If you build it, they will come (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
If you build it, they will come (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
Hey Snackers,
The hottest trend in podcasting: white noise. Spotify podcasters are raking in as much as $18K/month with pods that consist of nothing but the soothing sounds of running vacuum cleaners and waterfalls.
Stocks rallied to break a two-day losing streak as investors set inflation and economic growth fears aside, putting all three major indexes on pace to close the week in the green. The Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq are now between 8% and 12% off their 52-week lows.
Sparks are (still) flying… Despite production delays, EV investment isn’t going anywhere. This week Ford doubled down on its electrification plans. Supply shortages (think: chips, lithium) have eaten into sales across the industry, but Ford has fared better than its rivals:
Your e-truck’s on back order… but you can still buy a charger. EV sales hit nearly 7M last year, tripling their market share from two years ago. Because automakers can’t crank out EVs fast enough, they’ve found other ways to invest in an electric future:
The electric revolution is underway… but the road ahead is long (and probably won’t have enough charging stations). Although demand for electric cars is growing faster than expected — $6 gas will do that — EV production could lag behind for years on prolonged chip and material shortages, plus slow infrastructure development (think: few chargers). Since automakers can’t manufacture EVs any faster, they’ve shifted their focus to manufacturing future EV customers, by creating convenient charging stations and battery options.
Looks like a mega-mall... actually Amazon’s biggest warehouse ever. The five-story, 4M-square-foot facility has been under construction in Southern California since last summer — eons ago in the world of ecommerce. The distribution center is about to come online at a time when Amazon finds itself with too much warehouse space.
(Ware)house hunters… At the height of the pandemic, retailers like Amazon, Costco, and Walmart snapped up record amounts of storage and fulfillment space to keep up with demand. Their belief was that Covid would accelerate the transition to ecommerce and they’d have the square footage to keep the boom going. But two years later, online shopping has cooled and consumer retail habits are roughly back to where they were pre-pandemic. That’s causing online-only retailers like Amazon to offload extra space to cut costs — and it’s leading to a real-estate ripple effect.
Amazon bit off more than it could chew… and its decision to cut back on its industrial footprint could signal trouble for other ecommerce players who took on too much too soon — not to mention the warehouse industry that supports them. Commercial real-estate giant CBRE is expecting industrial leasing volume to fall 15% this year from 2021’s record highs.
Reno, Nevada, is west of Los Angeles.
Authors of this Snacks own: bitcoin and ethereum and shares of Amazon, Walmart, Block, Apple, Spotify, Tesla, and Ford.
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