Business News: Amazon’s Fuel-Cell Fleet, Fast-Food Price Wars, Sky-High Shipping, AI Guardrails, and Ikea Micro-Stores

Corporate megastores are spending millions lobbying DC politicians on one-sided policies that send small businesses tumbling. They want to enact harmful credit card mandates that take resources away from your local credit union and community bank, leaving mainstream businesses with less access to credit, making it harder for your family to pay for everyday goods like gas and groceries. Tell Congress to guard your card and oppose the Durban Marshall credit card mandates. Made for by Electronic Payments Coalition. This is right about now with Ryan Alfred, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years in over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cash and checks? Well, it starts right about now. It is Friday June 20th, 2025, because we barrel through our summer here on our business news recap, everything you need to know, everything you don't need to know sometimes, but you need it. I'm not sure what you need and what you want are two different things, trying to bring it all together. Hats off, hats on, too. I'm your lead shoveler today. A little shout out to my good friends, Mike, Castle Eyes Row, they're in like week three, New York Times bestseller, shoveling shit. I love story for entrepreneurs, best one of the best books ever written on how to be an entrepreneur, the ups, the downs, the realities, things to think about. Love those guys and I am your chief shovel officer today, shoveling it all. So what we do, we take the BS out of business, baby, and look, I've been telling you for weeks about this AI thing, the home, sleep on this. I'm telling you, those agents, AI agents, robots, whatever you want to call them, they're coming for some jobs. It's not that, again, so this isn't fear mongering, it's getting you prepared. You need to be using these tools and leveraging the way you can, because every other company is going to be doing it, too. The ones that don't, well, we ain't going to be talking about them because they're going to make the headlines. We try not to talk about the negative news. That's all it's going to be. An Amazon CEO came out and just said it, said, Ludwig, said it to the workforce, said, your jobs are going to get replaced. So you need to embrace this thing and know that there will be different jobs, but some of the same that you've been doing ain't going to be around. Because these agents, AI agents are going to be replacing some of the everyday tasks. Look, Amazon is one of the biggest companies in the world. They're making this known. They're headlines, say it. They're sending notes to the employees. Don't sleep on this. I'm telling you, this is how it's coming. You need to understand it. You need to be using it and you need to be leveraging it and embracing it because putting your head in the sand, well, you know how that goes. You don't want sand in your mouth. I'll be in the beach in a couple of weeks. I hate sand in my mouth. Sand in my shoes. It's no fun. So don't be putting your head in the sand. Pull it out. That's what we're doing here on the show. We're telling you about these things and it helped. We're going to be bringing more and more resources on the show to talk about what this means, how you can get ahead, how you can leverage it. There's going to be action coming out of the show. Tactics, things you need to do, specialists, the best. Because again, we're not just going to talk about it. We're going to tell you what to do about it, how to take action, and how it can impact your business. In other news, Amazon is piloting Mercedes-Benz Gen H2 fuel cell trucks on EU freight routes. Five test trucks run about 620 miles on one tank and refill in under 15 minutes. Amazon has secured enough green hydrogen to power around 800 trucks once the program scales. Heavy freight is notoriously tough to decarbonize. So cracking hydrogen's cost curve could give Amazon an unbeatable logistics edge. This is about more freight to more places, less fuel time and all that. So again, could bring costs down, but it's going to be tough to compete with Amazon in this space. We talk about electricity all the time. We talk about all these other ways with power and electric cars and self-driving. Well, don't forget about carbon too. So there's a lot of ways that we can be saving. And ultimately, just like in AI, Amazon is always innovating. This isn't about sitting still. They're going to show us the way with AI. You're going to listen, you're going to pay attention and use it in your business. And here they are with trucks going further, going with less fuel and ultimately can be less costs for us. Speed, efficiency, and removing friction. That's what Amazon is always about. Dollar menu 2.0 fast food giants are betting these discounts will reignite traffic. You know, it's been a, I've seen this. I've noticed just in my periphery, you kind of look around and you go, okay, what's happening out there? I was joking with my son about Arby's. Arby's when I was growing up had the five for five, the greatest deal ever. Five roast beef sandwiches for five bucks. Well, now we got a new special out. It's four for 10. I'm like, has the cost of roast beef sandwiches has doubled, but his salaries doubled in that same time period? Hmm. I don't know. I doubt it. Costs up salaries, flat sort of maybe increase 20%, 25% over that time period, which I'm out like 20 years ago. I don't think we've doubled our salaries with these calls throughout, but hey, I'll take four for 10. Wendy's has got the hundred days of savings, bringing back that one dollar, Dave's single. Hey, that's what I'm talking about. Dollar burger. Need some dollar burgers. I got four, four boys to feed. Are you kidding me? With joking with my wife, we went to the store. She bought 28 gator aides on Friday. By Monday, end of day gone. Every one of them. I need a, I need a value menu for drinks, for gator aides and cool aides and all that shit, like holy cow. These boys are growing. My wallet needs to grow a little more. Burking ties to Bogo, Whopper deals to quirky holidays, keeping loyalty members, checking in daily. Hey, I will say this about Burger King. The flame broad Whopper is one of the best burgers. If you're going to eat a fast food burger, give me that flame broad. It does taste like a brain broad oil. I still don't know exactly how to do it. They've really flame boiling it. Maybe, but ultimately, it's a good burger. Bogo Whopper sounds good in the Whopper. It's the offers house. Bogo Whopper is what the offers need. Chipotle, sombre of extra drops, free burrito codes and a burrito for a year lottery. Oh, I don't know. Burrito for a year lottery. Give me some mose. Short term giveaways, bill long term loyalty and lifetime value inside expanding rewards programs. This is true. I will say this though. I don't know if anyone is like me with these rewards programs, but I've got like 50,000 points on McDonald's rewards program. And I forget to use it about every other time we go to take the kids. And when I do go to use it, you can only use one code per visit. And I know for anybody text me or DMs me and goes, hey, you know, you can just check out twice or whatever. Yeah, we could do that, but it's kind of annoying. So it's like these rewards program. I don't know. I don't know who they're rewarding. They're ruining us or themselves delivery in 30 minutes by air. You know, I've been I feel like I've been doing this show for seven years. We've been doing the news segment for about four. I feel like I've talked about drones and delivery from Amazon to Walmart to a million others about a hundred times. And you know how many times I've actually seen it ever done? Zero. But we're going to talk about it today. Walmart and Wing add drone drops to 100 stores across five metros. All right, we're not far from Atlanta or Charlotte. So maybe we'll see one of these drones in action here in Gevegas, South Carolina. They're serving Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, Tampa, about 50 million people. Walmart's 4700 stores double as launch pads aiming to cut last minute cost. Blow a dollar launch pads. You know, you read this stuff. I say it out loud. Then I'm like, you know, that sounds ridiculous. But I'm waiting to see it again. I think we could go back in the coffers and play at least 27 articles I've read about drones delivering stuff over the years. I'm ready to see some ready to see some benefit from it. But we'll see. If drones hit cost parity, Walmart turns its store network into a same day delivery edge. That's what the buy this matters because look, it's Amazon versus Walmart. If you hadn't figured that out, the race to the bottom of cost and ultimately drones. I don't know. I don't want them racing to the bottom though. I want that shit delivering on time and intact. How much is the repair rate going to go up on some of this stuff when these drones start crashing with your camera or whatever? It's probably going to be just your toilet paper that they smash. Hopefully not your loaf of bread. We'll see how it plays out. But their drones are getting better. So we'll see. Will we see the proliferation of drones delivering goods robots are taking over even the skies? All right. We talk about bots, AI all the time. We need guardrails for it all, including the bots. 28 nations, ink, a Genova accord on safe and responsible AI. You know, that makes me feel warm and fuzzy kind of like my wife telling me, I might get lucky this weekend. I don't know. It seems like a maybe. The practice, the first legally binding safety notebook for large AI models, a new international AI safety board will publish report cards and can hit the stop button on risky systems. A lot of word play, a lot of words salad, all that. I will say this ultimately it is going to impact how we do marketing. CMOs need an AI governance plan now or they're going to get fines and shut down because again, if you have these robots in place and you have the risk that can be involved with setting prices, targeting ads, doing things like that, there's going to be an impact and customers will push back and marketers need to be ready because I, you know, the days of kind of back when Facebook used to be, you can actually get organic reach until they came out and realized that Facebook was using all your personal data to target you hardcore with everything. The same thing here, AI is moving at such a speed. There's going to be governance around this stuff and there will be fines and certain things for big brands to be aware of. And small brands, I wouldn't mess around. I will say though, I don't have a lot of faith in international boards around some of this stuff. So we'll see how the US gets involved ultimately, but we do need guardrails. There's no question about that. My taken sentiment around this is less around the need for it, but who is actually put it in place enforcing it and making sure that it's in the right hands. Fix a favor hits the bottom line. All right, guys, here, let me put some explanation into this one. Ultimately, we buy a lot of stuff that can't be repaired. There's some legal things that you think about wheelchairs and farm equipment. Personally, I don't want to fix either one, but I do think there's a lot of other things, TVs, a lot of different things that are made to break, but can't be repaired either for legal reason or otherwise or you just can't get access to the parts. But now you've got 35 states debating right to repair laws and Texas may soon join with electronics legislation. You got early wins in New York and Colorado that show big savings on those wheel tiers and farm equipment and ultimately brands that sell parked kits and how two guides can turn repairs into a profitable service arm. I think this is good for consumers because ultimately we should be able to repair this high cost stuff. This is prosumer if you ask me. And the proactive brands can turn looming legislation into a customer loyalty and revenue engine. Again, don't fight what's coming. See how you could gain from it and making these things accessible to your customers. Again, much as I hate to pull out the old screwdriver and repair bag. Ultimately, I also don't like writing thousand dollar checks for stuff that should be repairable when, when. Finally, today, Steve offered my father had this concept 25 years ago. It was actually in the kitchen remodel business doing pop-ups for kitchen remodels where you promote like the top cabinet faces, the top accessories that go in the kitchen and things that go in almost every kitchen remodel, but doing it in a pop-up fashion versus having these huge stores that have all this stuff for remodeling and just overkill. Well, Ikea is kind of taking that same same approach with the flat pack small footprint. It's micro plan and order store lands in Oregon. The studio let shoppers design kitchens and closets then ship direct no warehouse maize required. And those things are mazes. You've been to the same one of those. There's two mazes in the IKEA world. One, going through the store and then two, trying to put something together. Whoa. Tick me out, please. At roughly one tenth the size of a classic blue box, it slashes rent and staffing costs. That's good. Ikea plans eight more US micro stores and 39 pickup hubs by 2025. Now, if they could only make those instructions and putting the shit together a little easier, that's what my wife's for actually. She has patience and isn't as ADD as me. That's why I love her. But ultimately, I do like this concept. I liked it when Steve offered had it with kitchen remodels. Dad should have patented the idea a long time ago that what they say ideas are cheap executions everything. Tiny planning studios, plant IKEA at dis neighborhoods and feed more customers into its growing e-commerce funnel. I do like that. You know, forever, it seemed like you couldn't exactly find what you need for mykea online. That's gotten a lot better. The e-commerce store is better. I just don't like putting all that shit together. I like buying it ready made. That's why I like Facebook Marketplace. People have already gone through all the trouble. They put it together and they don't need it. I'm like, yeah. And you buy cheaper. Here here for Facebook Market. Police. Keep takeaways. You got hydrogen trucks. Could slash freight emissions and hand Amazon a cost and branding edge. Dollarmen, you deep discounts. Buy invaluable first party data and loyalty that allows the summer produce. Again, they're getting you in for those cheap prices, but ultimately they want to get your data because they want to remark it to you. And it's a good tactic if you're a marketer. Again, you're not always selling something for the profit of that deal. Lifetime value people. That's what you need to be thinking about. That's what they're thinking about. They're going to give you away the burger because they want the email so that they can hit you with the whopper down the road. Delivery in 30 minutes, pairing drones with 4,700 stores makes sub one dollar same day delivery. Walmart's new superpower. Hopefully. I'll believe it when I see it. Astrick. Astrick. Checkmark. Cross. Whatever else signifies. I'll believe it when I see it. Guard rails for the bots. A binding AI treaty means every brand needs a compliance playbook before regulators come knocking and fix it. Fever hits the bottom line. The right to pair laws can turn spare parts sales and DIY guides into fresh revenue streams and build loyalty. Make this stuff fixable people. And finally, IKEA is coming with these micro stores. The Steve offered special. That's all for today. I do want to remind you follow right about now on your favorite podcast app. You're probably watching this there. Again, hit that subscribe button. If this is your first time listening, we appreciate you. We know you have options. But go watch us on YouTube as well. Got the full video audio. We got a great production. Team here is doing a great job. Joel and studio is always putting it together. We're picking it to the next level. Radist. Review us. Drop me a DM on Instagram. That's the best way to get me. I'm over there all the time. Get a lot of DMs. Get feedback on the show. Things you want to hear. Things you don't. Hey, if you like this shoveler, chief shoveler hat that I got from Mike and Cass Lazaro, shoveling shit out now. New York Times best seller. They were on the show. Go back and watch that episode. Amazing episode and it's right. And guess what? If it's on the show, it is right about now. We'll see you next time. This has been right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast network production. Visit Ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening. DC politicians want to enact harmful credit card mandates that could take away your cashback and rewards points. Perks that stretch your budget and make life a little easier. Losing these benefits means less money for your family's everyday essentials like gas and groceries. The perks you rely on could disappear, leaving you with higher costs and fewer options. Tell Congress to guard your card and oppose the Durban Marshall credit card mandates.