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2026 will be a good year for people who love to walk where cars once drove. As climate change acceleratesand cities continue to grapple with congestion and air pollutionurban priorities have been shifting. In May this year, Parisians voted to close 500 streets to traffic across all 20 arrondissements. London is moving forward with plans to pedestrianize sections of the world-famous Oxford Street, as well as Regent Street, and Piccadilly Circus. Meanwhile, Barcelonas centuries-old promenade, La Rambla, is in the last stretches of a long-term redesign that will be completed in 2027, widening the pedestrian promenade and limiting access to residents vehicles and public transport. The U.S. isnt exempt from the trend. Next year alone, half a dozen cities, from Bentonville, AR, to Houston, TX, will reduce or remove car traffic on some of their streetsnot for a weekend pilot or a seasonal experiment, but for good. These projects matter in a country that still funnels tens of billions of federal dollars every year into new roads and highways. And they are particularly notable after the Trump administration recently withdrew previously awarded grants for some bike, trail, and pedestrian projects. Ever since cars became dominant in the 1950s, urban thinkers like Jane Jacobs and Jan Gehl have argued for cities designed around people, not vehicles. The conversation is still timely. According to several experts interviewed for this story, the tides are shifting. I think we are certainly seeing momentum in the car-free or car-lite movement, says Ben Crowther, policy director for the nonprofit America Walks. Here are six streets pedestrians can reclaim next yearno cars, or fewer cars, allowed. [Image: courtesy Downtown Houston+] 1. Main Street in Houston, TX Houstons Main Street, long a transit corridor, is being reinvented as a seven-block pedestrian promenade through the heart of downtown. The Main Street Promenade will feature shaded walkways, plazas, outdoor dining, and a series of flexible public spaces designed for lingering, not just passing through. Led by Downtown Houston+ in partnership with the City of Houston, and designed by Workshop, the project builds on the success of the More Space: Main Street initiative, a temporary program launched in 2021 to test reduced vehicle access. Its permanent transformation is timed to welcome visitors for the 2026 FIFA Mens World Cup, but the redesign is meant to serve residents long after the crowds leave. The streets physical makeover is substantial. Pedestrian space will be expanded across seven blocks, creating a continuous, safer corridor through downtown. Tree canopy will increase by more than 150%, with new trees added alongside shade structures and storefront awningscritical infrastructure in a city defined by heat. A series of outdoor rooms will support activities like casual dining and small events, while murals and public art installations will reinforce Main Streets identity. A raised street design and improved crossings aim to make the promenade accessible to people of all ages and abilities. The new promenade is a fitting evolution for a street that has carried Houston through multiple transportation eras, from horse-drawn carriages to trolleys, cars, light railand now, pedestrians. [Image: courtesy KC PWD] 2. 18th Street in Kansas City, MO Kansas Citys 18th Street, the cultural backbone of the historic Jazz District, isnt becoming fully car-freebut its redesign marks a significant shift toward people-first planning. Like Houstons Main Street, the 18th Street Pedestrian Mall project has been years in the making before accelerating toward completion ahead of the 2026 World Cup. Rather than banning vehicles outright, the project will remove curbs, gutters, and on-street parking to create a seamless corridor that is more akin to a shared street. Vehicular traffic will still be allowed at the center, but its dominance will be dramatically reduced. Replacement parking is being relocated to a new garage just south of the street, freeing up space for wider sidewalks, traffic calming measures, and safer, more accessible crossings. The redesign also lays the groundwork for expanded programming like farmers markets and live concerts. A City spokesperson said it will also make it easier for the Jazz District to close three blocks of 18th Street for major events like Juneteenth, First Fridays, and Halloween celebrationssomething that was logistically difficult under the old street design. The nuance matters here. Patricia Brownwho helped lead the pedestrianization of Trafalgar Square in London in the early 2000sargues that framing projects as car-free versus car-lite can be counterproductive. Were never going to have a car-free city, and we shouldnt, she told me. The real question is how you put people front and center and reduce vehicle dominance. Kansas Citys 18th Street offers a case study in exactly that approach. [Photo: courtesy Design Workshop] 3. A Street Promenade, in Bentonville, AR In Bentonville, Arkansas, pedestrianization is less about reclaiming a single block and more about stitching an entire downtown together. At the center of that effort is “A Street Promenade“a linear, pedestrian-only plaza that is part of the citys broader “Quilt of Parks” initiative. “A Street Promenade,” which just opened in November, has been remade from a vehicle corridor into a pedestrian promenade that links the town square with parks, local businesses, and civic spaces through a sequence of garden rooms and parklets. The promenade is designed for everyday use, but flexible enough to support markets, parades, and citywide events. The project emerged from a Design Excellence partnership launched in 2018 between the citys Parks and Recreation Department, the Walton Family Foundation, and Design Workshop (the same studio behind Houstons Main Street transformation.) The goal was never just to remove cars, says Conners Ladner, a principal at Design Workshop. It was about strengthening how people move through and gather within the city center. [Photo: courtesy Qmunity District] 4. Post Street in San Jose, CA In downtown San Jose, Post Street has become a template for how temporary street experiments can turn into permanent change. Once a conventional downtown roadway, the street was permanently closed to cars this spring following years of pandemic-era pilots. It now functions as a pedestrian-only corridor at the heart of the citys LGBTQ+ district, known as Qmunity. (Its the citys second major pedestrianization effortfollowing San Pedro Square, which closed in 2024.) Earlier this year, the city unveiled a permanent street mural by local artist Danny Feliz Hanson and community volunteers. Next year, the city is planning further upgrades, including an artist-led initiative to transform the safety barricades at each end of the street into reflective, neighborhood-branded design features. When the World Cup rolls around, Post Street will be a designated Entertainment Zone, but a spokesperson from the San Jose Downtown Association emphasized that the decision to pedestrianize Post Street wasnt driven by FIFA. San Jose began experimenting with temporary closures during the pandemic, and after tracking their impacts, the City Council voted unanimously in February 2025 to make the change permanent. Recent data shows consistent increases in foot traffic and visitor dwell time in the area since the closure. [Image: Greektown Neighborhood Partnership/SmithGroup] 5. Monroe Street in Detroit, MI In Detroits Greektown, Monroe Street is being reimagined as a civic space. The Monroe Streetscape Improvement Project, led by the Greektown Neighborhood Partnership and designed by SmithGroup, is transforming a four-block stretch into a safer, more walkable corridor that can flex between everyday use and large-scale events. Backed by $20 million in funding from the state of Michigan, the project is branded as A New Greektown, and prioritizes pedestrians without eliminating access altogether. Wider sidewalks, curbless lanes, and designated pick-up and drop-off zones reduce barriers between street and sidewalk, while still accommodating transit and essential vehicles. More than 50 new trees, enhanced lighting, and signature district signage aim to improve both comfort and safety, especially during evening hours. The redesign also leans into Greektowns role as one of Detroits most active entertainment districts. Eighty thousand square feet of granite paversmaking it the largest granite-paved street in Michiganwill create a unified surface for outdoor dining, festivals, and markets. Integrated art and heritage installations will celebrate the neighborhoods history, while removable bollards will allow Monroe Street to become fully pedestrianized during programmed events. A spokesperson from the Greektown Neighborhood Partnership said that current plans envision pedestrian-only weekends, with flexibility to adjust based on what works. Construction is unfolding in phases: the first segment is already complete, while the second phase is scheduled to wrap up in late 2026. [Photo: courtesy Sunset Dunes] 6. Sunset Dunes in San Francisco, CA San Franciscos Sunset Dunes marks a different scale of ambition altogether. Stretching across two miles, the 50-acre coastal park is billed as the largest pedestrianization project in Califonias historytransforming a former highway into a public park. The shift began with a ballot measure passed by voters, asking whether a long-debated stretch of the Great Highway should stop functioning as a road and start functioning as a park. The answer was yes. The city officially opened Sunset Dunes as a park in April 2025, rolling out initial activations like bike infrastructure, public art, and wayfinding. Since then, the space has continued to evolve, with picnic tables overlooking the ocean, a rotating outdoor art gallery, and free weekly programming. Whats notable is how explicitly the city is treating Sunset Dunes as a living experiment. A first round of community engagement wrapped up this year, focused on understanding how residents want to use the space and whats currently missing. The results will be published by the end of 2025, with a second phase of engagement launching in 2026 to shape a long-term vision plan, supported by landscape architecture firm CMG Landscape Architecture. The goal: to move from a repurposed roadway to a purpose-built coastal park, much like Crissy Field, a former military airfield that was transformed into a coastal park two decades ago. A spokesperson from local nonprofit, Friends of Sunset Dunes, told me design priorities will center on access and restoration. Since the park runs alongside a sensitive dune system, planned improvements will aim to restore dune ecology, improve beach access for people with mobility challenges, and create a continuous promenade that feels like one park. In the meantime, the programming will keep testing what works. In January next year, the nonprofit will launch weekly traditional Chinese dance classes designed for the neighborhoods large senior population. More temporary installations and pilot uses will follow as an intentional strategy to learn from the public before locking in permanent design decisions.
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E-Commerce
In 2026 (and beyond) the best benchmark for large language models wont be MMLU or AgentBench or GAIA. It will be trustsomething AI will have to rebuild before it can be broadly useful and valuable to both consumers and businesses. Researchers identify several different kinds of AI trust. In people who use chatbots as companions or confidants, they measure a feeling that the AI is benevolent or has integrity. In people who use AI for productivity or business, they measure something called competence trust, or the belief that the AI is accurate and doesnt hallucinate facts. Ill focus on that second kind. Competence trust can grow or shrink. An AI tool user, quite rationally, begins by giving the AI simple tasksperhaps looking up facts or summarizing long documents. If the AI does a good job of these things, the user naturally thinks what else can I do with this? They may give the AI a slightly harder task. If the AI continues to get things right, trust grows. If the AI fails or provides a low-quality answer, the user will think twice about trying to automate the task next time. Steps forward, steps back Todays AI chatbots, which are powered by large generative AI models, are far better than the ones we had in 2023 and 2024. But AI tools are just beginning to build trust with most users, and most C-suite executives who hope the tools will streamline business functions. My own trust of chatbots grew in 2025. But it has also diminished. Example: I entered a long conversation with one of the popular chatbots about the contents of a long document. The AI made some interesting observations about the work, and suggested some sensible ways of filling in gaps. Then it made an observation that seemed to contradict something I knew was in the document. When I pointed out the missing data, it immediately admitted its mistake. When I asked it (again) if it had digested the full document, it again insisted it had. Another AI chatbot returned a research report that it said was based on 20 sources. But there were no citations in the text connecting specific statements to specific sources. After it added the citations within the text, I noted that in two places the AI had relied on a single, not-very-trustworthy source for a key fact. I learned that AI models still struggle with long chats involving large amounts of information, and that theyre not good at telling the user when they’re in over their heads. The experience adjusted my trust in the tools. Grappling with ambiguity As we enter 2026, generative AIs story is still in its early chapters. The story started with AI labs developing models that could converse, write, and summarize. Now the big AI labs seem confident that AI agents can autonomously work through complex tasks, calling on tools and checking their work against expert data. They seem convinced that the agents will soon manage ambiguity with humanlike judgment. If large companies begin to trust that these agents can reliably do such jobs, it would mean enormous revenues for the AI company that developed them. Based on their current investments of hundreds of billions into AI infrastructure, the AI companies and their backers seem to believe this outcome is close at hand. Even if the AI could bring human-level intellect to business scenarios tomorrow, it may still take time to build trust among decision-makers and workers. Today, trust in AI isnt high. The consulting firm KPMG surveyed 48,000 people in 47 countries (two-thirds of which use AI regularly) and found that while 83% believe AI will be beneficial, only 46% actually trust the output of AI tools. Some may have a false trust in the technology: two-thirds of the respondents say they sometimes rely on AI output without evaluating its accuracy. But I doubt that AI agents are ready to complete complex tasks and manage ambiguity like human experts might. As the AI is used by more people and businesses, they will encounter a universe of unique problems within various contexts that theyve never seen before. I doubt that current AI agents understand the ways of humans and the world well enough to improvise their way through such situations. Not yet anyway. The limitations of the models The fact is that AI companies are using the same kind of (transformer-based) AI models to underpin reasoning agents that they used for early chatbots that were essentially word generators. The core function of such models, and the objective of all their training, is predicting the next word (or pixel or audio bit) in a sequence, Microsoft AI CEO (and Google DeepMind cofounder) Mustafa Suleyman explained in a recent podcast. It is using that very simple likelihood-of-word prediction function to simulate what it’s like to have a great conversation or to answer complex questions, he said. Suleyman and others doubt it. Suleyman believes that current models dont account for some of the key drivers of the things humans say and do. Naturally, we would expect that something that has the hallmarks of intelligence also has the underlying synthetic physiology that we do, but it doesnt, Suleyman said. There is no pain network. There is no emotional system. There is no inner will or drive or desire. AI pioneer (and Turing Prize winner) Yann LeCun says the LLMs of today are useful enough to be applied in some valuable ways, but thinks theyll never achieve the general or human-level intelligence needed to do the really high-value work the AI companies hope they will. In order to learn to intuit paths through real-world complexity the AI would need a much higher-bandwidth training regimen than just words, images, and computer code, LeCun says. They may need to learn the world via something more like the multisensory experience babies have, and possess the uncanny ability to process and store all that information quickly, as babies can, he says. Suleyman and LeCun may be wrong. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic may achieve human-level intelligence using models whose origin is in language. AI governance matters Meanwhile, competence is just one factor in AI trust among business users. Enterprises use governance platforms to monitor whether and how AI systems might be creating regulatory compliance issues or exposing the company to risk of cyberattack, for example. When it comes to AI, large enterprise companies . . . want to be trusted by customers, investors, and regulators, says Navrina Singh, founder and CEO of the governance platform Credo AI. AI governance isnt slowing us down, its the only thing that allows measurable trust and lets intelligence scale without breaking the world. In the meantime the pace at which humans delegate tasks to AI will be moderated by trust. AI tools should be used for tasks theyre good at, so that confidence in the results grows. Thatll take time, and its a moving target because the AI is continually improving. Discovering and delegating new tasks for AI, monitoring the results, and adjusting expectations will very likely become a routine part of work in the 21st century.&nsp; No, AI won’t suddenly reinvent business all at once next year. 2026 wont be the year of the agent. It’ll take a decade for AI tools to prove out and become battle-hardened. Trust is the hardening agent.
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E-Commerce
Work consumes around a third of our waking hours during the weekday. Yet, according to Gallup, nearly a third of employees are disengaged. 80,000 Hours, a London-based nonprofit that helps people find the best career fit for themselves, reviewed 60 studies on dream jobs and found that a dream job meets six criteria: its engaging, it helps others, youre good at it, you work with supportive colleagues, it doesnt have major negatives, and it fits with the rest of your life. Dream jobs seem difficult to landone 2024 survey of 3,000 employees across the U.S. finds only 14% of American adults are working their dream job. The same study found that 38% of adults hate their job, and 66% would be willing to switch careers to chase their dream job. And at a time when the labor market is shedding jobs of all sorts, a dream job may seem like a chimera. And yet? There are people who pull it off. Fast Company talked with four workers who have the gig of their dreams. While some of them knew exactly what they wanted and went to school for it . . . others had no idea their dream job even existed, or navigated countless twists and turns. One interviewee spent a period of time homeless; another is busy building up other paths just in case it turns out her dream job, well, stops being the dream. How do you fashion the job of your dreams? We first asked this question back in 2007and while industries and culture have changed, workers desire to do something meaningful to them has not. Nathalie Pereira: pilot What she does: Pereira is a first officer for United Airlines, where she flies a Boeing 777. Shes based out of New Jersey and makes long-haul international flights. Her career path: I fell in love with flying when I was five and visiting Brazil, says Pereira, who has Brazilian heritage. Ever since, I wanted to be in the skies. After high school, she attended flight school and worked as a pilot at a regional airport for five years, three as a captain. In 2021, she joined Uniteds Aviate program, a career development initiative started by United Airlines to find and develop pilots. Aviate offers candidates mentorship and guarantees them a job at United after completing the program and meeting hiring requirements. Pereira became a first officer for United in 2022. A day in the life: Pereira says she thrives on spontaneity. On a regular day, shell go through her morning routine of gym and coffee, and then look over her flight plan on the company iPad, which has information on everything from the weather on her route to plane maintenance status. Then shell go to the airport where she does a briefing with the other pilots on her crew. After the briefing, theyll do a walkthrough of the plane to ensure everything works. Once Pereira touches down, shell meet up with her crew, grab a bite to eat, and explore the city. Some of her favorite stops include Tokyo, Brussels, and Barcelona. Her advice: Being a pilot is highly feasiblethere are a lot of resources, she says. If the cost of flight school is holding you back, just do it. Youll make it back. She points out there are also tons of scholarships available through organizations such as the Latino Pilots Association and Women in Aviation International. In addition, Uniteds Aviate Academy is designed to take candidates from their first flight to a job at United. While women only account for 11% of the pilots in America, Pereira wants other women to know that shouldnt be a barrier. Aviation has traditionally had fewer women in pilot roles, but access to the profession is based on meeting the same training, performance, and regulatory standards for all. Success comes from skill development, discipline, and experience. I never let gender deter me from pursuing what I love, she says. Elizabeth Casper: personal stylist What she does: Casper works with clients at Stitch Fix to offer tips on styling. Shes also on Stitch Fixs content creation team and helps make merchandise videos with fashion advice. Her career path: Casper comes from a family with fashion roots. Her family owns a bridal shop and her grandfather had a degree in pattern design. Casper ended up pursuing a degree in musical theatre and was at an audition when she saw a friend working remotely for Stitch Fix. It blew my mind that you can be a stylist. That became the dream, she says. I didnt know being a stylist was a thing. I assumed Id need to learn to sew and become a designer, but what I really loved was the curation of outfits. Casper monitored the Stitch Fix website for jobs and landed one in 2021. A day in the life: Casper starts the day by checking if she has any messages from clients, answering questions and helping them put together outfits. In the middle of the day, shell take a break to work on filming some content, and then shell wrap the day by styling more clients. Im always trying to delve into personal experiencewhats something that youve worn recently that made you feel good? Whats a color that makes you feel like you glow? Is there anything coming up on your calendar? How can I help make that easier? Her advice: Pursue the things that you love and allow all of the avenues that are open to you to teach you something to take forward, Casper says, pointing out that her own career has been full of zigs and zags. Style your friends, style yourself. Learn what fabrics feel like so you can take all of that knowledge into the next phase. Put your creativity and your art out there. Melissa Lewis Gentry (MLG): video game designer What they do: MLG is a game designer for Demiurge Studios, which does code development for larger studios like Blizzard and Epic. A game designer is analogous to a product designer, MLG says. Im often the person who solves whatever problem comes up, whether its technical design, or gameplay programming. Their career path: I loved games as a kid and was definitely a Dungeons & Dragons nerd when I went to college. My dad was a programmer, so I grew up building my own computers. But when I got to college, I flunked that class, MLG said. A lot of it had to do with ADHD and not being diagnosed as a young woman in the early 2000s. Instead, I put down the idea of working in video games until the pandemic. MLGs path to video game design is long and winding and includes a stint working in a call center, taking a 50% pay cut to manage a comic and board game store which folded, working in sales and marketing at a board game company which also folded, and then trying torun a board game café that opened during the first month of the pandemic. When the board game cafe shut down, MLG became homeless. While MLG was crashing on a friends couch applying for jobs, they were invited to join a game jam (the equivalent of a hackathon). At the game jam, MLG started programming again and fell in love. They took online courses in programming and started searching for jobs in the video game industry. Ultimately they landed an internship at Demiurge Studios in 2021 for candidates with nontraditional experience who would otherwise be overlooked. Shortly after, they were promoted to full-time and still work there today. A day in the life: As a video game designer, you have in your heart the perfect experience you want to give a player, but then you have to marry it to time and budget. On a given day, MLG might be brainstorming ideas for a game with themes and characters and then narrowing these down. MLG also spends a lot of time problem-solving: Every morning I look in [project management tool] Jira to see what tickets I have. For example, if the designers want players to click a button to get a reward and the engineers say we cant do that, “‘its my job to say what if we do this instead? Their advice: No amount of education will give you the résumé experience of having shipped a game, and the best way to do this is make a game on your own and ship it. The video game industry has been seriously hit during the past two years and its brutally hard to find a job, but nothing is preventing you from making a game. Zinia Lee Fengel: influencer What she does: Lee Fengel, who goes by Zinia Lee, has been a fashion influencer on Instagram for the past five years and has over 115,000 followers on Instagram. For many members of Gen Z, Lees path is the dream. However, given that, Lee is still in her early twenties and unsure of what shell want in the future. So shes carving out other career options: Shes also a full-time student at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and a public relations intern at Retrofte, a New York fashion label; influencers commonly have day jobs or additional side hustles, especially Gen Z. Her career path: Lee posted her first video during the pandemic when she was 16. I love putting together cool outfits and wanted to share them, she said. Within the first year, she started getting invites from brands. At first, they offered her free merchandise in return for a post. However, gradually this turned into paid deals. This summer, Lee got a manager and started landing four-figure brand deals. While influencing could be a full-time job for her, she chooses to work with brands that represent her valuesfor example, she only works with cruelty-free makeup brands, and only wears leather if its secondhand. A day in the life: Since Lee is juggling classes and an internship, she fits content creation where she can. I have certain times of the day blocked off and I multitask, she said, I like going to the gym and being active, so Ill set the treadmill to an incline walk and edit. I have CapCut Pro on my iPhone so Ill also edit during my commute. Lee keeps a Notion, an AI workspace, full of video ideas, as well as a timeline for whats publishing when, and batches filming. If I do my hair and have my makeup on, Im gonna film five videos, she said. Going forward, Lee doesnt know if shell keep influencing, despite it already being a dream income stream for much of her age group. I want to go wherever it takes me, she said. But I know its very easy to resent something you love. Her advice: Lee notes that success is not linear. Sometimes a video you put two seconds into goes viral. Other times a video that you agonized over tanks. Instead, she said, the key is consistency. A lot of people think, if I have one really good video idea itll go viral and then Im set . . . I try to post every other day, so Im constantly filming, editing, and producing. However, she said the first step is easy: Post a video. It really is that simple.
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E-Commerce
January is a time when many people reflect on their goals for the year aheada new job, a promotion, hitting the gym, or overall better healthbut research from Baylor College of Medicine and psychologist Richard Wiseman shows 88% of people actually fail to achieve their New Years resolutions. But according to the experts we asked, you should forget resolutionsand do these things instead. Rewire your brain “Repetition, not intention, rewires behavior,” says Cherian Koshy, author of Neurogiving. “Resolutions fail because they rely on willpower, and willpower is unreliable. What works is design.” “The brain follows whats easy, not whats aspirational, and behavior changes faster when [it] requires less decision-making,” Koshy adds. According to Koshy, New Years resolutions live in an imagined future, but behavior lives in todays defaults. The brain learns who you are by what you repeat, not what you declare. If something matters in 2026, stop promising to do it later, and practice it now. That’s how to achieve your first win of the year. Make a to-don’t list Resolutions can help us be more intentional about how we spend our time in the year ahead. At least, that’s the theory. But with so many people already overwhelmed by their to-do lists, adding resolutions is likely to just lead to burnout in January, says Sally Helgesen, women’s leadership expert and coauthor of How Women Rise. “That’s why it can be helpful to focus on what we want to avoid in 2026: our to-don’ts rather than our to-dos,” she says. “For example: Don’t use the phone on Sunday (or Saturday), don’t make promises without taking a day to think them through, and don’t set the alarm clock one morning a week.” Ask yourself, what do you want to leave behind? Start small rituals Instead of chasing big New Years resolutions, try small daily rituals. “Taking three slow breaths before getting out of bed or stepping into morning light when you wake up can have a powerful impact and help life feel more grounded, clear, and steady long after January ends,” Marsha Ralls, founder and CEO of wellness retreat The Phoenix, Asheville tells Fast Company. “My best recommendation is to identify habits that naturally fit into your daily routine and begin incorporating them right away, whether that means taking an afternoon walk outside, or committing to a more consistent bedtime, even on weekends,” she says. “Over time, these small daily actions go a long way in supporting overall wellness.” Try New Year’s intentions “I would recommend having New Year’s intentions instead of resolutions, [which] are often based in shame and focus on what you are lacking,” therapist Esin Pinarli tells Fast Company. “Be more emotion-based than action-based,” Pinarli adds. “What was one thing you learned this past year? What is one thing that you will not be bringing into the new year, whether that’s a person, behavior, or habit?”
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E-Commerce
When the confetti settles and the ball has dropped, many Americans will wake up on New Years DayThursday, January 1, 2026with errands to run, groceries to buy, or just the urge to grab coffee. But because New Years Day is a federal holiday, the holiday clock affects a wide range of services differently: Some go dormant for the day, others hum along with normal or modified hours, and a few offer the convenience you might need as you kick off the new year. Heres what to expect if youre planning to be out and aboutor just need to know whether that store youre counting on is open. Will I get mail on New Year’s Day? Thursday is a full federal holiday, which means most government offices are closedfrom Social Security offices to local administrative buildings. If you were planning to visit a DMV or city hall, make sure to reschedule. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) will be closed, and no regular mail delivery will happen on New Years Day. Retail post office services are also shut for the holiday. Is the bank open on New Year’s Day? Major bank branches, including Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, will not open their doors on January 1. If you need cash, ATMs and mobile apps are your go-to since theyll still work even though physical branches are dark. Are grocery stores and retail chains open on New Year’s Day? When it comes to stores, the picture is decidedly mixed. Costco plans to be closed all day. The wholesale giant will shutter all 623 of its U.S. warehouses for 24 hours on New Years Day, meaning members cant shop at any location on January 1. Other superstores like Walmart, however, are expected to keep their doors open under normal schedules (though its always smart to check ahead). Home improvement chains like The Home Depot plan to remain open with regular holiday hours (e.g., roughly 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.) Groceries and pharmacies also tend to be open on New Years Day. Many regional grocery chains, such as H-E-B, Kroger, and Whole Foods, will operate regular or reduced hours, though some pharmacy counters within larger stores may close earlier than the main store. You can find store hours for your local locations via the chains’ store locators: Walmart hours Target hours Kroger hours Whole Foods hours Walgreens hours CVS store hours What restaurants are open on New Year’s Day? If your January 1 plans include grabbing a bite or a caffeine lifeline, youre in luck: many restaurants and fast-food chains will be open, though individual locations might choose to adjust hours. In practice, that means staples like McDonalds, Starbucks, and other chains are likely to operate on holiday schedules. Likewise, 24/7 convenience stores such as Wawa, Speedway, and Dollar General, in most areas stay open, making them a reliable choice when youre in a pinch. That said, if you have a specific local favorite in mind, its worth a quick call to check todays hours before heading over. Is the stock market open on New Years Day? The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Nasdaq are closed on New Years Day. Wall Street takes the holiday off just like it does every year. Are schools open on New Years Day? No. Public schools and most all private schools will be closed on New Years Day. Does the bus run on New Year’s day? Airports, Amtrak, Greyhound, and major transit systems generally run through New Years Day. Expect holiday or Sunday schedules on buses and trains in many cities, so check schedules in advance if youre moving between cities or across town. Service levels vary widely by region, but no major carrier shuts down entirely. Are movie theaters open on New Year’s Day? For those looking to unwind on day one of 2026: Movie theaters almost universally screen films on New Years Daygreeting crowds with morning and afternoon showtimes. Malls and shopping centers also typically open, often hosting post-holiday sales. Some may operate on a reduced schedule. Check local listings for showtimes and event schedules; big cities often host New Years Day brunches, skating sessions, and other seasonal attractions.
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E-Commerce
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