A pack of migraine meds… with your monthly TP delivery. Amazon’s doubling down on its pharmacy biz with a new prescription-drug subscription. Prime members can now buy unlimited meds (and get ’em delivered to their doorstep) for a flat fee of $5/month — no insurance necessary. The subscription (dubbed “RXPass”) offers 80 medications for everything from high blood pressure to anxiety. Amazon’s targeting people who are juggling numerous prescriptions: 150M+ Americans take one or more of the drugs included in the RXPass.

• Look back: Amazon bought online pharmacy PillPack for $750M in 2018 and splurged nearly $4B on membership-based health-clinic chain One Medical last year.

• Pill pack: So far only 14% of prescription customers know about Amazon’s PillPack online pharmacy, but over a third say they plan to switch pharmacies in the next year.

Getting crowded… Nearly half of US adults take two or more meds daily, and a quarter say it’s difficult to afford the treatment they need. Now retailers are scrambling to get more prescription business. In 2021 Walmart added prescription discounts to its Walmart+ membership program. Mark Cuban’s discounted Cost Plus e-pharmacy attracted 1.5M customers just a year after launching. Meanwhile, CVS and Walgreens have ramped up their prescription offerings with features like mobile ordering and delivery. Amazon’s big differentiator: offering many drugs at one flat rate.

Soft landing… Microsoft kicked off Big Tech earnings yesterday on an upbeat note. Shares of the software titan spiked 4% after it reported (slightly) better-than-expected earnings, courtesy of solid cloud growth. Microsoft’s cloud-computing unit — aka: the second-largest cloud biz after Amazon’s AWS — grew revenue by 31% from last year, a slowdown from previous quarters. Investors were uplifted by the small earnings beat, but Microsoft’s reality is not so suite:

• Far from Excel-ent: Total sales grew at the slowest pace since 2016, and profit dropped for the first time in eight years (from $18.7B last year, to $16.4B).

• Iffy Outlook: Last week Microsoft said it was slashing 10K workers to prepare for a recession as the remote-work boom wanes.

New year, new me… Microsoft is the first of the Big Tech Five (Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta) to report. In 2021, they demolished earnings with jaw-dropping records. In May of that year, Microsoft posted its strongest revenue growth since 2018, while Apple and Amazon delivered quarterly records. This year, it’s a different story:

• The remaining four of the Big Tech Five are also expected to release lower quarterly earnings as demand slows, recession fears grow, and layoffs abound.

• Walmore: Walmart, aka America’s largest employer, said it's raising its minimum wage for store staff to $14/hour. The goal: attract and retain workers in a still competitive job market.

• Googopoly: The Justice Department sued Google, saying it has a monopoly over online advertising tech. It's the fifth govt antitrust suit against the search giant since 2020, and aims to make Google sell off its ad tech.

• 3Miss: 3M announced it's laying off 2.5K employees as demand for disposable face masks sags. The Minnesota biz manufactures everything from Post-its to Scotch tape to "forever chemicals."

• Vaxing: Johnson & Johnson said its quarterly earnings dropped 25% as global demand for its Covid vax sank 57%. Still, sales of its over-the-counter meds like Tylenol got a boost during flu season.

• Whynance: Crypto exchange Binance said it was a "mistake" to keep customers' funds and collateral for its tokens in the same digital wallet. Meanwhile, regulators said exchanges shouldn't mix their crypto with customers'.

• Earnings expected from Tesla, Abbott Labs, AT&T, Boeing, NextEra Energy, Kimberly Clark, Levi, and IBM

Authors of this Snacks own shares of: Amazon, Apple, CVS, Google, Microsoft, Walmart and Tesla

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