Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson said it was time to bust out the tequila.

Standing by the seashore, the celebrity wrestler and film star put his arm around Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) founder. Bezos, in sunglasses, smiled for a picture and then shared it on the ‘gram. The men had just announced a movie deal for Amazon Studios.

Bezos, 57, is stepping down as Amazon’s CEO on Monday. He’ll remain executive chairman and the company’s biggest shareholder, but his Instagram account shows he has plenty of other interests to occupy his time.

The science fiction fan is planning a joy ride to suborbital space with his best friend and brother, Mark, this month, one recent post said. In another, Bezos is behind the wheel of an electric pickup truck built by Rivian, a startup that Amazon funded, traversing the desert in a cowboy hat to see a rocket capsule land.

The final frontier has long beckoned Bezos, who has poured billions of dollars into his company Blue Origin to promote tourism and infrastructure in space. The venture’s first crewed flight is to embark July 20, less than two weeks after Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic to commence a new epoch of travel beyond earth…read more.

Gap’s upcoming Yeezy line with rapper Kanye West could bring in nearly $1 billion in incremental sales next year, according to an analysis by Wells Fargo.

“Now that this catalyst is here, the majority of questions we are fielding regarding Gap is around how powerful this partnership with Yeezy could be — which is why we thought it would be helpful to put numbers behind the initiative,” Wells Fargo analyst Ike Boruchow wrote in a note to clients on Wednesday.

Earlier this month, Gap released its first product from the highly anticipated line, giving shoppers a taste of what’s to come. The $200 bright blue nylon puffer jacket was on sale for a limited time. Now, the coats are being floated on resale sites for more than $1,000, and the items haven’t even shipped yet. It’s unclear exactly when more Yeezy/Gap merchandise will drop, but a fuller line-up is expected to come later this year.

To quantify what the partnership could mean for Gap, Wells Fargo surveyed 530 Gap shoppers and 470 non-Gap customers to determine their interest in the Yeezy line. It completed the survey in a partnership with the data firm Guidepoint. Participants needed to know who Kanye West is, Wells Fargo said.

Among the Gap customers, 64% indicated they planned to buy items from the collaboration. On average, they expected to spend an incremental $178 on Yeezy products in the first year of the line’s debut. Of the people who currently don’t shop at Gap, 23% said they intended to buy the merchandise and expected to shell out an incremental $126 at Gap.

Within the group of people who don’t shop at Gap but plan to buy Yeezy products, 75% said they expect they’ll purchase other Gap products while shopping. This suggests that the tie-up has the power to drive new customers to Gap, Boruchow said.

Wells Fargo estimated that the Yeezy line could drive up to $990 million in sales for Gap in fiscal 2022, and boost earnings by roughly 50 cents per share. By fiscal 2026, the partnership could add about $1.50 per share to earnings, Wells Fargo said…read more.

Lumber prices have skyrocketed in the past 12 months, causing the average price of both new and existing single-family homes to increase. Until now. That bubble appears to have burst, finally.

Mandated lockdowns caused lumber sawmills to halt production while at the same time many Americans, trapped inside due to the stay-at-home orders, rushed to the stores to buy lumber for projects to kill the time.

Those two related things caused lumber inventory to plummet.

As a result, lumber prices have skyrocketed more than 300% since April last year, leading the National Association of Homebuilders to report that the lumber shortage has added at least $36,000 to the cost of a new home.

They estimated that the cost of lumber for building a home hit $70,000, nearly double the cost of building the exact same home last March.

Also, the median sale price of existing homes surged by a record 17% to $329,100 — the highest since the National Association of Realtors began tracking prices in 1999.

However, many experts have been forecasting the end of lumber’s time at the top of the commodity’s price list, though, and they have now been vindicated.

After reaching an all-time high of $1,711 per thousand board feet in early May, the cost of wood is now experiencing a fast descent.

Last week, the price fell some by $700, representing a drop of 41%. Still, even though lumber prices are in free fall, they’re still far above the futures prices of lumber from last March when it was $303.

Two factors initiated the price drop. First, with restrictions easing across the country, sawmills resumed their normal operations while lumber-hoarding DIYers shifted their money and time to travel and entertainment. However, it could still take several weeks for price reductions to take effect in retail home centers…read more.

Over the past decade dollar stores have flourished. Today 34,000 of them pepper the American landscape. That’s more locations than CVS (10k), Walgreens (9k), Walmart (4.7k) and Target (1.9k) combined. Click here to read full article.