billion on cleaning supplies and to pay workers
overtime and bonuses.
But it’s not just Amazon. The pandemic is
accelerating the move to online shopping, a
trend experts expect to say even after vaccines
allow the world to resume normal lives.
And thanks in part to shoppers consciously
supporting small businesses, Adobe Analytics
says online sales at smaller U.S. retailers were
up 349% on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. At
the more than 1 million businesses that use
Shopify to build their websites, sales rose 75%
from a year ago to $2.4 billion on Black Friday,
according to Shopify.
JURY’S OUT:
— Big Tech
Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google did well
financially, with each company’s stock price
and profit up considerably since the start of the
year. They gained users, rolled out new products
and features and kept on hiring even as other
companies and industries faced significant cuts.
But not all is well in the world of Big Tech.
Regulators are breathing down each company’s
neck and that’s unlikely to ease up in 2021.
Google faces an antitrust lawsuit from the
Department of Justice. And Facebook has been
hit by one from the Federal Trade Commission
along with nearly every U.S. state that seeks to
split it off from WhatsApp and Instagram.
More cases could follow. Congressional
investigators spent months digging into the
actions of Apple and Amazon in addition to
Facebook and Google, and called the CEOs of all
four companies to testify.