CORPORATE

The Covid Boom Times Are Over

Companies that enjoyed a surge in sales during the worst of the pandemic last year are confronting a new era of more socializing with people, and less socializing with an imaginary paper towel friend. 

Amazon, a poster child for the Covid boom, fell 7.6% Friday for its worst day in more than a year, dropping Jeff Bezos below French luxury mogul Bernard Arnault on the list of world’s richest people. 

• Devastating for Jeff, and devastating for other e-commerce companies in Amazon’s orbit. Shares in Etsy, Wayfair, and eBay all fell as investors questioned whether they could maintain the Covid momentum. 

“People are getting out more and doing things besides shopping,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told reporters. The company did bring in $113 billion in sales last quarter, but predicted that would drop to between $106–$112 billion for the current quarter due to what analysts like to call “reopening headwinds.”

Who else is taking a hit? 

• Pinterest stock plunged 18% Friday after reporting a 5% decline in global users last quarter. “We believe engagement on Pinterest was disproportionately lower as people began spending more time socializing with friends outside their homes, eating in restaurants, and generally participating in activities that are not our core use cases,” the company wrote.
• Kimberly-Clark, which makes Huggies diapers and Cottonelle toilet paper, said organic sales in its home-care unit fell 17% from Q2 last year. “Clearly our results did not turn out as expected,” the company’s CEO said.

Big picture: Despite rising Covid cases and concerns around the Delta variant, the sort of lockdowns that boosted these companies last year appear to be an artifact of 2020. We’re also learning that certain consumer behaviors established during the early days of Covid—constant sanitizing, home decoration, watching terrible TV shows—are fading as vaccination rates rise. 

COVID

The Hottest Trend in Corporate America

Nope, not the metaverse. Vaccine mandates.

Walmart and Disney, two of the country’s largest private employers, announced Covid-19 vaccine requirements for portions of their staff on Friday, joining other prominent companies requiring some or all of their employees to be vaccinated to come to work. Here’s a quick rundown:

Netflix
Saks Fifth Avenue 
BlackRock
Facebook
Goldman Sachs
Delta and United Airlines
Morgan Stanley 
The Washington Post
Lyft
Uber 
Twitter

Over in the public sector, the US federal government, New York, and California are requiring that workers be vaccinated or get frequently tested for Covid.

Zoom out: Vaccine mandates are popular. Earlier this summer, 64% of Americans said that they would support federal, state, or local governments requiring everyone to get vaccinated, according to a survey by the COVID States Project.

OLYMPICS

From ROC With Love

Sitting behind the US (with 59 medals as of last night) and China (51) in the total Olympic medal count is the athletic powerhouse ROC.

If you’ve never heard of ROC before, it doesn’t mean you’re bad at geography—it’s not a country. It stands for the Russian Olympic Committee, a loophole that allows more than 330 Russian athletes to compete in the Olympics without representing the country itself.

The backstory: In 2019, Russia was banned from international competition for four years for pulling off one of the biggest doping scandals in sports history. 

• One example: During the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russian anti-doping experts swapped more than 100 tainted urine samples for clean ones in the dead of night, the director of Russia’s anti-doping lab told the NYT.

Russia recently got the four-year ban reduced to two years.

Zoom out: Some US swimmers have voiced frustrations about Russian athletes competing in the Tokyo Games. Lily King said yesterday, “I’m sure there were a lot of people competing this week from certain countries who probably shouldn’t have been here.”

+ Optional homework: Watch the Oscar-winning documentary on the Russian doping scandal, Icarus, on Netflix. 

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GRAB BAG

Key Performance Indicators

Stat: Of the nearly 165 million people who’ve been fully vaccinated in the US, at least 125,000 (or 0.08%) have tested positive for Covid-19 and 1,400 (less than 0.001%) have died, according to an NBC News analysis of infections in 38 states. There are caveats—12 states’ data is missing and asymptomatic infections are also likely slipping by unnoticed—but the numbers show that the vaccines are highly effective in preventing serious illness from Covid-19. 

Quote: “Square and Afterpay have a shared purpose.”

Square cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey announced that his fintech company was buying Afterpay, an Australian “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) giant, for $29 billion in stock. The acquisition, Square’s largest yet, means the company’s small business clients will be able to offer Afterpay’s BNPL option to their customers.

Read: Who owns my name? (Amanda Knox)

CALENDAR

The Week Ahead

Infrastructure week, for real this time: After tidying up the final language yesterday, expect the Senate to pass the bipartisan $550 billion infrastructure bill this week before their August break. The House likely won’t take a peek at the package, the biggest of its kind in decades, until September.

Jobs report: The Beyoncé of economic data, the monthly jobs report, will arrive this Friday to reveal how many jobs the US added in July. Economists are expecting 788,000 new jobs, but whatever it is it’ll be notable because Fed Chair Jerome Powell will use the report to help decide when to wind down the Fed’s stimulus programs. 

Earnings: More than 25% of the S&P 500 will report earnings this week. Some names to watch include Alibaba, Roku, CVS, GM, Etsy, Uber, and Square.

Everything else: 

• Boeing and NASA are launching an uncrewed test flight of the Starliner capsule to the International Space Station Tuesday. 
• Barack Obama turns 60 on Wednesday.
• Are you ready for some football? The NFL preseason begins with the Hall of Fame Game on Thursday.
• The Olympics close up shop Sunday.

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Jungle Cruise topped the box office with a $34.1 million debut in North American theaters, plus another $30 million on Disney+.
• Former President Trump has raised a war chest of nearly $102 million as of June.
• The US and UK accused Iran of an attack on an Israeli-managed oil tanker that killed two people.
• Lollapalooza yanked rapper DaBaby from its Sunday lineup over homophobic comments he made last week.

Olympics links

• Kristina Timanovskaya, a Belarusian sprinter, said she was “safe” in police protection after claiming she was taken to the airport by Belarusian team officials to fly home. Timanovskaya had criticized the country’s athletic officials for adding another race to her slate without notice.
• The new fastest man in the world: Italy’s Lamont Jacobs, who won a surprise gold in the men’s 100m dash.
• Latest tearjerker vid: Two high jumpers share a gold medal. 

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Dive back into the week:

• Shallow dive: Business horoscopes
• Medium dive: Drawing corporate logos from memory
• Deep dive: A thread of Black American dances around the US
• Cannonball: Why English is so weird and inconsistent

GAMES

Nutritional Facts

Can you identify the following product by its ingredient list? 

Water, Sugar, Dextrose, Citric Acid, Natural Flavor, Salt, Sodium Citrate, Monopotassium Phosphate, Modified Food Starch, Red 40, Glycerol Ester of Rosin, Caramel Color.

ANSWER

Fruit Punch Gatorade

✤ A Note From Masterworks

See important information.