The Drive-Thru: Inside Amazon's delivery plans, McDonald's takes the Chicken McGriddle national, and a tiny IHOP serves tiny pancakes
Hello! If this is your first time reading The Drive-Thru, welcome to BI Retail's weekly rundown of the biggest news in shopping, food, and more. I'm Kate Taylor, and you can get more of me in your inbox every Friday by signing up here.
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Now that I've asked you to sign up for various things, let's get to what happened this week.
How Amazon does delivery
As Amazon enters crunch time before the holidays, Hayley has some great insights into how the e-commerce giant is approaching delivery.
- Amazon uses an app to track delivery workers' every move and assign them a score on a scale of 0 to 850 based on their driving.
- Amazon barred third-party sellers from using FedEx Ground for Prime deliveries. This was just one part of what turned out to be an extremely bad week for FedEx.
- Some big-picture context: Amazon employs 800 third-party courier companies that manage 75,000 drivers. Amazon's last-mile delivery network is on track to deliver 3.5 billion packages globally this year 2019. By comparison, UPS shipped 5.2 billion packages and documents in 2018.
Get the full story on the growth of Amazon delivery here.
Sneakerheads reveals all
Shoshy spoke with sneaker resellers Adeel Shams and Michael Mitchell about how they make thousands of dollars a month reselling sneakers.
Subscribe to BI Prime for the full explanation of how Shams and Mitchell broke into the multimillion-dollar sneaker resale market, plus a rundown of what types of shoes turn the biggest profit.
McDonald's takes the Chicken McGriddle and McChicken Biscuit national
McDonald's has been selling the McChicken Biscuit and Chicken McGriddle across a sizeable chunk of the US this year. And, this week I got my hands on some internal documents about the chain's plans to roll out the chicken breakfast items nationally in January.
2020 is set to be a hot year for the fast-food breakfast battleground. Wendy's is launching breakfast, Taco Bell is doubling down on $1 menu items, and McDonald's refuses to surrender its title as fast-food breakfast king. More competition typically means better deals and more absurd attempts to win over customers - so it's going to be a nice start to the new year for fast-food lovers.
Store tour: A department store for Instagram lovers
Bethany visited Neighborhood Goods, a trendy new marketplace that opened last week in Manhattan's Chelsea Market. Inside, she found buzzy direct-to-consumer brands and plenty of millennial pink.
"We wanted to test this thematic and communal approach to retail and provide a platform for younger companies that really wanted to dabble with popups," founder Matt Alexander told Bethany.
Taste test: Tiny [International] House [of Pancakes]
Irene went to the tiny IHOP and had some tiny pancakes. It was all extremely cute!
Irene's take: "That's what this meal was: fun and creative, with risks that didn't always pay off, but astonished when they did."
Everything else you need to know:
- Bed Bath & Beyond saw a massive C-suite shakeup.
- Chipotle execs say the chain doesn't need to partner with ghost kitchens because "Chipotle has a dark kitchen in every single restaurant."
- Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol dreams of quesadillas. (Really, though. He keeps bringing them up when I interview him.)
- A New York Times investigation found that workers subcontracted to make clothes for Fashion Nova are paid illegally low wages.
- Beyoncé's new Ivy Park x Adidas collection has a piece that looks like the uniform at Sainsbury's.
- Walmart is starting to sell high-end alcohol like Veuve Clicquot and Buffalo Trace.
- Yum Brands has "relaxed" its criteria for acquisitions, according to Wells Fargo analyst Jon Tower. I talked to the soon-to-be CEO about consolidation of the restaurant industry last year.
- Wawa discovered a data breach caused by malware that began running on its payment processing systems in early March.
- Something extremely weird is going on at Burgerim.
- What it is really like to be a black McDonald's franchisee, in franchisees' own words.
- Fake pet sellers are duping puppy lovers with a scam that promises them adorable pets that don't exist.
- Twitter troll "MuellerDad69" duped an Iowa congressman with claims that he manages a Starbucks and discriminates against conservatives.
- Taco Bell refuses to let the dollar menu die.
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