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Saks Comeback Plan, Victoria's Secret Boardroom Fight, AI Earnings Reality
Episode 2578th May 2026 • The Watson Weekly: eCommerce Strategy & News • Watson Weekly
00:00:00 00:27:33

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Three stories on the table this week, and none of them small.

Saks Global plans to exit Chapter 11 on June 22nd carrying $1.2 billion in debt, with a reorganization plan targeting $9 billion in GMV by fiscal 2030. That's nearly double where they sit today. Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky walk through the vendor mess (720 brands stopped shipping at the worst of it), the repair work underway, and why exiting bankruptcy this leveraged sets up another round of trouble down the road.

The Watson Weekly Weekend edition is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and compliance for leading eCommerce brands. For more details: https://avalaratax.watsonweekly.com

Over at Victoria's Secret, Australian investor Brett Blundy's BBRC Worldwide has built a roughly 13% stake and is pushing to remove two directors: chair Donna James and Miriam Naficy. The complaint is acquisitions like Adore Me. CEO Hillary Super is running a "path to potential" plan built around body positivity and a return to the Angels heritage. Fiscal 2025 sales are up 5%. The question is whether that's enough to keep the activist quiet.

Then earnings. Alphabet did $109B in Q1, with Google Cloud growing 63% YoY to a $20B run rate and a $462B backlog. Amazon hit $181B, AWS grew 28% to $37.5B, and the chip business crossed a $20B run rate of its own. Shopify cleared $100B in quarterly GMV for the first time, with operating income up 88% on the back of all the layoffs and restructuring.

The thread underneath all of it: AI compute is getting more expensive, not less. The pricing power is sitting with the infrastructure layer. Amazon, Nvidia, and the LLM owners are collecting the rent. The businesses adopting AI are paying it.

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