Shipping experts say the big winter storm across a wide swath of the country should be business as usual--if their safeguards hold. Up to two-thirds of the US is facing down the threat of serious snow, cold, and ice this weekend, with the potential to snarl roads (and the businesses that depend on them) from Texas up to New York City . At this point, grocery stores, logistics experts, warehouse operators, and trucking companies have been prepping for days. Still, the effects on the supply chain--and the retail store shelves that depend on them--are yet to be determined. On one hand, this is winter business as usual.

As vehicles grow more software-dependent, repairing them has become harder than ever. A bill in the US House called the Repair Act would ease those restrictions, but it comes with caveats. Every time you get behind the wheel, your car is collecting data about you. Where you go, how fast you're driving, how hard you brake, and even how much you weigh. All of that data is not typically available to the vehicle owner.

Instacart settles Federal Trade Commission's claim it deceived US shoppers Instacart has agreed to pay $60m in refunds to settle allegations brought by the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that the online grocery delivery platform deceived consumers about its membership programme and free delivery offers. According to court documents filed in San Francisco on Thursday, Instacart's offer of "free delivery" for first orders was illusory because shoppers were charged other fees, the FTC alleged. "The FTC is focused on monitoring online delivery services to ensure that competitors are transparently competing on price and delivery terms," said Christopher Mufarrige, who leads the FTC's consumer protection work. An Instacart spokesperson said the company flatly denies any allegations of wrongdoing, but that the settlement allows the company to focus on shoppers and retailers. "We provide straightforward marketing, transparent pricing and fees, clear terms, easy cancellation, and generous refund policies -- all in full compliance with the law and exceeding industry norms," the spokesperson said.

With a quarter of people in the UK using AI to find products, marketers must not only appeal to shoppers directly but to AI bots and their opaque decision-making process. With a quarter of people in the UK using AI to find products, marketers must not only appeal to shoppers directly but to AI bots and their opaque decision-making process. 'What to buy Dad for Christmas': is retail ready for the AI shopping shift? Consumer test drive: can AI do your Xmas gift shopping for you? While traditional internet search, social media - especially TikTok and Instagram - and simply wandering a local high street will still be the main routes to presents for most this year, about a quarter of people in the UK are already using AI to find the right products, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Rachael Dunfell knew two things about her husband's 21-year-old cousin: that he liked specialised racing bikes and that he was interested in the Vikings. But those pieces of information yielded few ideas for a suitable Christmas gift. So Rachael, 33, from Manchester, turned to artificial intelligence. She inputted his age, his hobby and his interest into Copilot, the Microsoft-owned chatbot, which led her to the website of a niche retailer that sells Viking-themed metal bike parts. It's just something that I really would never have known existed, she said, but it was perfect.

Waterstones would stock books created using artificial intelligence, the company's boss has said, as long as they were clearly labelled, and if customers wanted them. However, James Daunt, a veteran of the bookselling industry, said he personally did not expect that to happen. There's a huge proliferation of AI generated content and most of it are not books that we should be selling, he said. But it would be up to the reader. An explosion in the use of artificial intelligence, or AI, has prompted heated debate in the publishing industry, with writers concerned about the impact on their livelihoods.

A newly enacted New York law requires retailers to say whether your data influences the price of basic goods like a dozen eggs or toilet paper, but not how. If you're near Rochester, New York, the price for a carton of Target's Good & Gather eggs is listed as $1.99 on its website. It's unclear why the prices differ, but a new notice on Target's website offers a potential hint: "This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data." A recently enacted New York State law requires businesses that algorithmically set prices using customers' personal data to disclose that. According to the law, personal data includes any data that can be "linked or reasonably linked, directly or indirectly, with a specific consumer or device." The law doesn't require businesses to explicitly state what information about a person or device is being used or how each piece of information affects the final price a customer sees.

How to make sure you're getting a good deal on Black Friday Whether you're excited for the seasonal sales or avoiding the shops altogether, it's hard to escape the countless emails and social media adverts on Black Friday deals. The US holiday - which falls this Friday - has been firmly adopted by UK retailers, and what was once a single day of sales now spans the weeks before and after. However eight in 10 deals promoted during this buying bonanza were cheaper or the same price outside of the four-week Black Friday period, according to research from consumer group Which? This suggests shoppers could get the same or a better deal at other times of the year. But if you're planning to buy now, here's how to make sure you bag a bargain.

You Won't Be Able to Offload Your Holiday Shopping to AI Agents Anytime Soon Chatbot developers and retail giants are battling over user data as they lay the foundation for a future in which AI agents can do all your online shopping for you. Ask OpenAI's ChatGPT about a product on Etsy, and chances are you can enter your payment details and buy it without ever leaving the app. Instant Checkout was one of the first features to emerge from a recent wave of partnerships between leading AI and ecommerce companies. The aim is to encourage people to hand off parts of the browsing and ordering experience to AI tools and usher in an era of agentic shopping. But while these so-called agents have started to become more commonplace, they are far from taking over as full-time virtual buyers. OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and other AI chatbot developers are still negotiating with major retail partners on the best way to limit costly mistakes by agents and the amount of product data and chat history that have to be exchanged to make these agents successful, according to executives at seven tech and ecommerce companies who spoke with WIRED.

We propose an optimization model where a parking lot manager (PLM) can aggregate parked EV batteries to provide virtual energy storage services that are provably robust under uncertain EV departures and state-of-charge caps. Our formulation yields a data-driven convex optimization problem where a prosumer community agrees on a contract with the PLM for the provision of storage services over a finite horizon. Leveraging recent results in the scenario approach, we certify out-of-sample constraint safety. Furthermore, we enable a tunable profit-risk trade-off through scenario relaxation and extend our model to account for robustness to adversarial perturbations and distributional shifts over Wasserstein-based ambiguity sets. All the approaches are accompanied by tight finite-sample certificates. Numerical studies demonstrate the out-of-sample and out-of-distribution constraint satisfaction of our proposed model compared to the developed theoretical guarantees, showing their effectiveness and potential in robust and efficient virtual energy services.