Significant Digits For Thursday, March 15, 2018
You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
While 90 percent of retail sales happen in physical stores, that figure is decreasing, and the company that stands to gain the most is Amazon. A staggering 44 cents out of every dollar spent online is spent at Amazon. [Bloomberg]
Students around the country yesterday staged a 17-minute walkout at 10 a.m., a minute for each victim of the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, to protest gun violence and inaction from government. Event organizers said that over 3,000 walkouts had been registered. [ABC News]
Angela Merkel was elected to a fourth term as chancellor of Germany by members of the lower house of parliament. The final vote was close — 364 in favor, 315 against — even though she presides over a 399-member coalition of the Christian Democratic Union and Social Democratic Party. [DW]
Toys R Us announced it plans to sell or close all of its 800 U.S. stores, which would affect as many as 33,000 people who work at the company. [The Washington Post]
Jun Ying, a former executive at Equifax, was indicted Tuesday on insider trading charges. Ying was allegedly aware of the unprecedented leak of 145 million people’s identities from the company, and prior to the public announcement of that failure sold $950,000 worth of stock, avoiding $117,000 in losses. [CNBC]
Elizabeth Holmes was a CEO who raised over $700 million from investors to prop up Theranos Inc, a medical-testing startup that wrongly claimed it could conduct a full analysis with a drop of blood. On Wednesday, the SEC called her a fraud and Holmes agreed to pay $500,000, give up 19 million shares and accept a ban on being an officer or director at a public company for 10 years. [Bloomberg]
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