Statista

For only the second time in the 12-year-long history of Prime Day, Amazon is holding its exclusive shopping event in June this year. Starting today, Prime members in more than 20 countries will have the chance to score deals as part of the event that Amazon has successfully established as a summer counterpart to Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

What started as a 24-hour sales event to celebrate Amazon’s 20th anniversary in 2015 has grown into a multi-day shopping marathon, now lasting 96 hours or four full days. By stretching the event across several days, Amazon not only boosts total sales but also keeps shoppers engaged for longer, while giving sellers more opportunities to promote deals.

The evolution of Prime Day into a “Prime Week” underscores how major retail events are becoming longer, more frequent and increasingly central to online shopping strategies worldwide. The same has happened to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which have evolved into Black Week and Cyber Week, with deals seemingly stretched across longer periods each year.

Amazon remains the world’s largest e-commerce platform by gross merchandise volume, but its lead is increasingly challenged by fast-growing Chinese competitors. Platforms such as Pinduoduo and Douyin (China's original version of TikTok) have rapidly scaled their ecosystems, combining social media, entertainment and shopping in ways that are reshaping online consumption.

According to estimates from ECDB, Amazon's GMV amounted to $846 billion last year, with first-party sales contributing $296 billion to that total. Pinduoduo and Douyin were ranked second and third with $781 billion and $656 billion, respectively, both having overtaken Chinese incumbents Taobao, Tmall and JD.com in recent years. Both platforms use a data-driven approach to engage users and incentivize shopping. Low prices, gamification and live shopping are core drivers of their strategy and have proven successful over the years.

While Amazon continues to dominate in Western markets, the global e-commerce landscape is becoming more fragmented and competitive. The rise of social commerce and mobile-first platforms from China highlights a shift in how consumers discover and purchase products, putting pressure on established players to follow trends that increasingly shaped in the world's second largest consumer market.

Since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision to overturn the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018, allowing states to regulate sports betting individually, many states have passed legislation that allows sports betting through retail and/or online sportsbooks.

According to the American Gaming Association, 39 states and the District of Columbia have legalized sports betting in some form. 30 states plus DC allow sports betting online and in retail locations, seven only allow retail sports betting and two only allow online sports wagers. 11 states have not yet legalized sports betting in any form: Alabama, Alaska, California, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Minnesota, Oklahome, South Carolina, Texas and Utah.

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June 21 marks International Yoga Day, a celebration of mindfulness, movement, and balance.

From its roots in yoga culture to becoming a global activewear powerhouse, Lululemon has built a brand around inspiring people to live healthier, more mindful lives. Today, the brand enjoys remarkable customer loyalty, with 75% of its customers saying they would buy Lululemon again.

So, how does Lululemon measure up? Let’s take a closer look at the numbers.

While major economies take extensive measures to hedge against supply risks in times of geopolitical tension, some industrialized nations have surprisingly small strategic oil reserves. This uneven distribution could impact energy market stability and the ability of individual countries to respond to crisis like has been the case during the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

When looking at days of oil use different countries' oil reserves could cushion, the playing field is more level, with Germany, France and Italy all covering 120-135 days of net imports, showing not only the different size of their populations and nature of their industries, but also different patterns of energy production. This includes, for example, more nuclear energy in France and more renewables in the United Kingdom, which with a reserve of just 8.8 million tons still covers 115 days of net oil imports.

Japan as well as South Korea even cover approximately 200 days, while the U.S. and Canada are not listed in the statistic due to being net oil exporters. While this means that in case of a dire emergency, these nations could just stop oil exports and be self-sufficient. However, the last couple of years have shown the strategic oil reserve has proven very useful even to a country like the United States, as it was used as a valuable tool for price mitigation rather than a measure of last resort.

IEA data shows how strongly concentrated reserves are among a few OECD members. The United States dominates oil stocks among OECD nations, accounting for 37 percent of the total – or 174.2 million tonnes as of March 2026.

It's been four years since inflation peaked at 9 percent in June 2022, and yet many Americans are still reeling from the lasting effects of the inflation crisis. Despite wage growth outpacing inflation for 34 consecutive months between May 2023 and March 2026, real wages still haven't returned to 2021 levels, leaving many Americans with less buying power than five years ago. And just when real wages had almost caught up, the war in Iran began, sending energy prices soaring and causing inflation to surge from 2.4 percent in February to 4.2 percent in May. At the same time, nominal wages grew only 3.4 percent, meaning that real wages are once again declining.

Between April 2021 and April 2023, inflation had outpaced nominal wage growth for 25 consecutive months, leaving a hole in the pockets of millions of Americans. Despite making more money on paper - nominal wages continued to grow throughout the inflation crisis - consumers were able to afford less than they were before, a situation that is as frustrating as it is economically unsustainable. As anyone who has ever taken a pay cut knows, there are few things more discouraging than putting in the same amount of work in for less money, which is why it’s understandable that inflation has been at the very top of many Americans’ list of concerns for the past years. From an economic perspective, it's also crucial for real wages to increase over time, as consumer spending is by far the biggest component of the gross domestic product and a key driver of GDP growth. In recent years, consumer spending has been surprisingly robust in light of the circumstances, but many Americans were forced to deplete their savings or take on new credit to keep spending.

Perhaps more concerning than the recent uptick in inflation, which can mostly be attributed to surging energy prices due to the war in Iran, is the fact that long-term inflation expectations have also surged in recent months. Estimates by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, calculated using Treasury yields, inflation data, inflation swaps and survey-based measures of inflation expectations, put 5- and 10-year inflation expectations at 2.54 and 2.49 percent in June, respectively, far off the Fed’s 2-percent target.

The danger with elevated long-term inflation expectations is that they become “unanchored”, i.e. permanently move away from the target level, setting in motion a vicious circle that makes it much harder for central banks to control inflation. Expectations play a crucial role in inflation dynamics, as expectations of future inflation influence wage negotiations and price-setting processes today, which then feed into current inflation rates. When expectations of future inflation are high, prices and wages are likely to be set accordingly, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The latest Digital News Report by Reuters Institute published Tuesday shows that in a 45-country sample, only 10 percent of people use AI chatbots to consume news. Shares reached as high as 14 percent in South Korea and Turkey and 13 percent in Brazil. Countries where the fewest people engaged in the practice were the United Kingdom at 4 percent and Germany as well as Hungary, Croatia, Denmark, Finland and France at 5 percent. The United States, home to many of the world's most prolific chatbot creators, only saw use for news standing at 6 percent in 2026.

Since 2025, when the question was first asked in the Reuters report, chatbot news consumption worldwide rose from 7 percent. The report also states that news consumers are already able to encounter AI in online news. Public broadcasters in Germany and the United Kingdom recently started using the technology to generate article summaries. At the same time, newsrooms are experimenting with automation of processes in Colombia, Sweden and Mexico. In the latter country, for example, AI is helping journalists with lists and summaries of archived articles for follow-up coverage and story ideas at newspaper El Economista. In the Philippines, a fact-checking tool was launched by an organization specializing in the subject. In Nigeria, a transcription and translation tool versed in local languages was developed. While some experimentation with AI-created content was also reported, the report highlights AI's strengths for internal and research purposes rather than audience-facing production.

PwC's Global AI Jobs Barometer has found that AI-skilled workers earn 62 percent more across the globe than their non-AI-skilled counterparts. The analysis looked at data across one million job ads in 16 different sectors and 27 countries and found that in consumer market jobs, differences were especially stark, with roles requiring AI skills paying 118 percent more than those which don't.

Other high pay gaps could be observed in the areas of technology, telecoms and media (+84 percent earnings for AI-skilled employees), energy, utilities and resources (+75 percent) as well as manufacturing (+73 percent). Below average gains were calculated for the public sector, where (government) employees only earned 16 percent more if they had AI skills. In the health industries, this number stood at 37 percent.

The report also found that the hiring of AI specialists has been rising sharply. While in 2012, 1 percent of jobs posted were for AI specialists, this more than doubled and stood at above 2 percent in 2025. The biggest share of AI jobs was listed in the area of tech, media and telecoms at 11.4 percent of all job listings. Hiring was up in all sectors, with shares of AI jobs reaching between 2 percent and almost 6 percent for the other sectors included in the chart. The exception was the healthcare sector with just around 1 percent of jobs posted having an AI component.