 |
|
|
|||||
After nearly 40 years providing decor for countless birthdays across the United States, Party City is entering its final days of operations. And as the companys last storefronts close their doors, competitors including Five Below and Dollar Tree are vying to move in for majorly discounted prices. Party City filed for bankruptcy twicefirst in 2023 and again this past Decemberbefore ultimately announcing at the end of 2024 that it could not recover its losses and would be permanently shutting down its 800 locations. In a memo sent to employees at the time, the company listed February 28 as its last day of operations (though, since then, some Redditors have noted extensions at their local locations). While most Party City stores are living out their last hurrah this week, the company itself is working down to the wire to sell designation rights for more than 200 existing leases. Discount retailers are stepping up According to documents submitted to bankruptcy court in the southern district of Texas, Party City is currently hoping to secure deals with two new tenants: Five Below and Dollar Tree. Per a memo submitted on February 19, the proposed Five Below deal would include 44 storefronts in exchange for a $2 million upfront payment, followed by an additional $70,000 for each lease agreement signed after 29 leases. Likewise, the proposed Dollar Tree deal (submitted to court on February 21) would include 148 storefronts for a $1 million upfront payment, followed by an additional $65,000 for each lease agreement over 10 leases. In both cases, Party Citys legal representation noted, the company has an urgent need to close the transactions quickly, given that its dwindling budget does not provide for continued payment of rent. Both proposals are expected to be heard in court this week. Fast Company reached out to Party City, Five Below, and Dollar Tree for more information on the deals, and did not hear back from any of the parties involved at the time of publication. Many legacy retailers are struggling in 2025 Party City’s final woes come amidst a larger retail apocalypse affecting stores like 7-Eleven, Big Lots, and Joann Inc. (which also just announced it will permanently cease operations). As inflation persists and e-commerce continues to gain ground as consumers preferred method of shopping, physical retail locations are taking a major hit. According to a report from Coresight Research, this year could be the worst yet for U.S. retailers (including pandemic years), with an estimated 15,000 closures on the near horizon. Based on a report from The Independent, while the Party City corporations days are numbered, the store wont entirely fade into oblivion just yet. Currently, nine franchisees representing 29 Party City locations are planning to run their stores independently for the foreseeable future. A similar phenomenon has kept the last remaining Blockbuster store open years after the company itself died offpreserving a beloved site of retail nostalgia against all odds.
Category:
E-Commerce
Anthropic released on Monday its Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, which it says returns results faster and can show the user the chain of thought it follows to reach an answer. This latest model also powers a new coding tool called Claude Code that can perform some development tasks autonomously. Claude 3.7 Sonnet offers an extended thinking mode that engages in a more detailed chain of thought reasoning but takes longer to generate a response. For simpler questions it eschews this mode and instead focuses on speed. Other models offer their own versions of thinking mode, but typically the user has to select that feature for harder problems; Anthropic says Claude 3.7 Sonnet is the first publicly available model with the capability to choose the best mode based on the users question. If Grok 3 and DeepSeek-R1 are stick shifts, then Anthropics new model is an automatic. Just as humans use a single brain for both quick responses and deep reflection, we believe reasoning should be an integrated capability of frontier models rather than a separate model entirely, Anthropic says in a blog post. Claude 3.7 Sonnet outperforms other thinking models in some important benchmark tests. On SWE-bench, which evaluates AI models ability to solve real-world software issues, the model beat OpenAIs o1 and o3-mini and DeepSeek-R1 by a comfortable margin. It was the same story on TAU-bench, which tests AI agents on complex real-world tasks with user and tool interactions. However, OpenAIs o1 model still edges out Claude 3.7 Sonnet in math problem solving, visual reasoning, multilingual Q&A, and graduate-level reasoning benchmarks. Anthropic describes the Claude Code tool as an active collaborator that can search and read code, edit files, write and run tests, and commit and push code to GitHub. The company says the tool has already become indispensable for its own coders, completing tasks in a single pass that would normally take 45 minutes or more of manual work. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is now available on all Claude subscription plansFree, Pro, Team, and Enterprisebut the extended thinking mode isnt available to users of the free tier. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is also available to developers as an API for the same price as earlier Claude models.
Category:
E-Commerce
BP‘s chief executive will scrap a target to increase renewable generation 20-fold by 2030, returning the focus to fossil fuels, as part of a strategy shift announced on Wednesday to tackle investor concerns over earnings, two sources told Reuters. BP’s shares have underperformed rivals in recent years and the oil major has already dropped its target to cut oil and gas output by 2030, Reuters reported in October. On Wednesday, when BP holds a capital markets day, CEO Murray Auchincloss will tell investors the company is abandoning its target to grow renewable generation capacity 20-fold between 2019 and 2030 to 50 gigawatts, two sources close to the matter said. The plan to drop the target has not been previously reported. BP declined to comment. Its earnings reports show the company has 8.2 GW of renewable generation capacity, and that for 2019, BP’s net wind generation capacity reached 926 megawatts. It did not give a figure on total renewable capacity for that year. The sources said BP will also ditch a target to reach core earnings (EBITDA) of $49 billion this year and instead set an annual percentage growth target, the sources said. They declined to be named because they were not authorised to speak publicly on the strategy change. While BP has said in a call with analysts it could drop the targets, it has yet to formally announce any decision. BP failed to reach its 2024 EBITDA target of 40.9 billion. The company will also make public plans to divest assets and cut other low-carbon investments to reduce debt and boost returns, the sources said. The capital markets day was originally scheduled for February 11 in New York, but was changed to to Wednesday in London because Auchincloss had to undergo a medical procedure. Sector-wide shift Across the energy sector, major companies that shifted their portfolios in response to the need to lower carbon emissions and curb climate change have returned the focus to oil and gas, where returns have become easier as fossil fuel prices have rebounded from pandemic lows. The investor environment has also been transformed by the re-election of U.S. President Donald Trump, a climate sceptic and advocate of fossil fuels. Pressure has become intense on BP after activist investor Elliott Investment Management built up a nearly 5% stake. Elliott, known for pushing changes at companies such as Honeywell and Southwest Airlines, is demanding an overhaul, including tighter cost discipline at BP. A separate source familiar with the matter told Reuters Elliott wanted BP to scale down its green energy spending and sell assets such as wind and solar. BP would also benefit from selling its Castrol lubricants and its network of service stations to unlock value and boost share buybacks, added the source, who also asked not to be named. Under Auchincloss predecessor, Bernard Looney, BP pledged in 2020 to cut oil and gas output by 40% while rapidly growing renewables by 2030. BP lowered the reduction target to 25% in 2023. Since taking office, Auchincloss has slowed investments in renewables and announced plans to cut costs and reduce staff by 5%. BP could on Wednesday announce cuts to its annual low-carbon capex by $2-$3 billion, analysts at Bank of America said. BP’s 2024 capital spending was $16.24 billion. Arunima Kumar and Anousha Sakoui, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||