3 USA Truck execs benefit from tax law
Three USA Truck executives are benefiting from the new corporate tax rate in the form of cash bonuses, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing late Friday.
Chief Executive Officer James Reed; Jason Bates, the executive vice president and chief financial officer; and James Craig, the executive vice president, chief commercial officer and president of its Logistics segment, are the benefactors.
Reed will be paid an additional $200,588, Craig will get $131,636, and Bates will receive $84,623.
The company said the bonuses are the result of the new tax law.
In the SEC filing, the company said the bonus pool will allow it to apply the payouts to its 2017 tax year. The company's board of directors approved the bonuses on Dec. 29.
-- Dalton FaFerney
8-cent rise for gasoline projected in '18
The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline is expected to go up about 8 cents this year, according to the annual Fuel Price Outlook put out by GasBuddy, a tech company based in Boston that helps motorists find the cheapest gasoline in a given area.
The average price in the U.S. is projected to rise to $2.57 a gallon, the highest price since 2014. The nation's current average is $2.49 a gallon, according to GasBuddy data, and could peak at $2.89 a gallon in April.
Oil prices crashed to below $30 a barrel in February 2016 but have slowly increased since then, and Patrick DeHaan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, points to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries as the big reason why.
OPEC has reduced production to boost prices, and, unlike in the past, its members have stuck to their pledges for the most part.
"The old way of thinking was all you could be sure of in life was taxes, death and OPEC cheating on production quotas, so that was a big surprise," DeHaan said.
Oil inventories in the U.S. ended last year 54 million barrels lower than where they started in 2017, DeHaan said.
-- Los Angeles Times
Amazon maintains holiday dominance
Amazon.com Inc. maintained its online dominance in the 2017 Christmas shopping season despite increasing competition from Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and Best Buy Co.
Amazon captured 89 percent of online spending among dominant holiday retailers in the five-week period beginning on Thanksgiving, according to an analysis of credit- and debit-card transaction data by Earnest Research in New York. Wal-Mart, which purchased the Jet.com e-commerce company in 2016 for $3 billion, remained a distant second a 4.4 percent.
The data show market share has changed little from a year ago even as more spending shifts online. That suggests stores are keeping their customers, even as more shoppers shift their spending to the stores' websites, said Andrew Robson, president and chief revenue officer at Earnest. Traditional retailers have been trying to match Amazon's strength by offering more products online and adding new services like letting shoppers find and purchase goods on the Web and pick them up at nearby stores.
Wal-Mart traditionally sees a sales bump after Christmas because of clearance discounts, which could improve its final totals, he said.
Earnest measures total spending for each retailer based on anonymous consumer transactions. The spending totals for Seattle-based Amazon measure gross merchandise value, or the price of all goods sold on the site. That figure is bigger than Amazon's total revenue because many of the products come from independent merchants and Amazon takes a commission on the sale. Bentonville-based Wal-Mart is also building its online marketplace model and measures sales by gross merchandise value.
-- Bloomberg News
Barnes & Noble sales skid; stock off 14%
NEW YORK -- Shares of Barnes & Noble are tumbling after airing some ugly holiday sales numbers.
The bookseller said late Thursday that comparable-store sales slid 6.4 percent during the crucial nine-week period ending Dec. 30.
Most retailers have strengthened digital operations, and their sales have followed. At Barnes & Noble, however, online sales dropped 4.5 percent.
Amazon.com is winning over more people each year to its Prime membership program, at one point handing out trial memberships to 4 million people in one week this holiday. That's proved devastating for Barnes & Noble, where overall holiday sales fell 6.4 percent, to $953 million.
Barnes & Noble says trends of improving sales leading into November began to fade by December.
Shares of Barnes & Noble Inc. fell almost 14 percent to $5.60 as of closing Friday.
-- The Associated Press
Business on 01/06/2018