They keep shaking the bottle at Bud Light maker Anheuser-Busch, with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters — a union that represents 5,000 AB employees — threatening a strike starting March 1.
Teamster President Sean O'Brien said the beer maker has repeatedly put forward contract proposals that threaten to close breweries and lay off workers, which the company categorically denies. On top of that, AB is still struggling to regain the weekly beer sales it lost because of a boycott ignited by Bud Light partnering with trans activist Dylan Mulvaney for part of its March Madness ad campaign last year. The King of Beers faces dethronement.
BIG TECH
Amazon Could Soon Be On the Hook for Everything it Sells
It's everything Jeff Bezos' everything bazaar feared.
The US Consumer Product Safety Commission is gearing up to hit Amazon with an order that will force it to assume liability for items sold by third-party vendors, according to a Thursday report from The Wall Street Journal. Amazon, like its Big Tech brethren, has fought hard to assert that it functions as a mere platform, a medium for sellers to reach potential customers. Now, however, it looks like that argument might have finally run its course…
We Just Sell The Stuff
Amazon's relationship with third-party vendors is… complicated. According to Amazon's own stats, third-party sellers account for over 60% of the volume of items sold on Amazon. In 2022, that added up to 4.1 billion items. Over the years Amazon has also exerted greater control over its independent sellers. Last year a study showed Amazon levied higher commissions on third-party sales than ever, and in August it imposed fees on sellers that didn't use Amazon's logistics and fulfillment service.
But sources told the WSJ that the CPSC is done hearing that Amazon isn't responsible for the billions of products sold on its platform by third-party sellers:
Per the WSJ, the CPSC launched an investigation into Amazon in 2019 after the paper published reports on potentially dangerous merchandise being sold on Amazon Marketplace, its third-party sales platform. The WSJ also reported at the time that some items sold on Amazon had previously been dug out of the trash — good to know that raccoons have learned how to use Amazon.
In 2021 the CPSC sued Amazon to force it to issue a recall for a variety of products including 24,000 faulty carbon monoxide detectors, children's pajamas that were found to be too flammable to be legally sold, and 400,000 hair dryers that hadn't been properly tested to see if they might give users an electric shock.
Amazon has already had its mellow severely harshed by regulators this week. On Monday, Amazon backpedaled from its plans to acquire Roomba-maker iRobot once it was clear that competition authorities would block the deal.
Death of a Salesbot: Amazon's come-one-come-all approach to third-party vendors has helped make it the company it is today, but when it launched Marketplace it didn't have to contend with the possibility of AI-generated listings. Business Insider reported last month that listings have surfaced on the site that appear to have been fabricated by generative AI, including a listing for a dresser entitled: "I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request. It goes against OpenAI use policy. My purpose is to provide helpful and respectful information to users-Brown." Well, at least we know what color it is.
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Google is buying wind farms to offset the carbon footprint created by its data farms.
On Thursday, the tech giant announced it is signing power purchase agreements with two offshore wind farms to power its data centers in Europe, marking the company's biggest wind deal of its kind.
Data in the Wind
Powering data centers takes a lot of energy, and Google has ambitious plans to match every hour of energy use with an hour of clean energy by 2030 (the key word here is match, not necessarily replace). But wind power remains a costly endeavor, stifling the industry's growth. Which is why renewable energy producers have leaned into the burgeoning power purchase agreement (PPA) economy, in which companies committed to using clean energy, like Google, write big checks to help support developing new plants.
With this latest PPA, Google takes one step further toward its energy goals — while adding more sustainable energy to the power grid in the process:
Google's PPAs are with the CrossWind and Ecowende consortia, two joint enterprises run by Shell and Eneco, and will center on two wind farms off the coast of the Netherlands. Together, the plants will add about 700 megawatts of capacity to the country's grid, good for about 6% of the nation's overall annual energy consumption.
Google, meanwhile, says that combined with previous PPAs, its two Dutch data centers will start running on about 90% clean energy as soon as this year. The company has also signed similar, but smaller, PPAs to support data center power consumption in Poland, Italy, and Belgium.
Lump of Coal: The proliferation of power-guzzling artificial intelligence technologies will only add to the problem of Big Tech power demand. In fact, electricity consumption at US data centers is expected to triple its 2022 levels by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group. That's reshaping the entire energy industry, and, crucially, keeping coal plants alive longer than expected, per a recent Bloomberg report. US energy companies have now delayed closing almost 24 coal plants in the US that were scheduled to shut down between 2022 and 2028, according to coal trade group America's Power. Move fast and break things, Silicon Valley — just please not the planet.
Written by Brian Boyle
HEALTHCARE
WeightWatchers May Be No Match for Obesity-Drug Craze
If you're on WeightWatchers, you love to see numbers go down. But if you run WeightWatchers, well…
After a solid and hopeful 2023, shares of WW International (the brand's official name) just experienced their worst month ever, falling nearly 60% amid signs of waning demand for subscriptions, Bloomberg reported. Can meme status be far away?
Shedding the Pounds
WeightWatchers made its name in a gentler era of dieting, with an array of meetings, branded meals, and support groups giving way to a simplified calorie-counting app that encourages members to eat what they want within moderation. But with the emergence of habit-curbing, anti-obesity drugs like Novo Nordisk's Wegovy and now Eli Lilly's Zepbound, businesses built on traditional dieting are in serious jeopardy:
Last March, WW acquired telehealth anti-obesity drug provider Sequence, a move that secured the stock's biggest one-day gain in nearly a decade. But last month, Eli Lilly launched its own telehealth platform to sell directly to consumers.
Whether Lilly's move was the reason or not, WW also experienced fewer app downloads on Androids and less web traffic so far this year, a trend seen in similar traditional weight loss services like Noom, Bloomberg reported. WW's stock closed up slightly on Tuesday with a 5% uptick, but it's still within shouting distance of its all-time low in 2015.
While the start of 2024 has not been ideal, WW's Q4 earnings report in March should offer a clearer picture, and D.A. Davidson & Co. analyst Linda Bolton Weiser told Bloomberg the company is still well-positioned for the long term: "They have brand equity, whereas nobody else really does in the weight-loss space."
Where'd You Get This? If you're considering weight-loss drugs, the World Health Organization says to be wary of counterfeits. Both anti-obesity and similarly acting diabetes medications have been in short supply for nearly two years, and the WHO said it suspects fake versions are being sold through unregulated outlets like social media platforms. Reuters reported that three people in the US with dangerously low blood sugar sought medical attention last year after possible fake doses of Novo Nordisk's Ozempic.
Written by Griffin Kelly
Extra Upside
Not like riding a bike: Even though it gained subscribers, Peloton revenue and outlook continues to drop.
Making headlines: Staffers from the Chicago Tribune and six other newsrooms stage 24-hour walkout.
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Death of a Salesbot: Amazon's come-one-come-all approach to third-party vendors has helped make it the company it is today, but when it launched Marketplace it didn't have to contend with the possibility of AI-generated listings. 
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