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Hiring likely remained subdued last month as many companies have sought to avoid expanding their workforces, though the job gains may be enough to bring down the unemployment rate.December’s jobs report, to be released Friday, is likely to show that employers added a modest 55,000 jobs, economists forecast. That figure would be below November’s 64,000 but an improvement after the economy lost jobs in October. The unemployment rate is expected to slip to 4.5%, according to data provider FactSet, from a four-year high of 4.6% in November.The figures will be closely watched on Wall Street and in Washington because they will be the first clean readings on the labor market in three months. The government didn’t issue a report in October because of the six-week government shutdown, and November’s data was distorted by the closure, which lasted until Nov. 12.Another wrinkle: The economy lost 105,000 jobs in October, mostly because federal government employment fell 162,000, reflecting a purge of federal workers earlier last year by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. That drop won’t be repeated.Still, sluggish hiring in December would underscore a key conundrum surrounding the economy as it enters 2026: Growth has picked up to healthy levels, yet hiring has weakened noticeably and the unemployment rate has increased in the last four jobs reports.Most economists expect hiring will accelerate this year as growth remains solid. Yet they acknowledge there are other possibilities: Weak job gains could drag down future growth. Or the economy could keep expanding at a healthy clip, while automation and the spread of artificial intelligence reduces the need for more jobs.Economists do expect Friday’s jobs report to have some good news, driven partly by a rebound from the government shutdown, which likely drove a higher unemployment rate in November. Still, should the rate remain at 4.6% or even tick higher, that would be a cause for concern.“I’m really looking for a lot of that weakness to reverse in December,” said Martha Gimbel, executive director of the Yale Budget Lab, “and if it doesn’t, I am going to start getting much iffier about the labor market.”Either way, December’s report will cap a year of sluggish hiring, particularly after “liberation day” in April when President Donald Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries, though many were later delayed or softened.The economy generated an average of 111,000 jobs a month in the first three months of the year. But that pace dropped to just 11,000 in the three months ended in August, before rebounding slightly to 22,000 in November.Even those figures are likely to be revised lower in February, when the government completes an annual benchmarking of the jobs figures to an actual count of jobs derived from companies’ unemployment insurance filings. A preliminary estimate of that revision showed it could reduce total jobs as of March 2025 by 911,000.And last month, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that the government could still be overstating job gains by about 60,000 a month because of shortcomings in how it accounts for new companies as well as those that have gone out of business. The Labor Department is expected to update those methods in its report next month.Last November, the U.S. economy had just 770,000 more jobs than 12 months earlier, down from 1.9 million in the 12 months ending in November 2024 and the smallest yearly gain since early 2021. The benchmark revisions next month will likely reduce that figure even further.With hiring so weak, the Federal Reserve cut its key short-term interest rate three times late last year, in an effort to boost borrowing, spending, and hiring. Yet Powell signaled that the central bank may keep its rate unchanged in the coming months as it evaluates how the economy evolves.Should December’s jobs report come in surprisingly weak, it could strengthen case for a rate reduction at the Fed’s next meeting Jan. 27-28.Even with such sluggish job gains, the economy has continued to expand, with growth reaching a 4.3% annual rate in last year’s July-September quarter, the best in two years. Strong consumer spending helped drive the gain. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta forecasts that growth could slow to a still-solid 2.7% in the final three months of last year.Many economists are optimistic that growth will pick up in 2026, in part because Trump’s tax legislation, approved last summer, should lead to outsize tax refunds this spring. If growth does accelerate, it’s possible hiring may as well. At the same time, there are signs that companies are using technology and other tools to make their workers more efficient, which can spur growth without requiring more jobs.At the same time, inflation remains elevated, eroding the value of Americans’ paychecks. Consumer prices rose 2.7% in November compared with a year ago, little changed from the beginning of the year and above the Fed’s 2% target. Christopher Rugaber, AP Economics Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
Fans of Macy’s Inc. will be disappointed to learn that the iconic department store has announced its next round of store closures. Fourteen Macys locations in 12 states will shutter as a result of this move. Heres why and when the closures will take place. Whats happened? On Thursday, Macys published a letter from CEO Tony Spring to its employees updating them on the companys A Bold New Chapter strategy, which the department store chain unveiled in February 2024. As part of that strategy, Macys announced at the time that it would be closing 150 underproductive stores through the end of 2026. Fast Company previously reported on 66 stores marked for closure in January 2025. In his Thursday letter, Spring said that the Bold New Chapter strategy, which includes simplifying operations and investing in customer experiences that its shoppers value most, is working. We are seeing customers respond through strong performance in our go-forward business, record Net Promoter Scores, and improved results over the first three quarters, Spring stated. As a point used to highlight the A Bold New Chapters success, Spring said that the strategys Reimagine element, which is seeing Macys invest in 125 of its best-performing stores, was paying off. Those stores saw comparative sales grow 2.7% in the third quarter, which Spring said was the result of investment in those stores elevated merchandising, store design, and customer experience. Unfortunately for some Macys employees, Spring also confirmed that the next round of store closures is beginning now. How many Macys stores are closing? Springs memo confirmed that Macys will close additional stores. Axios reported earlier that 14 stores that are closing in this round, and those store locations have also been marked with the notation This location is closing on Macys store locator tool. The 14 stores are believed to be part of the 150 locations Macys previously said would close by the end of 2026 as part of its A Bold New Chapter strategy. When will the Macy’s stores close? In a FAQ about the store closures, Macys says the stores impacted will begin their clearance sales this month, and those sales will go on for approximately 10 weeks. That places the closing date for these 14 locations at around the third week in March. “These decisions are not made lightly,” Spring said in his letter. “We communicated directly with affected colleagues first and are providing support, including transfer opportunities where available, as well as severance and outplacement resources where applicable. Which Macys stores are closing? Fourteen Macys stores will be closing in this round. Those 14 stores are located in 12 states. Fast Company has reached out to Macy’s to confirm. The stores include: California Grossmont Center: 5500 Grossmont Center Drive, La Mesa, CA 91942 West Valley Mall: 3200 Naglee Rd, Tracy, CA 95304 Georgia Northlake Mall: 4880 Briarcliff Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30345 Maryland Marley Station: 7900 Ritchie Highway, Glen Burnie, MD 21061 Michigan Rivertown Crossings: 3850 Rivertown Parkway SW, Grandville, MI 49418 Minnesota Crossroads Center: 4101 West Division Street, St Cloud, MN 56301 New Hampshire Fox Run: 50 Fox Run Road, Newington, NH 03801 New Jersey Livingston Mall: 112 Eisenhower Parkway, Livingston, NJ 07039 Interstate Shopping Center: 225 Interstate Shopping Center, Ramsey, NJ 07446 New York Boulevard Mall: 1255 Niagara Falls Boulevard, Amherst, NY 14226 North Carolina Triangle Town Center: 3801 Sumner Boulevard, Raleigh, NC 27616 Pennsylvania Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills: 100 Pittsburgh Mills Cir, Tarentum, PA 15084 Texas La Palmera Mall: 5488 S Padre Island Dr Ste 5000. Corpus Christi, TX 78411 Washington Parkway Super Center: 17855 Southcenter Pkwy, Tukwila, WA 98188 How has Macys store reacted? Yesterday, when Macys published Springs letter, the companys stock price (NYSE: M) closed up for the day, around 5.5% to $23.72 per share. However, the gain in shares probably has little to do with the announcement of the closure of those 14 stores, as the company has long informed investors that it plans to close 150 locations by the end of this year. Instead, the share price gain was most likely driven by Spring’s comments about the companys 2.7% comp growth in its Reimagine stores and 9% comp sales growth in its Bloomingdales stores in the third quarter. With yesterdays share price jump, Macys shares are now up 7.57% for the year as of the time of this writing. Over the past 12 months, Macys shares have jumped nearly 48% and in the last few months have traded around levels not seen since January 2023.
Category:
E-Commerce
Welcome to the first Fast Companys Plugged In of 2026, and Happy New Year to you. More than 18 years ago, as the internet was transforming how we consume everything from news to music, someone called books the last bastion of analog. That someone happened to be Jeff Bezos. And he made the observation in a Steven Levy Newsweek article about Amazons original Kindle e-reader, a device designed to drag books into the digital age. Bezoss comment resurfaced in my consciousness last week, as I read a New York Times article by Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter on how the book publishing business fared in 2025. The upshot: It did pretty well overall, and remains a surprisingly analog enterprise. To be clear, the internet in generaland Amazon in particularhas transformed how we buy and consume books. Market share figures for booksellers are tough to come by, but estimates show the company controlling 50% or more of print book sales, leaving chains such as Barnes & Noble and independents to jostle for whats left. Thats before you account for e-books and audiobooks, where Amazons Kindle and Audible platforms are overwhelmingly dominant. Despite that, paper books remain popular, and many people choose to buy them at brick-and-mortar stores. As of mid-December, roughly three-quarters of the 707 million books sold last year were of the traditional, dead-tree variety. In the first 10 months, e-books accounted for only 11% of revenue, down from 17% in 2016. The American Booksellers Associations ranks swelled by 422 new shopsindependent ones, not chain operations. On top of that, we got dozens of new Barnes & Noble locations, with more on their way. All of that suggests that books in their classic form arent just running on fumes of nostalgia or consumer inertia. Much of whats delightful about the whole experience of engaging with the medium is inherently physical, in ways that other mediamusic, movies, newspapers, magazinesare not. I knew that a year ago when I declared that I was going to go out of my way to read dead-tree tomes in 2025, starting with the tower of them stacked on my nightstand. Taking the time to do so was a rewarding experience, and though life interfered with me reading as many as Id hoped, Im looking forward to continuing the quest in 2026 and beyond. As I wrote in that newsletter, Im hardly an e-book hater. Theyre often cheaper than print equivalents. They let you carry your entire library wherever you go. They can be easily searched. For nonfiction volumes being read for research purposesa meaningful chunk of my book consumptionthey beat print as the best overall format. Still, as I also wrote back then, e-books havent lived up to their full potential. Typographically and layout-wise, they remain rudimentary compared to paper. And even when they do things that print cant, they dont always do them well. Thats been my experience with a new AI-powered Kindle feature called Ask this book. Introduced last month for thousands of titles in the Kindle iPhone and iPad apps, it lets you use a chatbot-style interface to pose questions about a books contents. To avoid spoilers, it defaults to its answers reflecting only what youve read so far. The tool has proven controversial, in part because authors arent compensated and cant opt out. But when I tried it with my Kindle edition of Walter Isaacsons Steve Jobs, the big problem was that it was terrible. Its responses repeatedly mangled factual material, from the circumstances of Jobs time at Reed College to the year the iPod was introduced. They also failed to provide any citations, rendering them useless as entry points for additional reading within the e-book. Ask this book does have the potential to evolve into something more interesting and useful. But when it comes to the shopping experience, for both digital and print books, Amazon has been marching in the wrong direction for years. Author Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe how tech products tend to grow customer-hostile over time. In his new book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, he declares Amazon to have reached a terminal stage of the phenomenon. Indeed, the companys original taglineEarths biggest bookstorenow feels more like a threat than a promise. Even if you cut the company some slack for offering a shopping experience thats relentlessly utilitarian rather than intellectually stimulating, the place is in shambles. Search results are smothered with unrelated sponsored links and blatantly AI-generated junk books. Pages devoted to specific authors may be missing books, or, worse, list ones they didnt write. The search results for John Grisham started with a paperback copy of his 2002 novel The Summons for an absurd $51.76, with an estimated delivery turnaround of up to two weekseven though Amazon also has it for under 10 bucks with free Prime overnight shipping. For decades, the fact that local book shops couldnt compete with Amazons massive inventory seemed like an existential weakness. But the best ones curate their selections in ways that offer a powerful alternative to Amazons unedited sprawl. To my knowledge, no online merchant has replicated the artful serendipity of brick-and-mortar book browsing, where wandering the aisles and stumbling across stuff you never knew existed is part of the point, not a distraction. Recently, I did much of my holiday gift shopping at one of my favorite Bay Area bookstores, Menlo Parks Keplers. A large storebut not a completely enormous oneits a joy to get lost in. I didnt have to elbow my way past AI slop or sponsored chum, and emerged with a stack of books I would never have discovered through online shopping. Unlike Amazon, Keplers doesnt offer discounts off list price. Actually, it tacks on a small surcharge to pay its employees a living wage. I am happy to pay it. The 70-year-old store, which almost went out of business in 2005, doesnt feel like a relic. Instead, like every good bookstore, its an idea too vibrant to be rendered irrelevant by technology. Its heartening to think the publishing industry has settled into a groove that will keep such neighborhood gems viable for years to come. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompay.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company Craiglist’s founder has some simple rules for not losing your mindor moneyon the internetCraig Newmark’s ‘Take9’ campaign asks people to pause nine seconds before reacting online. Read More LinkedIn is expanding its AI-powered job search featuresThe platform continues to grow as a hub for seeking jobs and holding professional discussions. Read More AI isn’t stealing your traffic. It’s stealing your authorityAs AI becomes the first stop for information, GEO is how you make sure your version of the story gets told. Read More Yann LeCun: Meta ‘fudged a little bit’ when benchmark-testing Llama 4 modelThe testing sparked internal frustration about the progress of the Llama models. Read More OpenAI enters the connected health space with ChatGPT HealthHealth is already a popular topic area on ChatGPT. OpenAI is now adding physician expertise, and plug-ins for health apps and records. Read More Tin Can phones have been overwhelmed since ChristmasThe company says it’s working to fix a network issue and that paying customers won’t be charged until the devices are reliable once more. Read More 12 CEOs share bold predictions for 2026Market corrections, the rise of sovereign AI, and the first AI-driven attack are among the bold predictions for the coming year. Read More
Category:
E-Commerce
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