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Shares of rocket-builder Astra fell sharply in trading on Monday after a weekend launch carrying NASA satellites failed to reach orbit.
Astra’s rocket LV0010 took off on Sunday from launch complex 46 at Cape Canaveral in Florida, carrying two satellites on NASA’s TROPICS-1 mission.
The TROPICS-1 mission represents the company’s second mission failure in three launches this year.

The company’s LV0010 rocket stands on the launchpad at Florida’s Cape Canaveral ahead of the NASA TROPICS-1 mission.

Shares of rocket-builder Astra fell sharply in trading on Monday after a weekend launch carrying NASA satellites failed to reach orbit.
Astra’s rocket LV0010 took off on Sunday from launch complex 46 at Cape Canaveral in Florida, carrying two satellites on NASA’s TROPICS-1 mission. The first part of the mission went as planned, but the engine on the upper portion of the rocket shut down early and the company was unable to deploy the satellites.

“We are reviewing flight data to determine the root cause of this anomaly and will provide additional information when it is available,” Astra wrote in a securities filing.
Astra stock fell 23.8% to close at $1.54 a share. The TROPICS-1 mission represents the company’s second mission failure in three launches this year.
In a tweet, Astra CEO Chris Kemp noted that NASA needs to have four of the planned six TROPICS satellites in orbit to be successful, so “the next two launches need to work.” TROPICS-1 was the first of three missions that NASA awarded to Astra.
“Our team understands what is at stake,” Kemp said.
The company’s vehicle stands 43 feet tall and is considered a small rocket in the launch market. Astra’s goal is to launch as many of its small rockets as it can — aiming to hit a rate of one rocket per day by 2025 — and further drop its $2.5 million price tag.
Astra went public last year after completing a SPAC merger, raising funds to build out production of its small rockets, expand its facilities in Alameda, California, and grow its spacecraft and spaceport business lines.

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The mass quarantine measures imposed this past weekend in Shanghai, including highway closures, severely affected trucks carrying exports bound for the city’s port.
Orders for cargo bound for the U.S. West Coast have picked up after trending down.
West Coast ports are slowly processing containers, while East Coast and Gulf Coast ports are starting to feel the pinch.

Staff members of China Post unload parcels of daily necessities for residents quarantined at home from a minivan on May 14, 2022 in Shanghai, China.
Tian Yuhao | China News Service | Getty Images

The mass quarantine measures imposed this past weekend in Shanghai, including highway closures, severely affected trucks carrying exports bound for the city’s port, according to logistics company Orient Star Group.
“Trucks loaded with cargoes and containers were unable to enter the Shanghai terminal,” said the company, which also contributes to CNBC’s Supply Chain Heat Map. The heat map is a new data tool that CNBC created with 13 of the world’s top maritime and logistics data providers to give investors better insight into inventory flows in real time.

“Many clients have no choice but to change the loading ports to Ningbo or other small ports along the Yangtze River.”
The Port of Ningbo, which became the alternative port destination, is now showing an increase in congestion since Covid cases keep showing up in certain Shanghai districts.

Arrows pointing outwards

“Production and manufacturing are basically resumed in Shanghai, but once there are quarantines, transportation and drayage are affected to a certain extent,” Orient Star Group said.
DHL Global Forwarding tells CNBC finding truckers in and out of the Shanghai area still presents a challenge.
During the lockdown, the slowdown in trucking led to raw material shortages for companies such as Volkswagen and Tesla. Before the latest restrictions, truck drivers were still required to provide a nationally recognized 48-hour negative Covid test result and traffic permit, said Akil Nair, Seko Logistics’ vice president of global carrier management and ocean strategy for Asia-Pacific. In practice, he said many local governments have also demanded that tests be retaken locally and on highways.

“Some drivers are cautious about delivering into Shanghai and capacity has yet to fully recover to pre-lockdown volumes,” he said.
The latest quarantine restrictions come at a time when trucking capacity recovered to around 80%.
Orient Star Group is also seeing a pickup in West Coast cargo, which had been trending down. This is a forward-looking indicator of the container uptick many logistics experts were predicting. Containers bound for the East Coast remain strong and stable.
People in 15 of Shanghai’s 16 districts this weekend were ordered to be tested for the fast-spreading omicron variant. Five districts barred residents from leaving their homes.
The districts include Pudong, home to Tesla’s gigafactory, Merck, Covestro, L’Oreal, Thermo Fisher, SC Johnson, Siemens, Bosch, SAIC-GM and Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment; and the specialty chemical manufacturing district of Xuhui. Apple, Sony, and Volkswagen have all said Shanghai’s “zero Covid” restrictions have impacted the supply of materials needed to make their products. 
The district of Jing’an is home to many semiconductor and electronics manufacturers.

U.S. ports feel the pinch

Arrows pointing outwards

The increase in West Coast cargo comes at a time when ports in the West are slowly processing import containers due to a lack of rail options and trucks being used as makeshift warehouses.
Congestion at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, has affected the Port of Oakland, California, which has been skipped by the ocean carriers that are looking to make up time on their schedules. This is having an impact on the amount of U.S. export containers leaving the port. Logistics managers are also trying to regain some control by moving more containers to the East Coast and Gulf Coast. Now those ports are getting clogged up, too.
“Congestion measured in the number of waiting cargo vessels outside major ports is now worse on the East and Gulf coasts than on the West Coast, a major shift compared to the start of 2022,” said Mirko Woitzik, director of intelligence solutions at Everstream Analytics.
To keep up with growing container volume, the Port of Houston recently announced gate hours on Saturdays for the rest of the year. Warehouses at the Port of Savannah, Georgia, are 99% full and are using their pop-up container storage lots to free up land capacity.
“2022 is showing us that East Coast ports are just as susceptible to congestion,” said Brian Bourke, chief growth officer of Project44.

Europe labor strife

Last week, a union of port operators in Germany followed through on its “warning strike” that disrupted one of the afternoon shifts at the ports of Emden, Bremen, Bremerhaven and Wilhelmshaven.
Negotiations continue between the union ver.di, which represents about 70% of the port workforce, and the Central Association of German Seaport Companies.
The system is already under strain and any loss of manpower will only add to the congestion, said Andreas Braun, ocean product director EMEA at Crane Worldwide Logistics.
“Feeder operators see up to five days of delays waiting for berth to pick up their containers, and round trips between Rotterdam – Dublin – Rotterdam has increased from six to nine days. More vessels need to be injected by the feeder operators to keep the schedule somehow reliable,” Braun said. Rotterdam is in the Netherlands.

Arrows pointing outwards

The Port of Hamburg in Germany, Europe’s third-largest container port and the largest railway port, is crucial for autos. BMW, Rolls Royce, Volkswagen, Michelin and Ford export products ranging from fully assembled automobiles to parts and lithium batteries. Other major exporters include Ikea, BASF, Siemens and Bayer.
The CNBC Supply Chain Heat Map data providers are artificial intelligence and predictive analytics company Everstream Analytics; global freight booking platform Freightos, creator of the Freightos Baltic Dry Index; logistics provider OL USA; supply chain intelligence platform FreightWaves; supply chain platform Blume Global; third-party logistics provider Orient Star Group; marine analytics firm MarineTraffic; maritime visibility data company Project44; maritime transport data company MDS Transmodal UK; ocean and air freight benchmarking analytics firm Xeneta; leading provider of research and analysis Sea-Intelligence ApS; Crane Worldwide Logistics; and air, DHL Global Forwarding, and freight logistics provider Seko Logistics.
— CNBC’s Gabriel Cortes contributed to this article.

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Electric Last Mile Solutions said it will liquidate its assets via a Chapter 7 bankruptcy process.
ELMS has been unable to secure financing since its founder and CEO departed in February after an investigation found the company’s financial statements to be unreliable.

The ELMS Urban Delivery, anticipated to launch later this year, is expected to be the first Class 1 commercial electric vehicle available in the U.S. market and will be produced at the Company’s facility in Mishawaka, Indiana.
Electric Last Mile Solutions

EV start-up Electric Last Mile Solutions said late Sunday it plans to file for bankruptcy less than a year after it went public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company.
The Michigan-based maker of electric commercial vans said in a release that interim CEO Shauna McIntyre and its board of directors decided on Sunday to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, which will allow it to liquidate its assets, after a “comprehensive review of the company’s products and commercialization plans” turned up no better option for stakeholders.

ELMS’ public offering, in late June 2021, came amid a wave of SPAC deals that took EV makers public. The company is the first of those post-SPAC EV makers to say that it will declare bankruptcy.
McIntyre has served as interim chief executive since February, when founder and Chairman Jason Luo and then-CEO Jim Taylor left the struggling start-up after an internal investigation found that the company’s past financial statements were unreliable.
ELMS said in a statement that those executive departures, and a related investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, had made it “extremely challenging” to secure additional funding.  

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Warehouse giant Prologis said it will acquire its smaller rival Duke Realty in an all-stock deal valued at about $26 billion, including debt.
This comes after Duke Realty in May rejected a nearly $24 billion buyout offer from Prologis, calling it insufficient.
Prologis controls roughly 1 billion square feet of warehouses and distribution centers used by companies including Amazon, Home Depot and FedEx.

Signage outside a Prologis warehouse occupied by Kuehne + Nagel in Redlands, California, U.S., on Sunday, Nov. 7, 2021. Fallout from the global supply-chain crisis is clogging U.S. ports, pushing warehouses to capacity and forcing logistics managers to scramble for space.
Roger Kisby | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Warehouse giant Prologis said Monday that it will acquire its smaller rival Duke Realty in an all-stock deal valued at about $26 billion, including debt, in a vote of confidence for the red hot industrial real estate sector.
The announcement comes after Duke Realty in May rejected a nearly $24 billion buyout offer from Prologis, calling it insufficient.

Prologis shares fell more than 4% in premarket trading Monday after the news. Duke Realty shares rose around 4%.
Prologis controls roughly 1 billion square feet of warehouses and distribution centers used by companies including Amazon, Home Depot and FedEx. Duke Realty owns and operates about 160 million square feet of industrial real estate in 19 major U.S. logistics markets.
Both companies’ boards of directors have unanimously approved the transaction, a press release said.
Under the terms of the agreement, Duke Realty shareholders will receive 0.475x of a Prologis share for each Duke Realty share they own. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter.
Prologis said the transaction will allow for it to gain properties in key geographies including Southern California, New Jersey, South Florida, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta.

It said it plans to hold 94% of the Duke Realty assets and exit one market.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

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If you want to see how technology and deglobalisation are changing the global economy, there are few better places to look than the car industry. Not only is it going through an epochal shift: away from the internal-combustion engine (ice) and towards electric vehicles (evs). Automobiles are also becoming, in effect, computers on wheels, running as much on processing power as the horse variety. And the pandemic has wreaked havoc on car companies’ complex global supply chains, most prominently of semiconductors. As carmakers electrify, computerise and refashion their supply chains for the new reality, the giant sector is undergoing the greatest transformation in decades.Having outsourced much of the manufacturing process over the past few decades to focus on design, supplier management and parts assembly, car companies are trying to exert greater control over their value chain—from the metals that go into their batteries to the software their evs run on and the shops in which they are sold. They want to turn their ev arms into tech startups. In both respects, control and startupiness, Big Auto wants to be more like Tesla, the world’s undisputed ev champion. As with earlier examples of companies tailgating a rival that tries something that works, from Ford’s moving assembly line or Toyota’s just-in-time manufacturing, Teslafication of the car business will prove disruptive.Doing everything under one roof is an idea both old and new. Tesla’s industrial system is at one glance an embrace of Silicon Valley’s “full stack”—internalising all aspects of production, and thus all the profits. Elon Musk, Tesla’s opinionated boss, once claimed that his company is “absurdly vertically integrated” by any standard, not just the car industry’s. In fact, Mr Musk borrows heavily from carmaking’s past. Henry Ford often sourced raw materials, like rubber for tyres and steel for chassis, from plantations and blast furnaces owned by his firm. His River Rouge factory in Detroit was powered by coal from Ford mines. In an echo of Fordism, Tesla has struck recent deals with lithium miners and graphite suppliers and last month confirmed a deal with Vale, a Brazilian mining giant, to acquire nickel. The plan is to acquire most of its lithium, over half its cobalt and around one-third of its nickel directly from nine mining companies. It will use those minerals in its “gigafactories”, the first of which started making batteries in 2017 in Nevada in partnership with Panasonic of Japan. It plans to make more cells on its own at its three other gigafactories around the world. Tesla has also pulled other bits of the powertrain in-house. It makes its own motors and a lot of its own electronics, giving it more control over costs as well as over the technology, says Dan Levy of Credit Suisse, a bank. Although rumours swirling last year that Mr Musk might buy his own chip factory have faded, Tesla designs its own semiconductors and has closer links than other carmakers with companies that manufacture them. That has helped it weather the global chips shortage better than rivals. Tesla’s software engineers have created a centralised computing architecture to run on those chips, ensuring smooth integration with the four-wheeled hardware. Mr Musk has even dispensed with the dealership-based sales model, instead opening his own swanky Tesla stores. Jealously eyeing Tesla’s market capitalisation of $850bn, which is roughly as much as the next nine biggest carmakers combined (see chart 1), other car bosses are desperate to emulate Mr Musk’s digger-to-dealership control. According to ubs, another bank, “integration represents a strong competitive edge in an environment of structurally tight supply chains.” As Jim Farley, Ford’s current boss, recently declared, “The most important thing is we vertically integrate. Henry Ford…was right.”This reverses decades of outsourcing to big suppliers such as Bosch, Continental and Denso in order to concentrate on managing supply chains, integrating separate parts, design, and marketing. Suppliers sold similar sorts of the same components to many customers using scale to keep prices low. This freed up capital for carmakers but put technological innovation at one step removed. Carlos Tavares, ceo of Stellantis, an Italian-American giant (whose big shareholder, Exor, also owns a stake in The Economist’s parent company), has said that his cars are 85% “bolt-on parts”. Mercedes-Benz puts the value-added split at 70/30 in favour of suppliers. Established car firms now want their ratios to more closely resemble Tesla’s, which Philippe Houchois of Jefferies, an investment bank, puts at around 50-50 and rising in favour of in-house. This starts with raw materials. As demand for battery minerals and processing capacity continues to outstrip supply, car firms are striking deals which would have Henry Ford nodding with approval. Getting their hands dirty by short-circuiting supply chains is, in the words of one former mining titan, “extraordinary”. bmw said in 2021 that it has put $334m into an Argentine lithium project. Last year Stellantis and Renault also each signed deals with Vulcan Energy Resources, and gm revealed a “multimillion-dollar investment” in Controlled Thermal Resources, in each case for lithium. In April Ford inked one with Lake Resources for the same mineral. The same month Stellantis and Mercedes entered an arrangement with Umicore, a Belgian chemicals giant, to supply cathode materials for acc, the two carmakers’ battery joint venture. In March byd, a more Tesla-like Chinese firm that started out making phone batteries before buying a small car company in 2003 and turning into one of the world’s biggest ev-makers, announced a nearly $500m investment in a Chinese lithium miner. It is said to have bought six mines in Africa. The terms of such deals are generally opaque but the sums involved are large and growing. Car bosses agree that they will become commonplace. Efforts to emulate Tesla’s battery gigafactories are also getting into gear. Carmakers are hoping to break the stranglehold of China and South Korea on battery-making, bringing production closer to home to keep costs in check and supplies reliable. Volkswagen (vw) is creating some in-house battery-making capacity. It has earmarked €2bn ($2.1bn) for its German factory, and says it will build six battery factories in Europe by 2030.Plans for such fully fledged in-house battery units remain rare (see chart 2). Most companies prefer to team up with specialist producers. Ford and sk Innovations of South Korea will stump up $7bn and $4.4bn, respectively, for three joint gigafactories in America. Last year gm unveiled an investment of $2.3bn for a battery plant in Tennessee built with lg, another South Korean firm. Sometimes, as with acc, rival car companies band together to share the cost of battery production. Stellantis and Mercedes (along with TotalEnergies, a French oil giant) will invest $7bn in acc factories in France and Germany. vw has a 20% stake, worth 1.4bn, in Northvolt, a Swedish firm that also counts Volvo as an investor. Buying off-the-shelf electric motors from suppliers is also falling out of favour. Hyundai, and the long-standing alliance between Renault and two Japanese carmakers, Nissan and Mitsubishi, are mostly going it alone. bmw, Ford, gm, Mercedes-Benz and vw are among those planning to make more motors in their own factories. Although no car boss is about to outdo Mr Musk and make the leap into semiconductor manufacturing, the 7.7m cars in lost production last year as a result of the global chip shortage has made the industry forge closer links with chip designers such as Qualcomm and Nvidia, which would once have sold chips to firms far down the carmakers’ supply chain. The car firms are also employing chip specialists to help them semi-tailor specifications to make them, as one car boss puts it, “smarter buyers”. vw is hatching plans to design its own custom silicon, as Tesla does. Something similar is happening in software development. Last month vw’s boss, Herbert Diess, told a meeting of his employees that “development of our own software expertise is the biggest switch the automotive industry has to make.” Mr Diess’s fellow industry leaders share his analysis. In the next few years software is expected to become the main source of revenue for the industry. ubs reckons car-software sales will bring in around $1.9trn annually by 2030 (see chart 3). Small wonder that car companies want to appear more techie. In September Ford poached Doug Field, who had been in charge of special projects at Apple, a tech giant with its own long-rumoured automotive ambitions. Jim Rowan, who took charge of Volvo in February, is a former boss of Dyson, an electronics firm. Even Ferrari, an Italian sports-car brand defined by the roar of its petrol engines (which is also part-owned by Exor), has been run since September by Benedetto Vigna, recruited from stMicroelectronics, a Swiss chip company. In 2020 vw created a separate software arm, cariad, to sidestep its slow decision-making bureaucracy. Despite teething troubles with the software on its id.3 hatchback that surfaced at the end of 2019, the firm has recently said that it aims to develop most of its own software in 15 years’ time, up from about 10% now. That includes plans for a proprietary operating system, something that Mercedes and Toyota are also contemplating. (Ford and gm are instead adopting Google’s Android operating system.) To that end, vw plans to invest around €30bn over the next five years. Stellantis wants to hire 4,500 software engineers by 2024. Several carmakers are setting up research-and-development centres in tech hubs, from Silicon Valley and Shanghai to Berlin and Bangalore, in order to tap those places’ existing talent pools.As for sales, established car firms have no intention of ditching the dealership system. It serves useful functions in servicing, for example—as Tesla’s long-running struggles in this area illustrate. Still, more car companies are shifting to an “agency model”, selling cars directly to customers, like Tesla, rather than through a third party. Charging fixed prices could boost margins. Direct sales also forge a closer bond with buyers that might go on to purchase additional services and upgrades. If they really want to catch up with Tesla, let alone overtake it, car companies have to “move at Silicon Valley speed”, as Barclays, a bank, puts it. That means simplifying not just their supplier networks but their corporate structures, which have become complex and siloed. As long ago as 2019 Volvo and Geely, its Chinese parent company, merged their ice operation as a stand-alone business. That has allowed the Swedish marque to go full speed to becoming electric-only by 2030. In March Ford said that it would create an ev unit, Ford Model e, and separate it from the ice operations. Renault is considering doing something similar, also with a view to accelerating innovation. All this amounts to a huge upheaval for a globe-spanning industry involving thousands of companies, millions of workers and billions in sunk ice-age costs. Refashioning value chains means spending lots of time and money, and comes with the risk of failure. For suppliers, it potentially means less business, as vertical integration makes them less central to carmaking—a prospect reflected in the sliding share prices of some, including Continental, in the past few years. For car bosses, that means more headaches, as they consider how best to deploy their firms’ resources and skills, without provoking a backlash from governments and unions fearful of the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs. As a result, the sector’s Teslafication drive will be uneven and fitful. But the direction of travel is unmistakably Muskian. ■ More

Members of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot were tightlipped about what to expect in this week’s public hearings.
The first public hearing claimed that multiple Republican congressmen asked for pardons, but the committee has only named one, Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa. He has denied asking for a pardon.
The second hearing on the Jan. 6 probe is slated to begin at 10 a.m. ET on Monday.

Members of the Committee attend the public hearing of the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 9, 2022.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

Members of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot were tightlipped about what to expect in this week’s public hearings, giving few details beyond their road map to prove that former President Donald Trump is to blame for the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
The first public hearing held by the nine-member committee happened on Thursday evening, and three more days of hearings have been officially scheduled for Monday, Wednesday and Thursday this week.

Among the revelations from the first hearing was that multiple Republican congressmen asked for presidential pardons. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the committee’s vice chair and one of its two Republican members, named Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., as one such representative. Perry has denied the claim, calling it a “shameless” and “soulless” lie.
The identities of the other congressmen who sought pardons remain unknown, but several members of the committee said during Sunday television appearances that they believe that those requests show they knew they were doing something illegal.
“To me, I think that is some of the most compelling evidence of consciousness of guilt. Why would members do that if they felt their involvement in this plot to overturn the election was somehow appropriate?” California Rep. Adam Schiff said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the other Republican representative on the Jan. 6 committee, echoed that thought in an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“In general, if someone asks for a pardon, it’s because they have real concern that they’ve done something illegal. I’ll leave it at that, but I’ll say that more information will be coming,” he said.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is not on the committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” the same day that every member of Congress should be able to answer if he or she requested a pardon.
“When you don’t know which of your colleagues were part of a potential conspiracy, then we need to find out,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I believe that the committee would never make an allegation so serious without very substantial evidence to present to the American public.”
Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, who sits on the select committee, said that the investigation isn’t just for the public.
“I suppose our entire investigation is a referral of crimes both to the Department of Justice and the American people, because this is a massive assault on the machinery of American democracy,” he said during an appearance on “State of the Union.”
But he fell short of saying that the Department of Justice should indict Trump, instead saying that he is respecting the independence of law enforcement. Schiff, for his part, told ABC’s Martha Raddatz that he wants the DOJ to investigate.
“I would like to see the Justice Department investigate any credible allegation of criminal activity on the part of Donald Trump or anyone else. The rule of law needs to apply equally to everyone,” Schiff said.
Monday’s hearing is slated to begin at 10 a.m. ET. The committee is expected to focus on Trump’s misinformation campaign and the lack of evidence supporting allegations of election fraud.

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“Jurassic World: Dominion” roared to the top of the domestic box office over the weekend, generating more than $143 million in ticket sales during its debut.
Around 10.8 million moviegoers turned up to see “Dominion” domestically, representing around 66% of the overall moviegoing audience during the weekend, according to data from EntTelligence.
“Top Gun: Maverick,” which snared another $50 million in ticket sales during its third weekend in the U.S. and Canada, represented 26% of the domestic moviegoing audience.

DeWanda Wise and Laura Dern star in Universal’s “Jurassic World: Dominion.”

“Jurassic World: Dominion” roared to the top of the domestic box office over the weekend, generating more than $143 million in ticket sales during its debut.
Internationally, the film has secured around $245.8 million since opening earlier this month, bringing its global tally to just under $390 million.

Around 10.8 million moviegoers turned up to see “Dominion” domestically, representing around 66% of the overall moviegoing audience during the weekend, according to data from EntTelligence.
“Top Gun: Maverick,” which snared another $50 million in ticket sales during its third weekend in the U.S. and Canada, represented 26% of the domestic moviegoing audience.
“Maverick” has continued to draw in audiences and saw just a 44% drop in ticket sales between its second and third weekend. This is the second weekend in a row that the Tom Cruise-led sequel has held strong at the box office. Between its opening week and second week, the film saw only a 32% drop in ticket sales. Typically, films will see between a 50% and 70% drop between the first and second weekend
“‘Top Gun: Maverick’ is still flying high even in the face of stiff competition from ‘Jurassic World: Dominion,'” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. “For movie theaters, this is a dream scenario of having two blockbusters on their screens at once generating excitement and buzz surrounding the movie theater experience.”
For “Jurassic World: Dominion,” however, this game of diminishing returns could be much more severe. The blockbuster feature has received overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics and could see a steep drop off in ticket sales after its opening weekend if word of mouth from moviegoers is also sour.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. NBCUniversal distributed “Jurassic World: Dominion.”

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Walmart has launched style-forward brands, added national brands and debuted a new store design to try to sell more discretionary merchandise.
The retailer’s desire to sell more higher-margin items has become more urgent after it disappointed Wall Street with its fiscal first-quarter earnings and cut its profit expectations.
The company plans to expand its new store design, which draws attention to apparel and home, to 30 more stores by the end of the year.

Scoop is one of Walmart’s exclusive fashion brands. It has also struck deals with national brands like BCBG Paris.
Melissa Repko | CNBC

SPRINGDALE, Arkansas — Dressed-up mannequins. Eye-catching displays of sleek furniture and colorful swimsuits. And store signs that promote exclusive brands and nationally recognized ones.
Walmart’s redesigned SuperCenter, located just 16 miles from its Northwest Arkansas headquarters, reflects the retailer’s ambitions to get more customers to turn to its stores and website to fill their closets and living rooms, along with their fridges.

It is the retailer’s new model, and it will soon spread across the country. Walmart plans to open 30 more redesigned stores by late January and and hundreds more in the following fiscal year, Chief Merchandising Officer Charles Redfield said.
He said the locations will vary slightly and will have different elements of the pilot store. They’ll be used to test and learn before Walmart rolls out the look more widely, he said.
Walmart is the nation’s largest grocery by revenue, but it wants to drive more sales of higher-margin items such as apparel. Over the past five years, the retailer has launched new brands and struck partnerships with companies like Reebok, Gap and Justice to expand its offerings in apparel, home and other discretionary categories. Those brands have often come with a higher price point and a focus on style. Many are expanding to more of Walmart’s big-box stores.
The retailer’s strategy has taken on more urgency, after Walmart’s first quarter earnings disappointed Wall Street last month and cut profit expectations. Walmart’s mix of merchandise in the period contributed to its earnings miss. As customers spent more on groceries and gas because of inflation, some decided to not buy other, more-profitable items like clothing and TVs — the very purchases that tend to lift profits.

A changing consumer

A pullback on discretionary spending is hitting retailers in general, especially as the companies lap a year-ago period when shoppers had extra dollars from stimulus checks. For Walmart, sales of general merchandise in the U.S. slipped in the first quarter, drawing fewer dollars than the year-ago period even as overall U.S. net sales rose to $96.9 billion, according to Walmart’s filings.

To compound troubles, retailers — including Target, Kohl’s and American Eagle Outfitters — have racked up excess inventory, as consumers snub some popular pandemic items, watch the budget and decide to spend on travel or dining out instead of goods.
Walmart reported that it had excess merchandise, too, with inventory levels up about 33% versus a year earlier. U.S. CEO, John Furner, said last week at an investor day that it will take “a couple of quarters” to get back to where the retailer wants to be. He estimated that about 20% of that overage is merchandise that the company would like to “just wish away.” The company declined to comment further on its strategy to sell through its merchandise, after Target shared its aggressive inventory plans.
About 32% of Walmart’s U.S. net sales have come from general merchandise in recent years, according to company filings. That dropped to 28% in the most recent quarter. At Target, 54% of sales come from general merchandise, according to its most recent annual report.
There’s a big opportunity for Walmart if it can use the frequency of grocery shopping at stores and popularity of online options like curbside pickup to lift general merchandise sales, said Robby Ohmes, a retail analyst for Bank of America.
Plus, he said, creeping prices may encourage a new or infrequent Walmart shopper to give the discounter a shot.
“Everybody is sort of managing inflation,” Ohmes said. “There are going to be groups of people who find themselves at Walmart who normally wouldn’t — so they may get a better flow of customers as people become more value-conscious.”

Walmart is expanding the price points in its beauty department. It recently added a “Beauty finds” display with makeup, skincare, hair and other items for $3, $5 or $9 each. It also sells prestige brands through a new deal with British beauty retailer SpaceNK.
Melissa Repko | CNBC

The lure of lower prices

On its website and in a growing number of its stores, Walmart has expanded its styles and price points. Along with cheap basics, it sells sundresses and tops from exclusive brands, Scoop and Free Assembly, which customers could pack for vacation or wear to a party. It carries jeans a customer could wear out to dinner from Sofia Jeans, an exclusive brand developed with actress Sofia Vergara.
And in home, Walmart is selling more aspirational styles, too — including a collection developed with Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, the stars behind Netflix’s “The Home Edit.”

In Walmart’s redesigned store in Arkansas, a display shows Thyme & True, one of the retailer’s exclusive home brands. Shoppers can scan a QR code to learn more about the items or order them online.

CEO Doug McMillon said Walmart’s range will help it better weather a period of inflation.
At an investor day earlier this month, he and other Walmart executives stressed that the retailer will continue to offer entry-level price points for customers who live on a tight budget. It will have those low prices not only on key food items like rice, cans of tuna and macaroni and cheese, but also on general merchandise like T-shirts and tennis balls.
But it can also draw in customers who have more money to spend, McMillon said.
“As you move up the income scale, how many of those customers can you attract in the areas you might not have been doing business with them as frequently?” he said. “Can we move some volume into apparel and home and maybe even some of the consumable categories as people become even more value-conscious?”
Walmart attracted consumers for basics and groceries, but was losing them when they shopped for other items, Redfield said.
“They were having to go somewhere else to get what they want from a style and quality standpoint, so we said, ‘We’ve got to fix that,'” he said in an interview.

Walmart has launched exclusive apparel brands, including active and swimwear line Love & Sports, to nudge customers to buy more general merchandise. Those brands are front and center at a new store in Springdale, Ark., which is near Walmart’s headquarters.
Melissa Repko | CNBC

Silk scrunchies, craft beer and sundresses

Inside of the redesigned store in Northwest Arkansas, the clothing department has fewer racks and wider aisles to encourage browsing. It has dedicated areas that resemble mini shops for national brands, such as Reebok and kids clothing brand Justice. And it puts Walmart’s own fashion and home brands front and center with mannequins and displays that suggest how to put together an outfit or a room.
Walmart gives direct-to-consumer brands that resonate with younger, social media-savvy customers more square footage in the stores, too, including shaving company Billie and dog food company Jinx.
One of the other big changes? Price signs are smaller near the national apparel brands and Walmart’s elevated clothing brands — a big break from the retailer’s tendency to make the numbers big and bold.
“We’re selling apparel in a grocery store, however that doesn’t mean we have to sell apparel like it’s grocery,” said Alvis Washington, Walmart’s vice president of marketing, store design, innovation and experience. “Apparel is a discretionary category. It’s emotional. You want them to fall in love with the fashion.”
“This is where you actually want them to look, feel, touch the item and then validate the choice by looking at the price point on it,” Washington said. “We’re letting the product be hero and setting the tone.”
Even in the grocery department, the store has a different look. The wine aisle is larger and includes expensive red wines and top-shelf champagnes. The craft beer section is also prominent. Both changes are geared toward a more trendy millennial customer, Redfield said.
“We’re going to sell a lot of underwear and socks,” he said. “We do sell a lot of underwear and socks. We’re going to continue to sell that, but we’re not going to force our customer to go somewhere else when they want something special.”

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