Executive Summary

• This week’s note “From the Desk of Deborah Weinswig” discusses what we have learned from visiting and analyzing Amazon’s physical stores.
• The Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday kickoff of the US holiday shopping season showed the increasing preference for online purchases, as more Americans opted to stay home and use their smartphones and sales and traffic at brick-and-mortar stores declined.
• Some forecasters are predicting that UK shoppers likely spent more than £7 billion ($9 billion) across Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
• Swedish furniture and home products company IKEA announced that it will open the world’s largest store, at the SM Mall of Asia in the Philippines, in 2020. IKEA will invest $134 million in the 700,000-square-foot store, which will offer 9,000 products and also have a warehouse, an e-commerce facility and a call center.