Tragic news out of Japan this morning as former PM Shinzo Abe was shot and killed. In Japan, a country with more than 125 million people, annual gun deaths rarely get into double figures.
Today we have 3 charts for you exploring:
UK prime minister Boris Johnson is officially out of 10 Downing Street after an avalanche of resignations from within his own government, following a string of scandals.
State of the resig-nation
Data compiled by the Institute for Government (recreated above) shows how Johnson's tenure had already been dogged by more ministerial departures than many of his predecessors in his first 3 years in office. But the pressure on his premiership ratcheted up significantly on Tuesday when two key ministers, chancellor Rishi Sunak and health secretary Sajid Javid, left their positions within 10 minutes of each other — writing some pretty damning resignation letters in the process.
As Johnson clung to power in the wake of those departures, he worked quickly to re-assemble his top team. He was hopeful that his new appointment to Chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, would be a powerful ally. Instead, less than 24 hours after being given the job, Zahawi himself told Johnson it was time to go.
All told Johnson saw a total of 46 ministers resign from his government, most coming in the span of just a few days. That's the most of any modern PM — despite a relatively short tenure of nearly 3 years in office. From here, the question of who is living at Number 10 in a few months time is straightforward: it's going to be Larry the chief mouser and whoever wins the internal struggle for the British Conservative party leadership.
There's something wrong with my order
In 2020 European company Just Eat Takeaway struck a deal which they hoped would break open the US food delivery market — offering $7.3bn to acquire Grubhub. The takeover, which was completed a year later and created the largest delivery service in the world outside of China, hasn't taken long to lose its flavor.
Fierce competitors DoorDash and Uber Eats have eaten into Grubhub's market share. In 2018 the company had more than a third of the US market, last month they had just 13%.
A prime opportunity
After a tricky start to 2022 — with orders down 1% in the first three months — Just Eat announced in April that they were exploring the option of offloading their ailing US acquisition less than a year after they bought it.
Enter Amazon. With Just Eat under pressure to jettison its US operations Amazon swooped in, announcing on Wednesday that they had secured a 2% stake in Grubhub. They also announced that Prime members would get access to Grubhub+, which scraps delivery fees on orders over $12. Depending on how many new customers that initiative drives — and some other performance variables — Amazon has the option to increase its total stake in Grubhub to 15%.
Shares in Levi Strauss are up ~4% this morning after beating expectations for the second quarter, as the retailer notched its eighth straight quarter of positive net income, exactly 2 years after the company saw sales collapse during the start of the pandemic.
Stretchy demand
As maybe the biggest name in the denim game, Levi's recent results suggest consumers never really had plans to break up with their jeans on a permanent basis. The competition from more casual options like sweatpants could have been a permanent problem for Levi's, but the rise of casual actually seems to have benefited the jeans maker as more people are wearing jeans to the office according to Levi's management. Google search data backs this trend up, with searches for "jeans" getting back to normal at the end of last year, after falling during early 2020.
1) Funding for US tech startups is down 23%, the steepest investment slump since 2019.
2) Today is July 8th, the day of the year when the largest majority of the global population — either 93% or 99% depending on how strict your definition is — experiences sunlight at the same time (map here).
3) The US has a veterinarian shortage and it's only likely to get worse. One estimate suggests the US will be short 41,000 vets by 2030.
4) Nobody builds their own payment gateway anymore — they use Stripe or PayPal. That’s because checkout experiences are simply a means to an end. The same should be true for data onboarding — and it can be if you use Flatfile's unmatched data importer.**
5) What does it take to become Commander in Chief? Axios charted the most common work experience of former US presidents.
6) How much money would you want to live your ideal life? An interesting study found that most people chose a relatively modest amount, somewhere between $1m and $10m.
7) An Airbus A380 flew 14 hours with a hole in its side.
**This is sponsored content.
