Bitcoin News Australia

If I ran a $1.4T company like Amazon, I would:

• End each day looking at the long list of full countries with less money
• Dive into my gigantic pile of money like Scrooge McDuck
• Feel invincible

This week, Amazon’s leadership can continue doing the first two, but the “feeling invincible” thing may get a bit harder.

Amazon officials will meet with FTC commissioners, including Chair Lina Khan, ahead of an antitrust lawsuit that threatens to break up its ecommerce empire.

What both sides are thinking

• FTC: Khan’s agency has various pending cases targeting Google, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft, but this week’s Amazon action — which Bloomberg calls “the Big One” — would be its boldest move yet against Big Tech.
• The exact scope of the case is still unknown, but is believed to focus on Amazon’s alleged monopolistic treatment of outside sellers, how it rewards some merchants and punishes others.
• Amazon: The tech giant’s on the offensive, per Ars Technica — accusing the FTC of harassing founder Jeff Bezos and CEO Andy Jassy, and seeking to remove Khan (whose rise followed a 2017 paper calling out Amazon’s anticompetitive behavior) from the case.
  • This FTC action is seen as one of the gravest threats to Amazon’s business in its nearly three decades of operation. If the feds win in court, it could eventually result in a forced breakup or restructuring.

What’s next?

A lot more posturing and a lot more time in court for both parties.

This week’s “last rites” meetings offer Amazon one final shot to argue its case before commissioners vote on official antitrust action.

If a suit follows as expected, it’d spend years being litigated, per Politico.

That’d already be a win for the FTC. Its antitrust suits aren’t always pursued with courtroom victories in mind, per Harvard Business Review — they’re a tool to stymie companies it feels have grown too powerful and to discourage future dealmaking.

In the meantime… say it with us, Amazon: “We’ve got more money than Switzerland. We’ve got this.”

Open closet. Try to keep a rat’s nest of old cords and boxes of Lord knows what from falling on me. Close closet. Sigh.

Managing the ratio of accumulated stuff to available space is a nightmare — unless you’re making gobs of money running a storage facility.

Business has been brisk

Few industries had a better pandemic than the self-storage sector; in 2021, The Wall Street Journal called it the “best bet in real estate.”

While storage company profits and stocks have cooled from historic covid-fueled peaks, they are still wildly outperforming the rest of the S&P 500.

A housing crisis is a storage opportunity; everyone’s got so much stuff but can only dream of having enough house for it all, per WSJ.

• More than 10% of Americans lease storage space today.
• In June, they paid an average of ~$166/month to do so.

Cashing in on panic

Google searches for “Storage near me” are continually rising — so long as there’s death, divorce, disaster, moving, marriages, and mangers, there’ll be people scrambling to pack things away.

Even when the value of goods in storage doesn’t match the price of storing them, customers weirdly don’t seem to mind.

• Industry leader Extra Space Storage now issues ~130k rent-increase notices each month, and most customers don’t bat an eyelash. Talking pricing in June, CEO Joe Margolis noted that existing renters “didn’t care if it was $75 or $100.”

Wondering why Extra Space just dropped $11.5B to buy up rival Life Storage and create the largest storage operator in the US? Look no further than this captive consumer base.

$435m+: annual sales for Cheerios, the US’s best-selling cereal. General Mills has been making this breakfast staple for 82 years, but did you know it used to be called Cheerioats? The name changed in 1945 over a copyright claim to “oats” branding by Quaker Oats, per Food Dive.

814,466: at least the number of “Baldur’s Gate III” players, despite the “Dungeons & Dragons”-based RPG being in early access for three years, and so far only being available on PC. Belgian developer Larian Studios had expected ~100k players max. Most importantly, players have petted Scratch, a dog, 750k+ times.

800: pounds of butter used for the Illinois State Fair’s “Butter Cow” sculpture. The fair’s first butter cow debuted in 1922 when J.E. Wallace sculpted Raleigh’s Sybil, a cow that produced a then-record 18.8k+ pounds of milk in 1920. Sarah Pratt sculpted this year’s cow, which you can watch rotate via livestream through Aug. 20.

$1.9m: the fundraising haul for Fieldwork Robotics’ autonomous raspberry-picking robots. The gentle, four-armed harvesting machines are a part of climate investor Elbow Beach Capital’s delightful portfolio, including a broccoli upcycling startup and Muddy Machines, another robotics company specializing in harvesting asparagus.