Latest news with #JohnMercer
CBS News
6 days ago
- Business
- CBS News
Inflation, tariff concerns push families to start back-to-school shopping early
Although inflation is cooling, President Trump's new tariff rates are threatening to drive prices higher. That could lead to higher prices on back-to-school essentials like backpacks. Concerns about prices and the overall economy are changing how parents shop. It isn't even the midpoint of summer break, but Andrea Cuneo of Bloomington has already tackled back to school shopping for her two kids. "Except for shoes, I'll let the kids pick out their shoes and then we're good to go," Cuneo said. According to a report by Coresight Research, 62% of shoppers say they'll begin back-to-school shopping before August, up over 8 percentage points from last year. Coresight's John Mercer say shoppers are seeking deals and value for money, while preempting tariff-driven price increases down the line. "Tariffs have gone up, even if deals are struck. The baseline of tariffs has gone up. More tariffs are due to come in on August 1, and the flow through to prices is really only going to be upward from tariffs," said Mercer. Angela Ryan of Otsego is focusing on comparison shopping. "I wanted to make sure I was getting the lowest price. With two kids, when you have to buy four sets of markers or four sets of crayons of my fifth-grader needs a special case for all of her stuff at school, I want to make sure I'm paying the lowest price," Ryan said. Cuneo is also saving money by assessing what they already have. "We try to reuse backpacks. I don't need a new one every year unless it's worn out," she said. Even with parents' financial concerns, Mercer expects back-to-school spending will be up 3.3% compared to last year. "We think higher income consumers will drive retail growth. We think low income consumers will be much more cautious. Low income consumers, some of them will be hit by changes to SNAP, to Medicaid. And higher income consumers stand to benefit the most from income tax gains from the 'big, beautiful bill,'" he said. Another reason for earlier back to school shopping is Amazon Prime Day. About 40% of Prime Day shoppers used it for those items this year.
Miami Herald
09-07-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
Store Closures On Track to Far Exceed 2024 Levels
Store closures across the U.S. continue to rise, and remain on track to far significantly surpass both new openings and the figures seen in 2024. According to a new report from research and advisory firm Coresight Research, cited by CoStar News, 5,822 store closures were recorded as of June 27, compared to 3,496 closures announced during the same period of 2024. The 2025 closures have also far outstripped the 3,960 announced openings this year. The stark increase in closures reflects long-term challenges to the retail sector, which has for years battled declining foot traffic and the rise of e-commerce - particularly since the COVID Pandemic - Coresight reported. Persistent inflation and tariff hikes on goods from other countries - heralded by the Trump administration as a measure to boost American manufacturing and protect jobs - have also taken tolls on consumer confidence and spending, analysis from US banking giant JP Morgan suggests. Early in the year, Coresight Research predicted that around 15,000 stores would close in 2025, more than double the 7,325 that shuttered last year. Those were the highest number of annual closures since 2020, when there were 9,698. Store openings, meanwhile, were predicted to fall to 5,800 from 5,970 in 2025. Since it made the prediction in late January, several major brands have announced or embarked upon reductions in their nationwide footprints. Macy's and Kohl's are among the household names to announce widespread closures, fueled in part by declining sales and a desire to optimize operations to accommodate shifting consumer behaviors. Pharmacies have also seen mass closures. Chains such as CVS and Walgreens have already announced plans to permanently shutter hundreds of locations across the country. Rite Aid, which filed for bankruptcy in early May, recently saw the number of locations marked for closure surpass 1,000, though many of these have been sold off to competitors as it attempts to exit the Chapter 11 process. The widespread shuttering of pharmacies has exacerbated fears over Americans' access to essential medications, as many face the prospect of living in what have been referred to as "pharmacy deserts." John Mercer, Coresight's head of global research, told CoStar News: "U.S. retail is in a period of unusually high real-estate churn as cyclical impacts confront structural shifts." "U.S. store closures are up by two-thirds compared to one year earlier, while openings are flat," he added. "That closures total is compounding closure numbers that were already up, year over year, in week 27 of 2024." Miranda Rochol, Senior Vice President of Provider Solutions at healthcare technology firm Prescryptive Health, told Newsweek that the reasons for mass pharmacy closures "are complex, but it's not an overstatement to say pharmacies are facing unprecedented economic strain, with shrinking margins and reimbursement rates." "Many small pharmacies now operate at a loss on common prescriptions, and large chains are restructuring in response to reduced revenues, declining foot traffic, and other outdated models that no longer align with the needs of modern consumers," she added. It remains to be seen whether the number of closures will ultimately match the 15,000 originally forecast by Coresight back in January. Last week, Coresight estimated that the level of store closures could result in over 120 million square feet of closed retail space in 2025. Related Articles Rite Aid Closures Reach 1,000 as America Faces 'Pharmacy Deserts'Map Shows Cities Where Malls are Dying Off FastestAre Banks Open on Juneteenth 2025? List of Holiday ClosuresTD Bank to Close 38 Locations by June 5: See the Full List 2025 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.
BBC News
26-06-2025
- General
- BBC News
Work to start on Great Harwood leisure complex's £400,000 revamp
Initial work to transform a leisure complex in Lancashire will begin later this £400,000 project at Mercer Hall in Great Harwood will include asbestos assessments and the drawing up of technical designs to accommodate new flooring and furnishings in the main hall and front features of the renovation will be the reinstatement of the grand doors which lead into the hall, and the addition of a new dance community groups hope to be able to start using the hall from December. 'Historic building' Mercer Hall was built between 1913 and Council decided in 2022 to permanently close its swimming pool in favour of a new purpose-built £12m leisure centre at Wilson Playing Fields in new facility is due to open in Hall's gym will close when the new complex opens, the Local Democracy Reporting Service Council's deputy leader and leisure boss, Councillor Melissa Fisher, said Mercer Hall was a "much-loved community landmark".She said: "It's wonderful to know that these efforts will ensure the people of Great Harwood can continue enjoying this historic building for many years to come."Mercer Hall, on Queen Street, is named after scientist John Mercer, who came from the town and invented a treatment to improve the quality of cotton fabric. Listen to the best of BBC Radio Lancashire on BBC Sounds and follow BBC Lancashire on Facebook, X and Instagram and watch BBC North West Tonight on BBC iPlayer.
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
What I've learned after 40 years as the Observer's science editor
Earlier this year I received an email from a reader asking background questions about an article I had written more than four decades ago. Given the time gap, my recollection was hazy. To be honest, it was almost non-existent. So I was intrigued – and then astonished when I read the feature. I had written about the British glaciologist John Mercer, author of a 1978 Nature paper in which he warned that continuing increases in fossil fuel consumption would cause amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide to soar. Global temperatures could rise by 2C by the mid-21st century, causing major ice loss at the poles and threatening a 5-metre rise in sea levels, he warned. Today temperatures are 1.5C warmer than they were in preindustrial times and sea levels are rising at an accelerating rate. And, as Mercer also predicted, global warming is having its greatest impact at the poles. Ice is disappearing, threatening to inundate Earth's populated coastal zones with meltwater and compromising the planet's ability to reflect solar radiation back into space. Further temperature rises are likely to ensue. Mercer was not the first scientist to warn that our world faced a greenhouse future, but his paper, with its highly specific forecasts, was my earliest exposure to a detailed examination of the concept. In the late 70s, most climatic fears were focused in the media on the arrival of a new ice age. Mercer – then based at the Institute of Polar Studies at Ohio State University – predicted the opposite. Ours would be a hot and humid future, he insisted. That grim forecast has since been echoed by swelling numbers of scientists who have added their own, increasingly urgent warnings about the dangers posed by our changing climate. I have been at pains to record these in the Observer – often to orchestrated choruses of hostile responses from climate-change deniers – and to make it clear that our addiction to fossil fuels is going to have dangerous consequences for our planet. It remains the most striking scientific story that I have covered as the paper's science editor over the past 42 years, although I should also give credit to the multitude of other remarkable developments that have occurred in that period and which have been subjects of my reporting. These include our growing mastery of DNA science, the creation of mobile phones and computers, our improving ability to tackle the scourge of cancer, and the discovery that Homo sapiens have an African origin. I have listed highlights below this piece, and each demonstrates how dedicated researchers have transformed our understanding of our universe and our place in it since the 1980s. Their impacts nevertheless look insignificant compared to the one that will occur if our interference with our planet's climate continues at its present rate. This is, quite simply, the greatest scientific experiment ever undertaken by humans. Our continually rising emissions of greenhouse gases are altering Earth – with our own species destined to be the prime test subject. Melting ice caps, flooding coastal plains, droughts, severe storms and heatwaves threaten to displace hundreds of millions of people from their homelands as large chunks of our planet become uninhabitable. 'In such a future, we will bring about nothing less than the collapse of the living world – the very thing that our civilisation relies upon,' states Sir David Attenborough in A Life on our Planet. Our scientific creativity and ingenuity could surely help us face down the coming devastation, it might be expected. We certainly have the intellectual capacity to halt the changes that lie ahead. Sadly, my experiences as science editor suggest otherwise – for just as I have watched breathtaking advances in science unfold, I have witnessed large parts of society turn their heads and deliberately reject the truths that have been presented to them. The rise of unreason has been the unwelcome partner to our growing scientific sophistication. My first serious encounter with anti-science denial came with the arrival of Aids in the 80s. Scientists traced the cause: a virus now known as HIV which, they pointed out, is sexually transmitted. This point was disputed by many individuals who claimed it was caused by 'flawed' lifestyles and denied that Aids was caused by a virus. This was to have a devastating international impact after South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki asked several Aids deniers to join his presidential advisory panel on the disease. Widespread withholding of treatments for Aids ensued in South Africa, where the death toll from the disease reached hundreds of thousands of people. An even more startling example is provided by Covid. Our understanding of the disease gradually changed after its appearance in late 2019, and advice was altered as scientists learned more about its causes. Washing hands was dropped as a mantra and staying outdoors became acceptable. This uncertainty was fed upon by social media. Then came the vaccines, and the internet went into overdrive. Immunisation against Covid was linked to exaggerated numbers of deaths, and the subject was politicised, particularly in the US, where many Trump-supporting Republicans decided to shun the vaccine. The result was a grim distortion of responses to Covid infections in the US, with many fervently Republican counties showing significantly higher death rates compared with strong Democrat counties. This affront to reason has continued. The US now has an outspoken vaccine sceptic as its health secretary while cases of measles, a disease once vanquished by vaccines, are returning in increasing numbers, along with reports of early deaths, as the influence of anti-vaxxers takes a grip of the country. In the case of the climate crisis, denial has been long-lasting, pernicious and highly inaccurate. Claims that scientists have fiddled with facts have been shown to be unfounded while the warnings of climate experts, from John Mercer onwards, have proven highly accurate. As a result, we now stand at the threshold of a continuing rise in global temperatures – because deniers have been so effective in blocking progress towards the introduction of international agreements for limiting fossil fuel emissions. Anti-science movements have always been with us, of course – from the rise of the flat Earthers to the early establishment of groups opposed to evolution. However, the present trajectory is now becoming extremely worrying, with the US providing the most worrying examples. 'It is undoubtedly political and connected with the rise of the right in the US,' says Sir Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society. 'That is partly because Trump and many Republicans have a major down on elite universities in the US, and these are places where big science takes place. 'On the other hand, the recent rise of rightwing parties in European countries has not been mirrored with abuse of science, and so far the worst of this awfulness has not yet hit the UK. It is not something to take for granted over the coming years, however.' DNA In 1982, when I joined the Observer, research into deoxyribonucleic acid, the material from which our genes are made, was in its infancy. Today we can sequence the entire genomes of individual men and women, revealing treasure troves of biological data that have revolutionised medical practice. Forensic science has also been transformed through the development of DNA fingerprinting while our understanding of our own evolution has been turned on its head by our ability to sequence DNA from tissue scraps left behind by our predecessors. Among the breakthroughs made this way has been the discovery that we once interbred with our extinct evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, and that their DNA makes up 1-2% of the genomes of people of European or Asian ancestry. Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein, who nevertheless thought they could not be detected on Earth. He argued that these ripples in the space-time continuum – although generated by enormously energetic events – would be dissipated to a tiny fraction of their original magnitude by the time they reached Earth. Nevertheless, in 2015, researchers – in Louisiana and Washington – succeeded in detecting gravitational waves generated by the merger of two black holes by using giant laser interferometers that were capable of measuring wavelengths to an accuracy of a few hundred billion-billionths of a metre. This success has since opened up an entirely new way to study the universe. The web When I started work as a reporter, we typed our stories on manual typewriters and, when out of the office, phoned in our stories to human copy takers. The creation of mobile phones, the internet and powerful personal computers has since transformed mass communication thanks to developments in a host of techniques including semiconductor nanotechnology, sensors, fiber optics, satellites and atomic clocks. Today, a mobile phone has a processing power and a memory capacity that are millions of times more powerful than the computer that guided the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Out of Africa Forty years ago, those who studied human origins were divided into two groups. One side argued that modern humans evolved separately from predecessors found in different areas round the globe. The other group said that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa before spreading out of the continent to take over the planet. The former theory was known as the multiregional hypothesis while the latter was called the Out of Africa theory. Detailed studies of fossils, ancient DNA and stone tools and other artefacts have since resolved the issue, and we now know the latter theory is correct. Essentially we are all Africans under the skin. The James Webb space telescope Forty years ago, it was expected men and women would soon set up colonies on the moon and Mars. However, human spaceflight has since suffered financial setbacks and dwindling public interest. In contrast, the creation of sophisticated robot probes has transformed the study of the heavens, a trend that culminated in the 2021 launch of the world's most powerful observatory, the James Webb space telescope. It is now revealing the universe in unsurpassed detail with early results showing that the universe was already deep into the process of star formation only a short time after its big bang birth 13.8 billion years ago.
Bloomberg
11-02-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Shein's Growth is Hurting Discount Retailers as Store Closures Surge
Welcome to The Brink. I'm Reshmi Basu, a reporter in New York, where I've been reporting on the headwinds facing discount retailers. We're also looking at a missed bond payment by a Chinese car dealer, the latest at WeightWatchers and a downgrade at Altice International. Follow this link to subscribe. Send us feedback and tips at debtnews@ The rise of Shein and Temu is hurting America's discount stores, with rising competition and the looming threat of tariffs denting bricks and mortar retailers targeting low income consumers. 'Amid wider 'noise' around consumption and consumer caution, we believe the pressure on some nonfood retailers from the rapid growth of low-price cross-border retailers and marketplaces is being underappreciated,'' said John Mercer, head of global research for Coresight Research, which estimates the cross-border retailers generate $100 billion plus in combined sales globally. 'While Shein is widely known for fashion, it now incorporates a meaningful home and general merchandise offering, which we expect to increase as it grows its marketplace component.' Discount store closures rose almost 360% to 1,754 last year, according to data compiled by Coresight, making the category the biggest source of shuttered shops in the period. Nashville-based Bargain Hunt is the latest discounter to succumb to financial strain with plans to shutter more than 90 of its locations as part of last week's Chapter 11 filing. Meanwhile, Dollar Tree is seeking a strategic review for Family Dollar after closing hundreds of those stores last year. Options include a potential sale, spin-off or other disposition of the business, according to public disclosures.
