shopping

Last week we reported on a strike being organized by the Gig Workers Collective with Instacart Shoppers. Over the weekend, Instacart indicated they'd be updating health and safety measures. Instacart did not reply directly to the strike announcement, but the timing of their announcement would seem to be done in order to avoid the strike - at least in part. Unfortunate for the Instacart business, their response was not enough to quell the demands of the Gig Workers Collective and/or Instacart Shoppers, and the strike is still on.

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Today the folks behind Animal Crossing: New Horizons released a set of new items for free. This new set of items comes with some prerequisites - first, you're going to need to have the update version 1.1.0. Then, for one part of the free items collection, you're going to have to download the mobile game Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.

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Following the major success of Fortnite, Epic Games decided to take the mountains of money it earned and use it to go to war with Steam. Last year, the company launched the Epic Games Store, promising a better revenue sharing model for developers as a carrot on a stick. At launch, the Epic Games Store wasn't exactly feature-rich, and that's something Epic has been working to fix in the months since then.

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For some time now, Amazon has operated a number of cashier-less convenience stores under the Amazon Go brand. Now, it seems, it's ready to take that concept and apply it to larger-scale stores, today opening up its first Amazon Go Grocery in Seattle. The concept is still the same - there are no cashiers to ring up your items and the store doesn't accept cash - only the footprint is much larger.

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In the Digital Age, services often evolve at a pretty fast rate. That isn't true for Craigslist though, which has kept its simple interface for years and years. We're seeing Craigslist begin to modernize a little bit, as it now finally has an official mobile app available on both iOS and Android.

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A collection of cheap imitations of the original Apple Watch are currently posing on Amazon as a perfect alternative to the far more expensive alternative. Brands like YAMAY, Willful, Letsfit, SKYGRAND, and ANBES make little effort to hide the fact that they're not only using lookalike UI - in some cases, they're literally selling the same devices under different brand names. Scratch that - in quite a few cases... in a CONCERNING number of cases, companies appear to be selling the same product with different brand names for different prices.

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This may not come as a very big surprise to you, but both Black Friday and Cyber Monday were big days for Amazon. We'd expect those two days to be important for any retailer as large as Amazon, but today the company gave us a better idea of just how successful they were. For starters, Amazon confirmed that Black Friday 2019 was the biggest Black Friday in the company's history.

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Google continues to build out the capabilities of Google Assistant, and beginning today, it can help you buy movie tickets. Google has put its Duplex AI at the center of this functionality, allowing you to ask the Assistant to find showtimes near you. This isn't the first time we've seen Google pair Duplex with the Assistant, as the pair are also used to assist in booking restaurant reservations.

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Today, Google Shopping is getting an overhaul while Google Lens is receiving some new functionality. This redesign of Google Shopping is a pretty big one, as it aims to put information and product listings from "thousands of stores" in one place. The idea is to allow consumers to quickly compare item prices across stores - both online and brick and mortar retail locations - so they can find what they want without overpaying.

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In mid-2015, Amazon widely launched a product called the Dash Button, a small plastic device with a product's label and physical button that could be used to easily reorder an item. The idea behind the buttons was that consumers could place them in places where the related product was relevant -- a detergent button in the laundry room, for example -- to reorder the item without using the company's app. Those buttons will stop working this month.

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Google announced today that it will make it easier to access your payment information within Chrome regardless of the device you're using. Now, as long as you're logged in on Chrome, you'll see the option to choose from saved payment information when you're filling out a checkout form. The hope is that this makes checkout faster and more convenient for Chrome users.

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Amazon has already tested the waters with in-person order pickup through services like Locker, but today the company is expanding on that concept in a pretty big way. Amazon is launching a new service called Counter, which is available in various Rite Aid locations around the US starting today. The idea behind Counter is pretty straightforward: Place an order on Amazon and instead of having it delivered to your house, you can have it shipped to a nearby Rite Aid and pick it up in person.

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