Retail Randoms

BEFORE YOU GO: ADAPTABILITY / BRAKES / CUSTOMERS

Vegan-friendly meat and greet

With Covid restrictions and warmer weather encouraging more retailers to embrace outdoor dining solutions, here’s a great way of setting your outdoor seating area apart from the boring old continental cafe style that you see outside of most Costas. And what’s more, it’s vegan-friendly. You thought it was great slabs of meat, didn’t you? Go on, admit it. It’s actually rose quartz. Allegedly.

The billion dollar retail outage

As the old cliche has it, you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. A case in point was yesterday’s bizarre episode when the internet apparently broke.

You start to realise how reliant the world has become on the old information superhighway when you discover that, when chunks of the internet went down for just one hour, it is estimated that retailers in the UK, the US and Europe lost a cool billion dollars in sales.

Many of the world’s largest global online retailers including Amazon, eBay, Etsy and Boots were hit by the outage. When you learn that Amazon alone generates sales of $950,000 a minute – yes, every 60 seconds – it doesn’t take long to work out what the cost of an hour’s downtime might look like.

And that’s exactly what delivery specialist ParcelHero did. Their conclusion was that lost revenues will be in excess of $1bn. Ouch.