About 7 years ago

05/10/2017 - Midnight Reads – The Long, Hard, Unprecedented Fall of Sears

The Long, Hard, Unprecedented Fall of Sears

– Bloomberg

From Bloomberg: “In 1989, Sears Roebuck & Co. ruled America as its biggest retailer. It loomed over rivals from a perch high above Chicago, inside what was once the world’s tallest building – one bearing the company’s name. The fall from that height may finally be nearing an end. Over the course of almost three decades, the company experienced what industry observers described as one of the most monumental collapses in business history.”

 

Here’s Our First Look at Uber Freight, Uber’s Long-Haul Trucking Venture

– The Verge

Uber Freight was intended to act much like Uber’s app, connecting a shipper with a truck. Now it appears it will actually include its own fleet of semis, which can be a costly venture when you factor in maintenance, fuel prices, and insurance.

 

Self-Driving Trucks

– MIT Technology Review

Tractor-trailers without a human at the wheel will soon barrel onto highways near you. What will this mean for the nation’s 1.7 million truck drivers – and the companies and consumers who depend on the products inside those trucks?

 

Is the Gig Economy Working?

– The New Yorker

The American workplace can be seen as a national identity or as a site of chronic upheaval and social problems. The manufacturing industry that drove America’s rise in the nineteenth century was often inhumane. The twentieth-century corrective — a corporate workplace of rules, hierarchies, collective bargaining, triplicate forms — brought its own unfairnesses. The gig economy reflects the endlessly personalizable values of our own era, but its social effects, untried by time, remain uncertain.