Amazon is experimenting with a new retail ‘species’ and TikTok’s US saga has quietly reached its endgame.

Impacts on Retail are significant, trust me.

News about Amazon and physical retail

Amazon is experimenting with a new retail ‘species’: an oversized (230k square feet) physical format on the outskirts of Chicago that deliberately collapses two previously separate worlds.

On one side, an expanded grocery offer, general merchandise and ready-to-eat food.

On the other, a fully embedded logistics engine operating within the same walls.

This is not a store, it’s a platform – a very big one, where half of the space serves human shoppers, the other half fuels the e-commerce machine.

The signal is unmistakable: the future of big-box retail isn’t about choosing between physical and digital, but about forcing them to coexist in the very same square footage.

News about TikTok US

Reminder: TikTok Shop has rapidly become a significant U.S. e-commerce force, with strong adoption among Gen Z for fashion and beauty products.

After years of limbo, regulatory threats and collective fatigue, TikTok’s US saga has quietly reached its endgame.

What emerges is not a sale, but a geopolitical compromise engineered through ownership design.

A newly formed, US-controlled entity now anchors the platform, backed by a coalition of American capital, institutional investors and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth; think of Oracle, Silver Lake, MGX (Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund), Michael Dell and Xavier Niel – total ownership is about 80%.

ByteDance remains present (approx. 20%), but strategically capped: visible enough to preserve continuity, constrained enough to satisfy Washington.

This was never about an app, it was about control, data sovereignty and who gets to set the rules when platforms grow larger than politics.

Andy Cavallini