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If it seems like it’s getting more expensive to replace a broken door, kitchen fixtures, or upgrade a major appliance, youre not wrong. The cost of home repair and remodeling projects is up compared to a year ago and running ahead of inflation overall, according to a report from data analytics company Verisk. The firm’s latest Repair and Remodeling Index jumped 3.4% in the April-June quarter compared to the same period last year. That’s a bigger annual increase than the 2.7% rise in inflation in the same period, as measured by the Consumer Price index. The index, which tracks costs for more than 10,000 home improvement products, including appliances, doors, plumbing, and windows, showed a roughly 0.6% increase from the January-March quarter. While costs did continue to rise, they rose at a slower rate than in the first quarter,” said Greg Pyne, vice president of Pricing at Verisk Property Estimating Solutions. Much of the increase in home repair and remodeling costs appears to be driven primarily by higher labor costs for repair and remodeling work, Verisk noted. The second-quarter jump in costs for home improvement products coincided with the Trump administrations broad rollout of tariffs on imported goods from many of the nations major trading partners. But the tariffs didn’t have the expected impact given they were postponed several times and didn’t fully take effect until early August, midway through the third quarter. However, homeowners looking to replace cabinetry could soon see prices increase sharply, following a new volley of tariffs announced by President Donald Trump last week that includes a 50% import tax on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities due to kick in on Wednesday. John Lovallo, an analyst with UBS, estimates the tariffs on cabinets and vanities could add roughly $280 to the cost of a home. The most labor-intensive types of home repair or remodeling work registered the biggest quarterly increases in labor costs. For example, the cost of replacing tile flooring rose 1.2%, while the cost of remodeling a primary bath or replacing vinyl siding each rose 1% in the April-June period from the previous quarter. Nearly all of the 31 categories of repair and remodeling work tracked by Verisk saw costs increase at least slightly. The latest index puts costs for repair and remodeling at almost 62% higher than they were 10 years ago and more than 73% higher than the first quarter of 2013, when the index debuted. After declining the past two years, homeowner spending on maintenance and home improvement projects increased in the first half of this year, according to researchers at Harvard University. The universitys Joint Center for Housing Studies most recent leading indicator of remodeling activity, or LIRA, estimates spending hit $510 billion in the second quarter, a 1.8% increase from a year earlier. However, the researchers project that growth in spending on home improvement and maintenance will slow in 2026, citing weakness in the housing market and slower construction of new homes. The housing market has been in a slump since 2022, when mortgage rates began climbing from historic lows. Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes sank last year to their lowest level in nearly 30 years. And, so far this year, sales are running below where they were at this time in 2024. Alex Veiga, AP business writer
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E-Commerce
Curing cancer. Reducing carbon emissions. Maximizing business efficiency. To achieve all this and develop untold social goods, artificial intelligence accelerationsts at companies like Google, Meta, and OpenAI believe their industry has a duty to speed ahead towards superintelligence, or AI thats far superior to humans at most tasks. Key to that revolution will be the build-out of data centers. Meanwhile, a technical transformation of the workplace already appears to be underway. The nations largest employer, Walmart, said that because of its AI implementation, hiring will remain flat over the next three years even if revenues rise. Every businessnot just the big oneswill eventually reckon with some version of that transformation. Whoever wields the technology best will get an edge. Regulators, in turn, must find forward-looking ways of controlling the excesses of the winners while mitigating the hardship of the losersand fast. Sen. Mark Kelly fears that the biggest losers could be working-class people. The Arizona Democrats AI for America plan, arguably the most comprehensive Democratic answer to the Trump administrations pro-industry AI Action Plan, would create an industry-financed AI Horizon Fund to pay for energy-grid upgrades and workforce reskilling. But while Kellys plan is admirable … it dodges the policy specifics necessary for real legislation. He also fails to grasp certain economic and political realities of the AI industry and its players. And the federal government, as it heads for a shutdown, seems far from capable of passing any thoughtful AI legislation. Here, we attempt to fill in these gaps. Data centers everywhere The AI models poised to reshape business practices reside on servers humming away in the dark within massive single-story buildings called data centers. New data centers represent the most tangible sign of the so-called AI boom. Most estimates say that there are more than 500 hyperscale data centers, housing tens or hundreds of thousands of servers, in operation in the U.S. today. Between 50 and 100 more are either licensed or under construction in 2025. Kellys home state of Arizona is regarded as one of the most attractive places for data center projects because of the low cost, reliable power, affordable land, easy permitting, and tax incentives. (Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) already have data centers there.) States compete to attract data center projects. They come at a cost. Over the past five years, 10 states have already lost more than $100 million per year to data center tax abatements, with Texas and Virginia each giving away roughly $1 billion, according to a study by Good Jobs First, an economic development policy advocacy group. According to the study, a total of 32 states offer such exemptions to Big Tech companies and their partners; 12 states dont disclose the exemption amounts, which makes calculating a national total difficult. But its in the billions, and climbing. Whether all this investment truly delivers in the long run remains unclear. The infrastructure gap All this is causing Arizona citizens to ask more about these projects. In August, Tucson rejected Project Blue, a proposal to build a 290-acre AWS data center near the city. They cited concerns over water use, the potential burden on the local power grid, and the possibility of spiking electricity rates to fund additional power infrastructure. Deloitte estimates that the power demand from AI data centers in the U.S. could grow to about 123 gigawatts by 2035, up from roughly 4 gigawatts required in 2024. The problem is that the existing power grid was built to serve households and businesses, not legions of sprawling data centers. When a new one goes up, the local or regional energy supplier typically must augment the capacity of the grid to meet the demand. And those infrastructure costs are often passed on to residents through rate hikes or tax increases. Those same tax increases and electricity rate hikes could hit businesses in the area, including small businesses. Who should pay? Kelly believes that AI companies should pay for energy infrastructure upgrades necessitated by data center power demand. But his proposal offers no mechanism for metering the AI companies financial obligation or amount they should pay into the fund for infrastructure augmentation. Making this workable would require working with utilities and state and local energy regulators to determine a fair fee. To pay for infrastructure upgrades, Kelly could require a small but significant percentage of every megawatt of power purchased by the data center operator to go into a hypothetical fund. Congress could also require data center developers to buy or lease enough land to contain both their facilities and the renewable energy infrastructure to power and cool them. The data center operators could also be required to pay to connect the renewable sources to the local grid, should the power they generate go unutilized. Elon Musks xAI, for example, brought its own power to its massive Colossus data center in Memphis. Unfortunately, it was dirty powermethane-powered turbines, and the facility quickly became one of the areas biggest pollutersa cautionary tale. For a city and its utility, the biggest fear is that an AI data center could pick up and leave, in pursuit of more permissive environmental laws or cheaper power rates, leaving behind an empty hulk and suddenly unemployed local workers. Establishing federal-level environmental guidelines and power-grid responsibilities could remove some of the incentives to leave, forcing data-center operators to consider that at least some of those costs would be the same no matter where they went. Reskilling, but make it AI Tech companies often say that in their ideal world, humans will work in tandem with AI tools, and that new jobs will emerge that require some skill with these technologies as old ones are eliminated. Arriving at the right balance will likely take years. Because of the ongoing, rapid advances in AI, the process may never truly end. In the near term, the biggest beneficiaries are likely to be the companies selling the tools. Kelly argues, reasonably, that the AI companies should help pay for the costs of job displacement and reskilling workers. He suggests that the AI Horizon Fund be used to pay for AI education programs at community colleges, trade schools, and universities. Kelly also believes that the government should pass laws to make sure that workers themselves benefit from AI efficiencies. This could mean reimagining what the workweek looks like, as well as policies to strengthen worker bargaining power through stronger union representation.
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E-Commerce
In the early days of the internet, collectors traded rare whiskey and wine on eBay alongside Beanie Babies and vintage sneakers. But then, in 1999, six months after closing down firearm sales, eBay announced they would ban the sale of alcohol and tobacco products as well. “As a general rule, these laws are just so complex and contradictory, that we just decided that in the best interest of our users to prevent that situation from ever occurring,” then-spokesman Kevin Pursglove said. More than 25 years later and almost a century after the end of Prohibition, the regulatory environment is no less forgiving, and the resale of spirits online has been scattered across niche forums, gray-market Facebook groups, and high-end houses like Christies, Sothebys and Bonhams. The patchwork of U.S. liquor laws Domestic laws are complex. Six states still ban retail spirits sales on Sundays, to start. Seventeen operate as control states with a government monopoly on liquor sales. And while 47 states allow wineries to ship directly to consumers, only 11 extend that same privilege to distillers, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. Industry groups have shepherded a bill into Congress that would give the USPS authority to mail alcoholic beverages, but a final vote could take years. Few competitors have cracked this market. BAXUS uses blockchain for tokenized bottle trading, while U.K.-based Whisky.auction, Whisky Auctioneer, and Whisky Hammer focus outside the U.S. Good Bottle Auctions, based in Connecticut, sticks to the Northeast with in-person delivery. But since launching in 2020, a company called Unicorn has expanded to serve the continental U.S., logging over six million bids across half a million lots, totaling $125 million in sales. Its Chicago vault holds more than $100 million in inventory, with weekly and monthly auctions that ship purchases to pickup locations nationwide. Sothebys vs. Unicorn CEO Phil Mikhaylov, who previously worked at UberEats and delivery startup GoPuff, frames Unicorns speed and scale as a direct extension of that background. He says that most legacy auction houses top out at a few hundred lots per week, while Unicorn regularly clears thousands. I think what you see at other auction housessay, a Sothebysis they might have roughly 300 lots in an auction every single week. We’re doing, on a bad week, 3000 lots. On average, we’re doing 4000 to 5000 a week, Mikhaylov says. Unicorn CEO Phil Mikhaylov [Photo: Unicorn] Sothebys, for the record, did $114 million in spirits and wine sales in 2024a slump from their record of $159 million the year before. At this point, we sell $12 million of whiskey per week, Mikhaylov said in an interview earlier this year with their newly acquired (and renamed) in-house magazine, the Unicorn Review. Whats happened is that weve become effectively a redistribution platform. A bottle thats selling for $50 in Chicago might have $200 of value to someone in New Mexico. Unicorn has spent yearsand millions of dollarsbuilding the framework to do so. As of 2025, they have 12 dropoff points across the country, which then link out to a handful of vans that drive across the region, all eventually relaying bottles back to their Chicago processing facility. Sellers can hand off their bottles, and buyers can drive out to any of the facilities, or go through Unicorn for delivery. For legal reasons, Unicorn (a licensed retailer) must take possession of every bottle and bring it to its central Chicago location. There, an authentication and appraisal team runs each one through what may be the most robust spirits-resale database in the industry, producing estimates that cover everything from a 1982 Chateau Lafite Rothschild Bordeaux to a jug of Jose Cuervo. I tested the system by submitting four bottles for appraisal online. The sheet broke down batch numbers, year, and proof, and offered estimates within a few dollars of their eventual sale price. After handing the bottles off the next week in-person, they were on auction by Sunday: one sold $5 below estimate, another $5 above, and the other two squarely within range. Mikhaylov credits the accuracy to their in-house tracking software and the size of their data set. A data-driven bar cart Digitizing that many bottles was slow at first, but after five years (and some AI integration), the system has basically been perfected. Bottles are scanned, authenticated, photographed in 360 degrees, and logged into the vault. Customers using Unicorn for storage pay 25 cents per bottle per month and can check their inventory online at any time. [Photo: Unicorn] Storage complements sales: Mikhaylov says that many collectors were looking for a solution to manage their treasure troves, often resorting to home-brewed spreadsheets and lists. Now, whales might have their entire collection picked up, palletized, digitized, and tracked onlineready for observation, admiration, or sale at auction. If they do decide to sell, payouts are delivered in 10 days or less, minus $5 per bottle and 5% commission (buyers pay a 15% premium). Compared to traditional auction houses, which often require weeks or even over a month to process consignments and payout sellers, thats fast. The idea began during the pandemic. Mikhaylovs cofounder, Cody Modeer, found himself unable to auction bottles from his shuttered bar; traditional houses dismised his inventory as too low-value. Meanwhile, Mikhaylov was searching for a way to digitize and manage spirits collections, allowing collectors to drop off bottles anywhere in the country and track them remotely. There wasnt a modern platform that was meeting the demands of today’s consumer: something that made it easy to drop off, to sell, or to manage a collection, Mikhaylov says. This is meeting the demands of that consumer. 70% of our clientele that signed up this year have been Gen Z and millennial. For the younger demographic, its all about transparency and speed . . . Think of us like Kelly Blue Book, but for your bar cart.
Category:
E-Commerce
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