Best of Pax Westona: January 2021

• Work of the future (MIT)
• The man who turned credit card points into an empire (NYT)
• Jim Orlando: Canadian tech / venture capital predictions for 2021 (Medium)
• An oral history of Xbox (Bloomberg)
• Inside the booming business of relaxation beverages (The Verge)
• Couche-Tard drops bid to take over Carrefour (CBC)
• Roger Martin: My business is too fast moving for strategy (Medium)
• Couche-Tard executives outline a plan that extends beyond convenience stores (Globe and Mail)
• The resilient vending machine industry (McKinsey)
• The state of the sporting goods industry (McKinsey)

 Stephan's Friday Picks

• Is your 401(k) colluding to make your cereal more expensive (NPR)
• The truth about Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Skip the Dishes (Maclean's)
• Growing the joint profit pool of retailers and manufacturers in Europe (Bain)
• America abandoned its economic prophet. The rest of the world embraced him (Foreign Policy)
• From the archives (1998): Taken to the cleaners (Slate)

 Stephan's Thursday Picks

• Walmart to ramp up automatic fulfillment in its stores (CNBC)
• Walgreens poaches Starbucks executive Rosalind Brewer for CEO (WSJ)
• Why Target is deepening its partnership with Levi's (Fortune)
• Online shoppers accidentally buy too much (WSJ)
• Metro's CEO on plans to expand e-commerce as pandemic reshapes industry (Globe and Mail)

Stephan's Wednesday Picks

• The state of the sporting goods industry (McKinsey)
• Beyond Meat's PepsiCo tie-up revives animal spirits (Bloomberg)
• Television makers are pitting rival technologies against each other (The Economist)
• Beauty retailer L'Occitane files for Chapter 11 (Retail Dive)
• Belk files for Chapter 11 bankuptcy, Sycamore Partners to take control (CNBC)

 Stephan's Tuesday Picks

• Roger Martin: Playing to win and scenario planning (Medium)
• The next chapter in analytics: data storytelling (MIT Sloan)
• Burger King's new logo shows why companies are obsessed with 'flat design' (Marker)
• Fast food chains bite into the fervor for chicken sandwiches (WSJ)
• Uber, after buying Postmates, lays off 180 employees (NYT)

 Stephan's Monday Picks

• The resilient vending machine industry (McKinsey)
• Office Depot rebuffs takeover offer from Staples (WSJ)
• Seafood sales skyrocket during pandemic (Bloomberg)
• An online sales boom is killing supermarket profits (The Economist)
• The pandemic has been good to U.S. retail firms. For their workers, less so (The Guardian)

 Stephan's Friday Picks

• Can the Pizza Pusha survive pot legalization (Grub Street)
• Procter & Gamble gets customers to pay up (WSJ)
• My search for lost time in a slice of Jewish rye (NYT)
• How to take advantage of unprecedented points and miles deals (Bloomberg)
• From the archives (1997): Nation's first supermarket attempts to stay competitive (NYT)