Comment on Country Stores, a New England Institution, Are Going Dark

Salesforce predicts about one in five online purchases in the U. S., the UK, Australia, and Canada will be made through four online marketplaces: Shein, Temu, TikTok Shop, and AliExpress. Shopping on Temu can feel like playing an arcade game. Instead of using a joystick-controlled claw to grab a toy, visitors to the online marketplace maneuver their computer mouses or cellphone screens to browse colorful gadgets, accessories, and trinkets with prices that look too good to refuse.

The affected products can be identified by their expiration dates, so check your packaging now. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that there is yet another food recall that Americans need to know about. This time, the recall involves vegetables that experts fear may be contaminated with E. coli.

Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve, delivery companies will handle nearly 2.2 billion deliveries and returns. The weak demand bedeviling package delivery companies like United Parcel Service and FedEx promises to be great news for online U. S. shoppers who want quick, on-time holiday gift delivery.

Adobe Analytics, an online shopping tracker, expects consumers to spend a record $13.2 billion on Monday. Consumers in the United States are scouring the internet for online deals as they look to take advantage of the post-Thanksgiving shopping marathon with Cyber Monday. Even though e-commerce is now part and parcel of many people’s regular routines and the holiday shopping season, Cyber Monday—a term coined in 2005 by the National Retail Federation—has become the biggest online shopping day of the year, thanks to the deals and the hype the industry has created to fuel it.

The European Search Perspective project faces serious obstacles, but the U. S. government’s proposed search-antitrust settlement with Google could lend it a hand. Google’s dominance of web search—consistently above 85% of the market in the U. S.—is an unmissable fact of online life. But a key source of that power is much less obvious: the exhaustive index of web pages that Google has created and maintains, and which is so comprehensive that even alternative search engines often have to rent it out.

Design isn’t dead, but it is evolving. Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.