Dollar Tree's everyday basics grew almost 6% last quarter. The discretionary side, toys and seasonal and party goods, grew under 2%. Dollar Tree and Dollar General reported the same day, and both chief executives worked hard to tell analysts the spread doesn't mean what you think it means. Dollar General credits its share gains to households making over $100,000 a year and raised full year guidance. Rick's read is that a retailer winning because the economy is bad has borrowed the quarter and pays it back later. The more durable move is the $1 frozen set sitting on top of DG Fresh, because a dollar store with a working cold chain is a grocery store in places that don't have one.
Costco shut down the Costco Next marketplace at the end of August, over a weekend, with no notice. Members who bought through it can no longer return the item to Costco. Customer service hands them a vendor phone number. The last thing Costco said publicly about Next was on the third quarter call last May, when CFO Gary Millerchip said a single quarter's sales matched the program's entire fiscal 2022. There has never been a dollar figure for Next in any filing, and a growth rate without a denominator is what you hand analysts when the absolute number is small. Fourth quarter and full year results land September 24.
Greg Foran is rebuilding Kroger with the people he ran Walmart US with. Nate Faber, who cofounded Jet.com and ran supply chain for Walmart's US eCommerce, started as eCommerce chief September 1. Mark Ibbotson, formerly central operations at Walmart and COO at Asda, starts in stores today. Earnings landed between the two start dates. eCommerce grew 20% and turned a profit for a second straight quarter. Identical sales excluding fuel grew two tenths of 1%, and the full year outlook for that measure got cut. Foran called the price work a glide path funded by cost savings rather than margin, which raises the question of what actually pays for it when almost all of roughly $147 billion in revenue is food, operating profit is a little over 3 cents on the dollar, and more than 400,000 associates work under UFCW contracts.
Anthropic published a commerce agent blueprint on September 2, a public GitHub repo with two working reference builds, one shopping agent and one merchant agent. The company says retailers running these see carts up to 35% larger and shoppers 60% more likely to complete a purchase. Those numbers come from the vendor giving the code away, with no baseline and no outside auditor. The blueprint is also silent on payment. Visa and Mastercard are quoted in the announcement talking about trust, and neither shipped code. Shopify's Vanessa Lee says they're building a reference storefront connecting the blueprint through catalog, the universal commerce protocol, and Shop sign-in, which puts Shopify's own login layer inside someone else's agent framework. Somebody could run this in production before December and find out what a 35% lift looks like when it's measured by a party that didn't build it.
Plus the Investor Minute with four raises: Locus Robotics Series G, Atorie in seed, Advizar pre-seed, and Overroute in seed.
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