Fast Five Early Edition | Amazon's Temu Rivalry, 7-Eleven & Why Goldman Sachs Thinks 2025 Is The Year Of The Robot

Hello Omni Talk Fans! To help our team in India celebrate Diwali, we are moving up this week's normal Friday newsletter to Thursday and shutting down the Omni Talk headquarters on Friday.

Because who doesn't love a little extra vacation? Especially when Halloween also falls on a Thursday?

But rest assured the shortened week won't stop the Omni Talk content train -- chugga chugga chugga! We have a great lineup of content for you today, starting with our weekly Fast Five Podcast.

In this week's Fast Five, Anne and I discussed:?

• Amazon setting aggressive price targets for its rival online store to Temu and Shein (Source)
• 7-Eleven’s “New Standard” format which it plans open across 600 new stores (Source)
• Simbe’s $50 million Series C funding round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives (Source)
• Wayfair’s new paid subscription loyalty program (Source)
• And closed with a discussion inspired by Marks & Spencer around the now, next, and future of self-checkout within the fitting room (Source)

There’s all that, plus Doug Tiffan from AWS stopped by for 5 Insightful Minutes about AI investments in the fashion & apparel space, along with pre-fab housing, waltzing, and basketball stories from when I was a "strapping" young lad (Anne's words, not mine).

Listen to This Week’s Fast Five Podcast

Be careful out there,

-- Chris, Anne, and the entire Omni Talk team

P.S. We delivered a ton of exciting and exclusive content this week. All of which you can find below. Video Commerce, AI's impact on fashion retailing, and RFID all in a week's work. What could be better than that?