Good morning, it’s only Tuesday and so much has happened already, here’s what’s up:

• Ted Baker is closing down Canadian operations.

• Wildfires are getting out of control.

• Apple Vision Pro is coming to Canada soon.

• The return of “Roaring Kitty” GameStop up 75%.

• Airlines sued Biden administration.

• OpenAI’s huge announcement.

Let’s get into it.

BUSINESS 

🔒️ Ted Baker is closing down Canadian operations

First Nordstrom and now Ted Baker London.

The brand has now began its store closing liquidation sales for their entire Canadian and US operations.

Why?
The company has been facing major financial challenges with increased costs and low sales to reach any sort of cash-flow in the Canada.

Liza Amlani (Co-founder) said - lack of understanding of the Canadian market have been the biggest challenge so far. Because customers in different provinces want different things.

What we think: We are seeing one after the other retailer closing down their Canada operations and reason is quite simple. Brands are failing to study the Canadian market and their buying behaviour. Most brands view Canadian market as an extension of U.S and that’s where they go wrong.

ENIVORMENT 

🧯 Wildfires getting out of control

Wildfires in parts of Alberta, B.C., and Manitoba have resulted in mass evacuations affecting thousands of Canadians. As per some experts, this wildfire season would be more severe than last year.

TECH 

🥽 Apple Vision Pro coming to Canada soon

The wait is over for Canadians, Apple announced that they will soon release Apple Vision Pro outside of U.S.

Apple is currently training their international employees on how to demonstrate the $3,499 ($4,699 CAD) headset to customers.

Are you buying the Vision Pro?

Our suggestion to Apple: launch a training for customers on how to buy the $4,699 headset. Spending that kind of money on tech goggles would need some training as well 🥴

BUSINESS 

😼 Roaring Kitty is back: GameStop up 75%

The internet sensation Keith Gill aka Roaring Kitty is back after 3 years.

On Sunday Gill posted a picture on X-formerly Twitter of him sitting on his chair.

Background:
GameStop is a video game retailer and in 2021 they were struggling to survive because customers were switching towards downloadable games instead of discs and CD’s. Big Wall Street hedge funds and investors were shorting the stock big time.

That’s when Keith Gill came into the scene picture and started a reddit page to show his support for the stock, which turned into a massive movement and resulted in a 1000% increase in the stock, making him a multi-millionaire and many others with him.

There’s a whole movie on this if you haven’t watched already - Dumb Money.

What’s happening now?
After the surprise return of Roaring Kitty the shares of GameStop surged 75% on Monday and hit an 18-month high of $38.20.

✈️ Airlines sued USDOT

U.S. Transportation Department is being sued by major U.S. airlines over a new rules that requires airline to disclose all airline fees in addition to the airfare, so the customers can avoid any unexpected fees.

Which airlines are included?

• American Airline

• Delta Airline

• United Airline

• JetBlue Airways

• Hawaiian Airlines

• Alaska Airlines

What are they suing them for?
The airlines are arguing that department’s new rule would confuse the consumers and it’s “attempt to regulate private business operations in a thriving marketplace is beyond its authority.”

Why does this matter: Based on the agency reports, consumers overpay by $543 million in fees annually. WHAT? 😱 

U.S. Transportation Department’s objective for this new rule is to end the bait and switch tactics of some airlines and provide travellers more price transparency.

TECH

🤖 OpenAI’s surprise unveiled and its worth it

Yesterday, OpenAI anncouced the launch of GPT-4o an improved model of GPT-4. CEO Sam Altman claims it is faster, more powerful with text, vision and audio capabilities.

These are some of the new features GPT-4o offers:

• Realtime translation.

• Emotion and face detection.

• Code understanding and debugging via voice commands.

• Understanding the emotions using your voice.

• Visual understanding of images, graphs and code.

Plus: GPT-4o has also release an app for MacOS users.

GPT-4o will be free for all ChatGPT users. The paid users will have 5x the capacity limit.

Significance: The release of GPT-4o “o for omni” is a step forward in companies broader vision of making human and computer interactions more natural.

GAMES

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