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Target’s sales continued to climb in the fourth quarter, surpassing analysts estimates, as the retailer capitalized on the shift in consumer shopping habits to buying online and picking up their purchases in stores.
The company said on Tuesday that its sales in the fourth quarter increased nearly 21 percent, higher than the 17 percent that Wall Street expected.
The strong fourth quarter, buoyed in part by stimulus spending by consumers, caps a year of staggering growth at Target. Target reported that its sales growth for 2020 of more than $15 billion “was greater than the company’s total sales growth over the prior 11 years.”
After years of investment in its online ordering and in-store pickup services, the company has emerged as a top winner during the pandemic, gaining billions in market share from less adept retailers.
Amid such strong results in 2020, the company was also being hailed for its decision to raise its starting wage to $15 an hour last year.
“Target tops a record year with a phenomenal fourth quarter,” Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote on Twitter. “After — but not despite — raising its starting wage to $15/hour.”
The company did not provide guidance for the coming year. Analysts noted that it would be difficult for Target to top its growth in 2020 as other retailers are likely to see their businesses bounce back in the next few months.
Credit…Rosem Morton for The New York Times
Instacart, the grocery delivery company, said on Tuesday that it has raised another $265 million in a funding that values it at $39 billion, more than doubling its valuation for the second time in a year.
Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, which are existing investors in Instacart, participated in the latest financing for the eight-year-old start-up. Over the last year, Instacart has raised two rounds of funding totaling $525 million. It was previously valued at $17.7 billion.
The pandemic has supercharged Instacart’s growth. Customers eager to avoid shopping in stores are using the company’s app-based grocery ordering service. Laid-off workers have also turned to gig-economy jobs, like Instacart shopping, to make money. Instacart now has 500,000 shoppers who work on contract.
“This past year ushered in a new normal, changing the way people shop for groceries and goods,” Nick Giovanni, Instacart’s chief financial officer, said in a statement.
Instacart has weathered criticism of its business model as it has expanded. Earlier this year, layoffs of some of Instacart’s few unionized workers prompted accusations of union busting. Grocery stores have said the app’s fees of around 10 percent have made it difficult to make a profit.
The company delivers goods from 600 retailers across 45,000 stores in the United States and Canada. It has expanded beyond groceries to include office supplies, sporting goods, prescription drugs and pet supplies from chains including Staples, Dick’s Sporting Goods, CVS and Petco.
Instacart said it planned to use the new funding to hire more employees and to expand business lines including advertising for consumer packaged goods companies and enterprise software for retailers.
In a statement, Jeff Jordan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said his firm had been impressed by the way Instacart had shown resilience in the pandemic and “met the moment of 2020.”
The company has been named as a candidate to go public. In January, it appointed Mr. Giovanni, formerly of Goldman Sachs, as chief financial officer.
Credit…Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times
Gary Gensler, President Biden’s nominee to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, fields questions regularly as a professor at M.I.T. But on Tuesday, his audience will consist of senators on the banking committee, who will vet his nomination by asking him about some of the same topics as his students — like cryptocurrency and financial market plumbing — in a more pointed fashion.
Republicans’ focus, a person familiar with the committee minority’s thinking told the DealBook newsletter, will be on Mr. Gensler’s record as the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under President Barack Obama. They believe he revealed a tendency to “aggressively” advocate regulation and stretch regulatory power to its limits. Their fear is that he will write rules to advance liberal policy priorities, citing climate change specifically.
Corporate climate disclosures will be another hot topic. The S.E.C. last week said it would look more closely at corporate climate statements, and Mr. Gensler’s opening statement calls for “strengthening transparency and accountability in our markets” in general.
Democrats say they welcome additional discussion on increased disclosure:
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“I’ll be carefully watching Gary Gensler’s answers on issues like climate risk disclosure, corporate diversity, and investor protection,” said Tina Smith of Minnesota.
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Bob Menendez of New Jersey intends to ask about increased disclosure of corporate political spending, a representative said. He wants companies to reveal more about their donations and seek shareholder approval for spending.
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Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is curious about the rules and limits on the timing and disclosure of insider stock trades.
And then there is GameStop. The committee chairman, Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, railed against Wall Street during the meme-stock frenzy, and that episode is sure to come up on Tuesday A representative for Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said that he intended to ask Mr. Gensler about payment for order flow.
Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming and the first senator to invest in Bitcoin, will focus on the nominee’s commitment to “financial regulations that foster innovation,” according to a representative. Mr. Gensler, who teaches blockchain courses at M.I.T. and is also a former Goldman banker, should be game. Alluding to his job at the intersection of finance and technology, the banker-turned-regulator-turned-academic cautiously acknowledged the promise of fintech in his statement and said rules must evolve with new tools.
The confirmation hearing for Rohit Chopra, nominated to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will also take place on Tuesday. Republicans are wary of Mr. Chopra, the person familiar with their thinking said; they view him as a protégé of Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts and a banking committee member, who created the C.F.P.B. and whose progressive economic policy positions conservatives starkly oppose.
Mr. Chopra is expected to revive the enforcement powers of the bureau which had waned under the Trump administration.
In a copy of his opening statement, Mr. Chopra said, “consumers continue to discover serious errors on their credit reports or feel forced to make payments to debt collectors on bills they already paid or never owed to begin with, including for medical treatment related to Covid-19.”
Credit…Audrey Mcavoy/Associated Press
U.S. markets
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The S&P 500 was unchanged in early trading on Tuesday. On Monday, it gained 2.4 percent, the most since June. The Nasdaq and Dow Jones industrial average had jumped by the most since early November.
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Traders are recovering from a volatile few days when a sell-off in government bonds rattled the equity market. On Monday, the rout eased but now bond yields are pushing higher again. The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes rose 3 basis points, or 0.03 percentage point, to 1.45 percent on Tuesday.
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Analysts at RBC Capital Markets said markets had been testing the central banks’ resolve to keep interest rates low globally and that policymakers would have to take action to drive this message home.
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“However, we remain convinced that the structural upward pressure on yields remains,” they wrote in a note. “The reopening of the economies coupled with sizable fiscal spending programs and supply constraints will make it difficult for bond markets” to gain. Bond prices rise when their yields decline.
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Shares in Zoom rose more than 6 percent in early trading after the video conferencing company said its revenue surged 326 percent in its past fiscal year to $2.65 billion.
Europe
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Stock indexes across Europe were mostly higher. The Stoxx 600 Europe gained 0.5 percent.
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The annual inflation rate for the eurozone was 0.9 percent in February, the same as the previous month and in line with economists’ expectations, data published Tuesday showed. “These numbers represent the calm before the storm,” Claus Vistesen, an economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in a note. In a few months, he wrote, inflation will jump to reflect the change in energy prices over the past year.
Asia
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Most stock indexes in Asia dropped after China’s top financial regulator said that the high leverage in the financial system needed to be reduced. Guo Shuqing said he was “very worried” about bubbles in China’s property sector and that bubbles in U.S. and European markets could burst.
Credit…Pierre Albouy/Reuters
Volvo Cars said it would convert its entire lineup to battery power by 2030, phasing out internal combustion engine vehicles faster than other automakers like General Motors.
Volvo, based in Sweden and owned by Geely Holding of China, has been ahead of larger rivals in converting to electric power. In 2019, all the models it sold were either hybrids or ran solely on batteries.
By 2030, Volvo will “phase out any car in its global portfolio with an internal combustion engine, including hybrids,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
Hybrids have better fuel economy than conventional vehicles, but they may not be much better for the climate or for urban air quality if drivers do not use the electric capabilities.
G.M.’s promise to sell only emission-free vehicles, which it made in January, does not take effect until 2035.
Volvo acknowledged that it was responding in part to pressure from governments, many of which have announced bans on internal combustion engines in coming years.
The company said its decision was based “on the expectation that legislation as well as a rapid expansion of accessible high quality charging infrastructure will accelerate consumer acceptance of fully electric cars.”
In another break from industry practice, Volvo’s electric models will be sold exclusively online, bypassing dealers.
“Instead of investing in a shrinking business, we choose to invest in the future — electric and online,” Hakan Samuelsson, the chief executive of Volvo, said in a statement.
Credit…Wes Frazer for The New York Times
A unionizing campaign that had deliberately stayed under the radar for months has in recent days blossomed into a star-studded showdown to influence the workers.
On one side is the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and its many pro-labor allies in the worlds of politics, sports and Hollywood. On the other is one of the world’s dominant companies, an e-commerce behemoth that has warded off previous unionizing efforts at its U.S. facilities over its more than 25-year history: Amazon.
The attention is turning this union vote into a referendum not just on working conditions at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., which employs 5,800, but on the plight of low-wage employees and workers of color in particular, Michael Corkery and Karen Weise report for The New York Times. Many of the employees in the Alabama warehouse are Black, a fact that the union organizers have highlighted in their campaign seeking to link the vote to the struggle for civil rights in the South.
The warehouse workers began voting by mail on Feb. 8 and the ballots are due at the end of this month. A union can form if a majority of the votes cast favor such a move.
Amazon’s countercampaign, both inside the warehouse and on a national stage, has zeroed in on pure economics: that its starting wage is $15 an hour, plus benefits. That is far more than its competitors in Alabama, where the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
“It’s important that employees understand the facts of joining a union,” Heather Knox, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in a statement.
The situation is getting testy, with union leaders accusing Amazon of a series of “union-busting” tactics.
The company has posted signs across the warehouse, next to hand sanitizing stations and even in bathroom stalls. It sends regular texts and emails, pointing out the problems with unions. It posts photos of workers in Bessemer on the internal company app saying how much they love Amazon.
Credit…Rajah Bose for The New York Times
The University of Idaho is one of hundreds of colleges and universities that adopted fever scanners, symptom checkers, wearable heart-rate monitors and other new Covid-screening technologies this school year. Such tools often cost less than a more validated health intervention: frequent virus testing of all students. They also help colleges showcase their pandemic safety efforts.
But so far the fever scanners, which look like airport metal detectors and detect skin temperature, have flagged fewer than 10 people out of the 9,000 students living on or near campus, Natasha Singer and Kellen Browning report for The New York Times. Even then, university administrators could not say whether the technology had been effective because they have not tracked those students to see if they went on to get tested for the virus.
One problem is that temperature scanners and symptom-checking apps cannot catch the estimated 40 percent of people with the coronavirus who do not have symptoms but are still infectious. Temperature scanners can also be wildly inaccurate.
Administrators at Idaho and other universities said their schools were using the new tech, along with policies like social distancing, as part of larger campus efforts to hinder the virus. Some said it was important for their schools to deploy the screening tools even if they were only moderately useful. At the very least, they said, using services like daily symptom-checking apps may reassure students and remind them to be vigilant about other measures, like mask wearing.
Some public health experts said it was understandable that colleges had not methodically assessed the technology’s effectiveness against the coronavirus. After all, they said, schools are unaccustomed to frequently screening their entire campus populations for new infectious diseases.
Even so, some experts said they were troubled that universities lacked important information that might help them make more evidence-based decisions on health screening.
“It’s a massive data vacuum,” said Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist who is an assistant professor at George Mason University. “The moral of the story is you can’t just invest in this tech without having a validation process behind it.”
