Would you be surprised if I told you that as many U.S. consumers now order groceries online as order restaurant food online?

Don’t be.

According to PYMNTS’ latest national consumer study fielded earlier in May, which surveyed a representative sample of roughly 2,300 adults, 17 percent of all consumers reported using digital platforms such as Instacart to order and pay for groceries instead of going to the grocery store to buy food. That’s a whisker ahead of the 16 percent of all consumers who reported ordering restaurant food online or from delivery aggregators instead of going into a restaurant to…

Coinbase’s April 14 IPO was the stock market event that launched a thousand superlatives. A “ watershed moment,” a “ rocket” that analysts said would see its stock price double, and a “ landmark moment for crypto “ are but a few of the headlines marking its debut as a listed company that day.

Today (April 19, before the market’s open), Coinbase’s market cap stands at $64 billion, give or take. Coinbase offers many services, but it mainly operates as an exchange for cryptocurrencies. The market cap of ICE, an exchange that owns and operates 12 exchanges and clearinghouses, including…

Netflix first introduced its streaming service in the U.S. in January of 2007. It landed with a bit of a thud with analysts and pundits.

Media accounts then poo-poohed its impact, claiming that users would have to <gasp> download a piece of software onto a PC to access content, and pay more to subscribe to a service with a limited content catalog (1,000 shows) — and who’d really want to do that? Content creators would never cut deals with Netflix, they speculated, because doing so would only cannibalize their own businesses and business models. …

The U.S. has 40,460 grocery stores. If you want to see how physical retail might look 20 years from now, you might want to watch the grocery store space over the next three to five years.

If, as I wrote in January, retail’s success in 2021 and beyond will be defined by logistics, grocery is where we will see clear evidence of this — and where grocery stores’ successes and failures will play out in real time.

In grocery, a small number of platforms at scale will emerge to influence the consumer’s relationship with buying food and will power the…

The U.S. has mobilized the largest COVID-19 vaccination rollout of any country in the world. The Biden administration has set May 1 as the date that all states will be required to lift vaccine requirements to include any adult who wants to get the jab. President Biden says he’s hopeful that the U.S. will be ready to celebrate a return to normalcy come July 4. After a year of living life under lockdown, all of that is certainly welcome news.

Why, then, do most Americans still think it will take until this time next year — March of 2022 —…

March 19 will mark the one-year anniversary of the U.S. lockdown in the face of the global pandemic. Since then, the payments and commerce headlines have been mostly about one thing: the consumer’s massive shift to digital.

Mostly because it’s indisputable.

And it’s likely to be the biggest headline of the next year — and beyond.

In a digital-first world, checkout is no longer about a plastic card dipped at a terminal in a store — and potentially no longer the slam-dunk domain of the traditional issuers and card networks that own that experience in the physical world.

In a…

Thirty-three years ago, in 1988, in Washington, Missouri, the first Walmart Supercenter opened its doors. The store concept itself took a page from the European hypermarkets, which had begun dotting the suburban landscapes there in the mid- to late-1960s — a vast physical store footprint that sold everything from general merchandise to groceries, offering ample (and free) parking.

When Walmart reported its Q4 2020 earnings last week, CEO Doug McMillon described a very different “super” concept at the center of Walmart’s future: the “super app.” …

An article published in the Harvard Business Review in August of 2009 posed a question that many airline and travel industry CEOs are pondering 11 years later: Will videoconferencing kill business travel?

The answer in 2009 was, probably not. The answer in 2021 is far less clear.

Eleven years ago, video conferencing tech was in a very different place, even though the technology itself had come a long way from the commercial launch of Bell Lab’s Picturephone in 1964.

It was expensive — an investment that only big companies could afford to make, and mostly did so to make it…