Amazon Accused of Using Monopoly Power as E-Commerce ‘Gatekeeper’
A congressional panel took direct aim at one of Amazon.com Inc.’s defenses against antitrust scrutiny of its retail dominance and detailed allegations about how the company wields its market power.

In a report issued Tuesday, the Democratic-led House Antitrust Subcommittee challenged the company’s stance that its share of total U.S. retail shopping is the most relevant way to understand its size. The committee asserted repeatedly that Amazon dominates U.S. e-commerce.

The company’s market share of U.S. online sales is often said to be about 39%, but the figure is as high as 74% across a range of product categories, according to the report, which also called out practices of other large tech companies.

“Amazon functions as a gatekeeper for e-commerce,” the report said. The subcommittee provided details that it says shows how Amazon uses its size and platform to thwart competitors, dedicating more pages to its findings about the Seattle-based technology giant than the other subjects of the probe.

Amazon addressed the findings in a blog post. “All large organizations attract the attention of regulators, and we welcome that scrutiny. But large companies are not dominant by definition, and the presumption that success can only be the result of anti-competitive behavior is simply wrong.”

The House panel argued that Amazon has amassed “monopoly power” over sellers on its site, bullied retail partners and improperly used seller data to compete with rivals. The subcommittee cited examples that it said showed how Amazon has launched copycat versions of products sold by third-party merchants on its platform. The report also accused the company of blocking search advertising on its site for competitors and attempting to “replicate some of the startups it meets with or invests in.”

Several investigative articles by The Wall Street Journal published this year accused the company of similar actions. Amazon launched an internal investigation following one story about whether its employees used seller data to inform the company’s private-label strategy. wsj.com

Internal Amazon documents show how it instructs employees to comfort retailers who are worried about using its cloud services, including by calling Walmart 'paranoid'

Read Amazon's Full Blog Post Response: Fringe notions on antitrust would destroy small businesses and hurt consumers


Click below to read the Daily's coverage of Amazon's antitrust hearings back in June:

1st Time Event in Congress
Congress & The Big Four - Breaking Up is Hard to Do
Antitrust showdown: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google CEOs report to Capitol Hill

Bezos Clueless & Unprepared About Vetting
What didn't Jeff Bezos know and when didn't he know it?

Will Anything Really Change?
Bezos Admits To Serious Issues For Retail Brands In Antitrust Inquiry. What Will Change?
 

COVID Update

US: Over 7.7M Cases - 216K Dead - 4.9M Recovered
Worldwide: Over 36.1M Cases - 1M Dead - 27.2M Recovered

Private Industry Security Guard Deaths: 190   Law Enforcement Officer Deaths: 118
*Red indicates change in total deaths

How Coronavirus Changed the Retail Landscape

From foot traffic to profit margins, the story of the retail reckoning in charts

The coronavirus pandemic accelerated a major shift in the retail industry. Traffic to stores evaporated. Online credit-card transactions soared. E-commerce sales in the second quarter rose by 44.5% compared with the same period in 2019 and they now make up 16% of all U.S. retail sales, according to the Commerce Department.

Consumer spending has picked up since many cities and states began lifting lockdown restrictions and allowing stores to reopen in May, but only some sectors have regained lost ground. Sales, profits and hiring at many grocers and home-improvement retailers are up. Many apparel sellers have slashed staff and closed stores for good. Weekly foot traffic from July until the second week of September is down by an average of 14% compared with the same period a year ago, according to mobile-device location data from foot-traffic analytics firm Placer.ai.

Online Shopping: The pandemic pushed many of the last online-shopping holdouts over the e-commerce hump. Online transactions with credit and debit cards have increased an average of 88% each month since the beginning of April.

Store Closures: Since April some 5,000 stores in the U.S. have shut their doors for good. In the same period only about 680 new stores were opened. In August alone, almost 2,200 retail stores closed while only 14 opened.

Retail Sales: U.S. retail sales have been climbing steadily since late May, though several categories are still struggling. The nonstore retailer category, which includes online merchants, maintained the highest growth rate since the beginning of the pandemic. Grocery stores had a huge sales uptick in March, but growth has slowed since then. Sporting-goods stores recovered faster than most. And clothing stores suffered the most.

Employment: Initial claims for jobless benefits held steady at 870,000 last week, revealing a loss of momentum in the recovery of the labor market. Retail is one area where job losses could be permanent.

Profit Margins: eBay Inc. by far had the biggest increase in its profit margin in the second quarter compared with the same period last year. Other winners were automotive and discount chains, which managed to boost profitability despite the higher costs of operating in a pandemic. wsj.com

Deloitte Study: Virtual deal-making will continue post-pandemic,
regardless of cybersecurity concerns
Despite ongoing economic uncertainty amidst a global pandemic, many dealmakers remain optimistic about the outlook for the year ahead as they increasingly pursue alternative merger and acquisition (M&A) methods to navigate the crisis and pursue new disruptive business growth strategies. According to Deloitte’s new “Future of M&A Trends Survey” of 1,000 U.S. corporate M&A executives and private equity firm professionals, more than 6 in 10 survey respondents (61%) expect U.S. M&A activity to return to pre-COVID-19 levels within the next 12 months.

Soon after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, deal activity in the U.S. plunged — most notably during April and May. Responding M&A executives say they tentatively paused (92%) or abandoned (78%) at least one transaction as a result of the pandemic outbreak. However, since March 2020, possibly aiming to take advantage of pandemic-driven business disruptions, 60% say their organizations have been more focused on pursuing new deals. securitymagazine.com

Casey’s puts the customer first in its COVID-19 response
Casey’s General Stores is building its “new normal” operational strategy around meeting customer needs. Chain Store Age recently spoke with Chris Jones, chief marketing officer Casey’s General Stores Inc., about how the Midwestern convenience chain is adapting to the continuing challenges of COVID-19 while maintaining core corporate values. chainstoreage.com

Lowe’s paying another pandemic bonus to hourly associates
Lowe’s announced it will pay full-time hourly workers $300 and part-timers $150 as part pf a discretionary bonus. With the new payments, Lowe’s has paid more than $775 million in bonuses to workers during the novel coronavirus pandemic. pennlive.com

Cuomo Orders Shutdown in NYC's COVID-19 Hotspots
Only essential businesses to remain open; schools remain closed
New York Gov. Cuomo unveiled a plan to combat coronavirus “clusters” Tuesday that includes closing businesses and limiting religious gatherings in areas seeing a surge in cases.

The governor called the measure a “last resort” and blamed the uptick in infections in the city on Mayor de Blasio failing to enforce social distancing and mask-wearing mandates.

The new restrictions, which include limits on religious services, barring mass gatherings and stopping indoor and outdoor dining in affected areas, come a day after the governor dismissed the city’s proposal to close businesses and Cuomo knocked de Blasio on enforcement and defining hotspots by zip code. nydailynews.com

Orthodox Jews Set Fire to Masks in Protest at New York's COVID Restrictions
 

California Fire is Now a 'Gigafire,'
A rare designation for a blaze that burns at least a million acres
Wildfires have gotten so extreme in recent years that experts have had to coin new terms to describe their increasingly massive scale. Enter the "gigafire" -- a term for a blaze that burns at least a million acres of land and a level above the "megafire," which burns more than 100,000 acres.

California recorded its first gigafire in modern history on Monday, after the expansive August Complex in the northern part of the state scorched more than a million acres. The August Complex is now the largest fire in California's history, according to Cal Fire.

The fire, which is now burning across several counties, began as a series of separate fires sparked by lightning strikes in August. Those smaller fires later morphed into the larger complex that firefighters are now battling. The blaze is 58% contained as of Tuesday morning.

Blazes across the state have burned four million acres so far, more than double the previous record set in 2018, the state's fire agency said Sunday. This fire season has also produced five of the six largest wildfires in California's history. cnn.com

Online order fulfillment is this year’s hot holiday retail job
Big-box retailers are starting to announce their holiday hiring plans. Most share a similar mandate: hire more people to help them fulfill online orders.

Target, Walmart, Kohl’s, Gap, Michael’s and Dollar General are among the retailers who have announced within the past two weeks plans to start hiring in preparation for the holidays, with an emphasis on hiring for roles in its e-commerce fulfillment centers, or to fulfill orders in stores that were placed online.

Walmart said in a press release at the end of September that it plans to hire for 20,000 workers specifically at its e-commerce fulfillment centers.

Target said in its announcement that it would be training existing team members on “areas that are in higher demand during the holiday season, such as order pickup and drive up,” and plans to have double the number of store employees working on these services compared to last year. modernretail.co

  Warehouse employment is at an all-time high

Coresight Research: The Impact of COVID-19 on Halloween Retail Spending

Cheers to the RH-ISAC 2020 Peer Choice Award Winners

RH-ISAC relies on the continued support and engagement of our membership to further the cause to #ProtectasOne. The Peer Choice Awards provides the opportunity to recognize those whom their peers have determined went above and beyond in sharing intelligence on incidents, threats, vulnerabilities, and threat remediation, and collaborating to share best practices that help to strengthen security operations.

The Peer Choice Award winners were recognized at the RH-ISAC Member Meeting on October 5, which also kicked off the 2020 RH-ISAC Cyber Intelligence Summit. We are proud to announce to the full community our 2020 Peer Choice Award winners. rhisac.org

Risk Management Framework Online Training
NIST has released an updated Risk Management Framework for Systems and Organizations Introductory Course to reflect guidance from NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-37, Revision 2. The RMF was developed by NIST to help organizations manage information security and privacy risks to and from Information Technology (IT) systems more easily, efficiently and effectively.

This three hour online course provides individuals new to risk management an overview of a flexible methodology for organizational and system risk, the Risk Management Framework (RMF). For individuals with experience with NIST SP 800-37, Revision 1, this course explains updates to the RMF in Revision 2, including the integration of privacy and supply chain risk management into this holistic process.

The RMF Introductory Course describes at a high-level the importance of establishing an organization-wide risk management program, the information security legislation related to organizational risk management, the steps in the RMF, and the NIST publications related to each step. The course can be launched through your internet browser and upon completion, individuals may print a certificate of completion. The training is also available for organizations who wish to include it as a module in their Learning Management Systems (LMS) in the following LMS standards: SCORM, AICC, xAPI, and cmi5. csrc.nist.gov

Maintaining PCI Compliance
Deep Dive: Fighting Card Data Breaches With Payments Partnerships
Retailers must protect customers’ card data from hackers who try to snatch payment details, and following best practices to ensure security requires adhering to the regulations established by the PCI SSC, a global payments industry forum. The panel’s standards apply to all entities that accept credit or debit card payments and are intended to ensure that these organizations are working to reduce their risks of security breaches and to minimize the damage of attacks that slip through their defenses.

Sellers that fail to abide by these requirements could see fees or be disqualified from accepting card payments altogether, meaning following PCI standards is critical for businesses’ health as well as customers’ safety. Maintaining compliance can be tricky for merchants, however, as they may struggle to comprehend all aspects of these rules or find cost-effective ways to adhere to them.

This month’s Deep Dive examines the challenges sellers face in becoming — and staying — PCI compliant as well as how payment orchestration platforms can simplify this task: pymnts.com

PCI DSS Compliance Slumps 28% Since 2016
Compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) has declined for the third year in a row, with organizations failing in their long-term planning, according to Verizon.

The tech giant compiled its Verizon Business 2020 Payment Security Report based as usual on data gathered by its own PCI DSS qualified security assessors (QSAs) and those of other providers. It revealed that on average only 27.9% of global organizations maintained full compliance with the PCI DSS, a drop of over 27% since compliance peaked in 2016.

The report highlighted other concerns: just half (52%) of assessed organizations successfully test security systems and processes and unmonitored system access, and around two-thirds monitor access to business-critical systems effectively. infosecurity-magazine.com

Independent poll says 68% of Americans support facial recognition

Facial Recognition Market is Projected to Garner $9.6 Billion by 2022 | 21.3% CAGR

Researchers show modest progress in face biometrics bias reduction, find a possible cause

COVID Update