The holiday season is off to a hot start, with Thanksgiving shopping breaking records for online sales. Mickey Mericle, vice president of marketing and insights at Adobe, joined us to chat about this season's most notable trends.
Adobe is forecasting online sales this season to be over $107 billion, nearly 14 percent higher than last year. The company expects e-commerce to outpace in-store retail by 10 percent. Even though Black Friday has tons of deals, Adobe predicts Cyber Monday to become the largest online shopping day in history.
Mericle breaks down how retailers are reinventing the ways their advertising reaches consumers. She says social media is the fastest-growing way to stand out. Despite growth on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, Mericle says email is still the most popular way.
An independent watchdog within the IRS reports that while taxpayer services have vastly improved, the agency is still too slow to resolve identity theft cases. And National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins says those delays are “unconscionable.” Erin M. Collins said in the report released Wednesday that overall the 2024 filing season went smoothly, though IRS delays in resolving identity theft victim assistance cases are worsening. It took nearly 19 months to resolve self-reported identity theft cases as of January, and Wednesday's report states that now it takes 22 months to resolve these cases.
Amazon.com Inc. surpassed $2 trillion in market value for the first time in afternoon trading on Wednesday. The push higher for Amazon’s stock market valuation comes a little more than a week after Nvidia hit $3 trillion and briefly became the most valuable company on Wall Street. Nvidia’s chips are used to power many AI application and its valuation has soared as a result. Amazon has also been making big investments in AI as global interest has grown in the technology. Most of the company’s focus has been on business-focused products.
Climate change doesn’t just mean more extreme weather – it also leads to billions of dollars in lost productivity, tourism, and stresses infrastructure.
