Amazon Prime Day has arrived once again. More accurately, it’s Prime Days, with deals running until Friday this week. The Standard and Independent are among those swept up in all the excitement, with both running live blogs about the best deals on offer. But it’s even even bigger news in the US, with Reuters reporting shoppers will spend a predicted $23.8bn across the country during the 96-hour extravaganza.
The FT, meanwhile, reports that both Amazon and Walmart will lock horns after the e-commerce giant and the world’s biggest retailer set their flagship annual discount periods for the same dates in a battle to win US consumers. Seattle-based Amazon moved its annual Prime Day digital sales event to begin on 8 July, matching the date of Walmart’s sales period last year, and lengthened it from two to four days.
Walmart, meanwhile, stuck to the same start date, setting up a head-on clash. It also one-upped Amazon by extending its event from four days to six with its “Walmart Deals” period. “The two retail giants are locked in heated competition for US consumer loyalty,” says Sky Canaves, an analyst at Emarketer.
Reuters, meanwhile, reports on other challenges for the online giant after a federal judge in Seattle on Monday said tens of millions of users of Amazon.com’s cloud-based voice service Alexa can band together in a class action accusing the tech giant of deceptively recording and collecting their private conservations. The Alexa users met the legal threshold to sue in a nationwide class action for monetary damages and a court order to stop the alleged privacy violations, US district judge Robert Lasnik said.
The agency also reports trouble for fmcg food giant Nestlé’s recent announcement that chairman Paul Bulcke will step down following rising investor unease over the food group’s share price, the tenure of previous CEO Mark Schneider and concerns its corporate governance model was out of date, investors told Reuters. It quotes investors saying support for Bulcke, 70, was ebbing away due to doubts about Nestlé’s recovery after the pandemic, when sales volumes flagged in 2023 as the world’s largest packaged food maker increased prices to offset rising raw material costs.
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