Elastic Path is the API-first, AI-ready commerce platform for brands with complex requirements: large catalogs, multi-tier pricing, and multiple brands and markets. Manufacturers, distributors, and retailers run account hierarchies, quoting, and negotiated pricing natively, not through bolt-on apps and workarounds.

Grocers should be more worried about DoorDash buying Instacart than they seem to be.

DoorDash agreed on October 29 to buy Instacart for $65 a share, about $17B in equity value and a 26% premium to Instacart’s October 22 close. With the FTC in mind, DoorDash promised grocers they can keep using any delivery platform. The deal isn’t expected to close until the end of 2027.

The promise doesn’t cover shopper data, and grocers have about a year to work out what DoorDash will do with what Instacart knows about their customers. Instacart sold itself as the company that powered a grocer’s own website and app. It will soon belong to a company that runs DashMart, its own grocery stores with its own inventory, competing for the same basket.

PayPal reported on October 27. Payment volume rose 6% to $487.1B in the third quarter while revenue rose 2% to $8.6B . By my math, PayPal earned about 4% less on every dollar it moved than a year ago. Venmo is where the growth is. Monthly actives on the Venmo debit card rose more than 55% to 6.7M. I think PayPal has become the boat anchor on Venmo, and Stripe or Shopify could do far more with it. An analyst on the call opened by asking about offers, and management hasn’t denied there are any, which tells me PayPal is holding out for a high price.

UPS moved about 3% fewer US packages a day and charged 6.1% more for each. Cost per package rose 5.5%, which ate most of that increase. Carol Tomé told Reuters the logistics opportunity tied to data centers is $15B a year, though she wouldn’t say how much of it UPS has today. RFID tags now get 1.9M packages a day to customers without anyone scanning them by hand. That’s a real win, and the Teamsters will bring it up when their contract comes due in 2028.

Then Anthropic filed to go public. First-half revenue was $16.3B, against $4.6B for all of 2025. For years the software question was whether to buy or build. A marketer with Claude Code can now build what they used to buy. Systems of record like CRM and ERP, which hold your customer list and your books, look safer than the mid-tier tools someone could rebuild over a weekend.

That lines up with a Wall Street Journal report on about $300B in risky loans to private equity backed companies coming due in 2028 and 2029. Roughly a third is software. Plenty of what retailers run on, from order management to marketing tools, is PE-owned. If you’re signing a multi-year deal with one of those vendors this quarter, ask who holds their debt and when it’s due. An extension on your terms buys the vendor time, but it doesn’t tell you whether their product will still be worth paying for in 2029 if an AI lab has copied it.

All of this is why we picked our theme for WatsonLIVE! at NRF 2027, on Saturday, January 9 in New York, the night before the show opens. We’re putting brands in the middle of a turnaround on stage. I’ll give my keynote, and Jess and I will record the Friday show live with our predictions for the year. Registration is by request at watsonweekly.com/events.

Plenty of retailers are walking into 2027 still fixing what broke this year. I’d rather hear how those fixes are going than sit through another victory lap. We’ll find out on the 9th how many of you feel the same.

Walmart has committed about $6B to Symbotic for more automation in 25 of its regional distribution centers and for unspecified work across its global supply chain. Put all of it on those 25 buildings and my math says about $240M each. The release doesn’t say how the money splits and calls it an initial commitment over several years.

Symbotic was already working in all 42 of Walmart’s regional DCs by early 2025. That January it agreed to buy Walmart’s robotics unit for $200M in cash, and Walmart agreed to pay Symbotic $520M to develop store pickup and delivery systems. The Journal reports Walmart owns 12.6% of Symbotic.

Rob Montgomery, Walmart’s head of U.S. supply chain operations, says the work improves service and lowers costs. I’d like a number. In October the Wall Street Journal reported oversized boxes and robots that break down too often across Walmart’s automation rollout, which uses several vendors. Symbotic says BreakPack is already in about half of Walmart’s regional DCs, so the cost-per-case data exists. Neither company has shared it, and from the outside I can’t tell whether Walmart keeps buying because the early sites worked or because, as a Symbotic shareholder, it has reasons that go beyond the warehouse.

My read is that Walmart has decided the rollout problems are the price of going early. Montgomery told the Journal that waiting for perfect would take too long, and this deal puts $6B behind that view. Walmart also says spending on store remodels and supply chain automation will peak this year and next, so the payoff should start showing up in operating margin after that. Walmart hasn’t said when, or what margin it’s aiming for.