/17)
“Amazon Launches Online Pharmacy” (Wall Street Journal). “Amazon.com Inc. said Tuesday customers can buy prescription medications through a new store on its platform, a move that comes as more people grow increasingly accustomed to shopping online. The news weighed on shares of other drugstore companies Tuesday before the market opened. Shares of CVS Health Corp. were down 8.5% premarket, while shares of Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. were off 11.2%. Shares of Amazon were up 2.4%.”
“Walmart Earnings Top Expectations As Customers’ New Shopping Habits Send E-Commerce Sales Soaring 79%” (CNBC). “Walmart reported third-quarter earnings on Tuesday that topped Wall Street’s expectations as customers continued to shop online and sent U.S. e-commerce sales soaring by 79%. The discounter said customers are embracing the new ways of shopping they adopted during the global health crisis. As the holiday shopping season begins, instead of browsing store aisles, more of them are shipping purchases to their homes, getting groceries dropped off at their doors or picking up online purchases by the curbside.”
“Recession With A Difference: Women Face Special Burden” (New York Times). “For millions of working women, the coronavirus pandemic has delivered a rare and ruinous one-two-three punch. First, the parts of the economy that were smacked hardest and earliest by job losses were ones where women dominate — restaurants, retail businesses and health care. Then a second wave began taking out local and state government jobs, another area where women outnumber men. The third blow has, for many, been the knockout: the closing of child care centers and the shift to remote schooling. That has saddled working mothers, much more than fathers, with overwhelming household responsibilities. ‘We’ve never seen this before,’ said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan and the mother of a second grader and a sixth grader. Recessions usually start by gutting the manufacturing and construction industries, where men hold most of the jobs, she said.”
“Fund Managers Have Hopped On The Rotation-To-Value Trade, Latest Bank Of America Survey Shows” (MarketWatch). “News that two coronavirus vaccines have been effective — as well as a relatively smoothly run U.S. election — have sparked a big switch into energy financial and travel stocks…[a] total of 216 panelists running $573 billion in assets under management participated in the survey, which ended on Nov. 12, which was after drugmaker Pfizer announced its vaccine effectiveness but before biotech Moderna did.”
“How Copart Is Making A Billion Dollars From A Junkyard” (Forbes). “‘We took a relatively unsophisticated business where they were selling cars over an oral auction, and turned that into a business that receives a hundred billion dollars a year in bids and is doing 100% of it online,’ says Copart’s 51-year-old CEO, Aaron ‘Jay’ Adair, in a Zoom call with the company’s founder — and his father-in-law — Willis J. Johnson, 73. ‘Nobody has to be at our yard,’ adds Johnson. ‘When we're having an auction online, it doesn't matter if Florida is having a tornado; we’re selling cars.’”
