The Friday Report: August 28th, 2020

Amazon Provides Seamless Service via Amazon Fresh Grocery Store

Amazon announced that it has designed a grocery store from the ground up to provide a seamless shopping experience for consumers who are shopping either online or in a brick and mortar store.  The new Amazon Fresh grocery store will offer free same-day delivery for Amazon Prime members.

Amazon Fresh will feature a wide variety of goods from prepared foods made fresh in-store daily to nationally branded products, fresh produce and high-quality meat and seafood.  Using the Amazon Dash Cart, consumers will be able to skip the checkout line.  Amazon Alexa can be used to manage grocery shopping lists as well as to navigate the store aisles.

The Amazon Dash Cart leverages sign into an Amazon Fresh QR code in the Amazon app and facilitates a frictionless check out when used in the Dash Cart checkout lane to automatically process payment for the groceries selected.         

The first Amazon Fresh store location will be in Woodland Hills California.

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194-Year Old Retailer Lord & Taylor Announces Liquidation

After nearly two hundred years of successful operation, Lord & Taylor, the high end department store announced it was closing all its locations and going out of business.  The initial announcement indicated that 14 locations would remain open however the company switched course soon after and decided to begin liquidation and close all its stores.

Lord & Taylor, the first department store established in the United States had filed for bankruptcy on August 2nd, following similar announcements by Brooks Brothers and Neiman Marcus.

How Hurricane Evacuations Are Impacted by COVID-19

Shortly before the 15-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the game-changing destructive hurricane that changed the lives of millions along the Gulf Coast, Hurricane Laura came ashore in southern Louisiana.  More than simply another killer storm, Hurricane Laura brings along with it a fresh set of new worries:  namely how to evacuate a huge population safely without increasing the spread of COVID-19.

The pandemic led the state government to eliminate offering shelters, primarily because the rate of infection in Louisiana is outpacing that of Florida, Arizona and New York.  The governor noted his concern that even if the maximum precautions were taken, the situation of housing a population inside would be deemed to be unsafe.

Scientists have already forewarned of the likelihood that the incidence of infections would escalate along with that of a major hurricane.  Researchers from Columbia University and the Union of Concerned Scientists determined that hurricanes that met or exceeded a ranking of Category 3 could result in thousands of new coronavirus infections. Considering the likely evacuation routes, the incidence of infections is projected to increase when populations flee to areas with already high infection rates.

Factors such as the availability and use of personal protective equipment (PPE) and necessity of using mass transportation, and the time limitations of the mass movement complicate the scenarios and rates of infection.

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