Coffee & Commerce #51: Meta’s AI Legal Win, Target’s Big Bet & Amazon’s UK Boost

Good afternoon,

Here’s the headlines for this week: 4 July 2025

ECOMMERCE

Tariffs on Chinese goods forced Shein and Temu to flirt with price hikes, triggering a double-digit drop in U.S. spending for both.
Shoppers are flocking to Amazon’s fashion marketplace: women’s apparel sales on Amazon jumped 26% in six months, with Chinese third-party sellers dominating the category.
Amazon even stretched Prime Day from 2 to 4 days, likely aiming to snatch up Shein/Temu’s wandering shoppers. Meanwhile, Asos, Zara, and discounters like Ollie’s are cashing in on the fast-fashion slump too.

TransUnion’s latest survey found 27% of Americans pessimistic about their finances — the most since 2021 — thanks to tariff jitters and higher costs.
Still, 55% remain optimistic overall, even as worries over inflation, recession and more tariffs mount.
Gen Z and millennials are the most upbeat, and many of those spooked by tariffs plan to seek credit to stay afloat.

Only 1 in 5 U.S. consumers trust retailers to use their personal data responsibly.
Yet over two-thirds will hand over data if it nets them personalized, rewarding experiences — though less than a third would switch stores just for better personalization.
Big generational split: nearly 40% of Baby Boomers either don’t care about personalization or flat-out refuse to share data with retailers.

Inflation and economic fears have consumers chasing value beyond just rock-bottom prices, per Deloitte’s latest deep dive.
Roughly 40% of shoppers say a brand’s value comes from factors other than price, and brands laser-focused on delivering that extra value enjoy higher purchase intent and market share.
Value hunters plan to slash discretionary spending by 40–50% this year (on clothes, personal care, home goods, entertainment) while spending more on essentials like housing and transportation.

Gen Z and millennials are powering a Sam’s Club membership surge – Gen Z membership jumped 63% and millennials 14% over two years.
The warehouse club hit record membership levels in Q1, boosting fee income by 13%, alongside 11 straight quarters of double-digit sales growth (and even profitable ecommerce).
Tech-savvy touches are luring the young crowd: one in three members uses Sam’s Club’s Scan & Go self-checkout, and its digital-first approach resonates strongly with Gen Z shoppers.

Meta just dodged a big copyright bullet: a judge threw out authors’ claims that training its AI on their books infringed copyright, since the writers didn’t prove it hurt their book sales.
But the court didn’t give AI a free pass — the judge stressed this wasn’t a blanket blessing on using copyrighted works, just that these particular authors “made the wrong arguments.” (In a separate case this week, another judge outright deemed Anthropic’s AI training fair use).
Meta hailed the win (calling fair use “vital” for transformative AI), while authors slammed Meta’s “unprecedented pirating” of their work and are none too pleased.

Anthropic had its Claude AI (“Claudius”) autonomously run a mini convenience store for a month. Spoiler: they wouldn’t hire it as manager just yet, after seeing both surprising resourcefulness and some face-plant failures.
On the plus side, Claudius quickly sourced niche items (from Dutch chocolate milk to tungsten cubes), adapted to customer feedback (even launching a pre-order concierge service), and resisted employees’ attempts to make it misbehave.
But as a shopkeeper, the AI still fell on its face: it missed easy profits (turned down a $100-for-$15 deal), hallucinated payment info, priced goods too low (selling metal cubes at a loss), and got sweet-talked into giving out excessive discounts and freebies.

Mondelez’s SnackFutures arm has pivoted hard: launched in 2018 to incubate new snack brands and run an accelerator, it’s now renamed SnackFutures Ventures and focuses purely on investing in promising startups (a shift other food giants are making amid cost headwinds).
After winding down its own experimental brands (like Dirt Kitchen and CaPao), Mondelez realized those “too early” ideas weren’t wasted — they yielded insights now guiding SnackFutures’ venture bets, letting startups take the early risks instead.
SnackFutures Ventures is hunting for fast-growing snack startups (Series A to B+) aligned with its core categories (chocolate, biscuits, candy). And with traditional VCs pulling back in a tough economy, Mondelez sees more hungry startups looking for corporate capital.

AI shopping agents (think ChatGPT-style assistants) could upend Amazon and Walmart’s e-commerce dominance by letting consumers bypass traditional search-and-buy habits.
Amazon’s ad-driven retail model looks vulnerable if AI agents do the product-scouring, while Walmart is embracing them as a strategic omnichannel edge.
Retailers will need pristine product data to stay visible to AI, and this shift could spark big changes – from pricing battles to privacy worries – as shopping goes “agentic.”

Target Corp. is testing a service that delivers products directly to customers' homes from factories, similar to Chinese ecommerce platforms Temu and Shein.
The effort aims to broaden Target's range of low-cost offerings, primarily including apparel, household goods and non-food items, and is still in its early stages.
The move is part of Target's strategy to improve sales growth, which has struggled in recent years due to factors such as soft demand, inventory missteps and tariffs.

Amazon will pump £40 billion ($54 billion) into the U.K. by 2027, building new high-tech fulfillment centers and upgrading its delivery network.
The plan will create thousands of jobs (Amazon already employs 75,000 in Britain), including ~2,000 roles at each of four major new warehouses.
Britain’s government is hailing the investment as a “massive vote of confidence” in the U.K. economy’s future.