“This morning, UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s announced a deal with Walmart to buy a majority stake in Asda, Walmart’s wholly-owned UK subsidiary. The deal values Asda at £7.3 billion ($10 billion), and if it closes will net Walmart £2.975 billion ($4 billion) in cash, a 42 percent share of the combined business as a “long-term shareholder”, and 29.9 percent voting rights in the combined entity, which will include 2,800 Sainsbury’s, Asda and Argos stores and 330,000 employees in the country.”

“Walmart  announced this week it’s going to roll out more than 500 additional Pickup  Towers to its U.S. stores over the course of the year. The towers, which are like high-tech vending machines distributing customers’ online purchases, were first introduced into nearly 200 stores in 2017. The towers are one of the ways Walmart is taking on Amazon by leveraging its large brick-and-mortar footprint to encourage more sales. The company had also announced last April a “pickup discount” on a million online-only items, if customers opted for store pickup over shipping.”