Post office sees groceries as growth area
The U.S. Postal Service wants to expand its grocery deliveries for Amazon and potentially its rivals.
For the past several weeks, the agency has been testing delivering prepackaged grocery items purchased from the Web giant to customers in San Francisco. According to a filing, the Postal Service is now seeking approval from the Postal Regulatory Commission to add new cities to the test.
The public version of filing, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, has been redacted and never mentions AmazonFresh, the company's grocery delivery service, or San Francisco. But a Postal Service spokesman noted that partnership and said the agency is looking to move beyond both the company and the city.
"We've been conducting an operational test with Amazon in San Francisco, but the filing is requesting the ability to conduct a two-year market test to expand locations and partners," Postal Service spokesman Sue Brennan said in an email exchange.
An Amazon spokesman said only that the company is "always looking for new and innovative ways to deliver packages to customers."
In the four markets in which AmazonFresh operates -- Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego -- the company uses its own trucks to deliver canned food, perishable items and even nongrocery items such as books or DVDs. San Francisco is the only market where AmazonFresh also uses the Postal Service.
According to the filing, the post office is delivering both perishable and nonperishable items. The agency said that "the retailer brings groceries already packed into retailer-branded totes, some of which are chilled or include freezer packs" to postal delivery operations between 1:30 a.m. and 2:30 a.m.
Postal carriers deliver the goods between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m., dropping them off at a spot designated by the customer, without ringing doorbells or knocking on doors. The filing noted that carriers were delivering an average of one to four totes per address with an average of 160 totes per day to the 38 ZIP codes included in the test.
-- The Seattle Times
Book charts alcohol consumption in U.S.
People who drink a glass of wine with dinner every night fall in the top 30 percent of American adults in terms of per-capita alcohol consumption. If they drink two glasses, they fall in the top 20 percent.
But to break into the top 10 percent of American drinkers, a person would need to drink more than two bottles of wine with every dinner. Even that would make them below average among those top 10 percenters, according to a new book on U.S. alcohol consumption.
The top 10 percent of American drinkers -- 24 million adults over age 18 -- consume, on average, 74 alcoholic drinks per week. That works out to a little more than four-and-a-half 750 ml bottles of Jack Daniels, 18 bottles of wine or three 24-can cases of beer. In one week.
Or, if you prefer, 10 drinks per day.
These figures come from Philip J. Cook's Paying the Tab, an economically-minded examination of the costs and benefits of alcohol control in the United States.
Cook notes in his book that the top 10 percent of drinkers account for well over half of the alcohol consumed in any given year. On the other hand, people in the bottom three deciles don't drink at all, and even the median consumption among those who do drink is just three beverages per week.
The shape of this usage curve isn't exactly unique. The Pareto Law states that "the top 20 percent of buyers for most any consumer product account for fully 80 percent of sales," according to Cook. The rule can be applied to everything from hair care products to Xboxes.
-- The Washington Post
Insurer builds up company-crime unit
Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s specialty insurance business, created last year to expand into new niches, is adding sales of coverage to protect employers against misdeeds by their staffs.
Brian O'Neill was hired from American International Group Inc. to lead the push into the fidelity and crime insurance market, the unit of Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire said last week in a statement. O'Neill will be based in New York.
Peter Eastwood arrived from AIG last year to start the specialty insurance unit at Warren Buffett's Berkshire and has been building the staff with former colleagues. The business previously hired two Asia-based executives to lead growth in that region and in May said it was expanding in travel coverage, led by John Noel. Another recent hire, Geoff Delisio, joined from Zurich Insurance Group AG as part of a push into backing construction projects.
"We continue to round out our portfolio of executive and professional lines," Andre Basile, chief underwriting officer for executive and professional lines at Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance, said in the statement.
O'Neill has a bachelor's degree from Iona College and was most recently the executive vice president and the senior fidelity officer at AIG, Berkshire said. Matt Gallagher, a spokesman for New York-based AIG, declined to comment.
-- Bloomberg News