Lou Whiteman

AI driven shopping tools.

It feels like, and this is a very oversimplistic, I don't know if they can do this, but it feels like Google is trying to take every other retail operation on the web that isn't Amazon and make them a consolidated Amazon killer.

Like where you can just like, the reason we love Amazon is you can get anything.

there, right?

And you can just check out and go.

Yeah, I guess, unless Google wants to eventually move there.

But look, if they can become the shopping default for discovery and research, why can't they be the place you check out to?

So, you know, which isn't ideal for Shopify, but I do think that, yeah, I'm not ready to short Amazon on this.

I think it's still ambitious and it involves changing consumer habits.

Good luck with that.

But I do think that Amazon is sort of the interesting company to spotlight with what Google is doing.

Rachel, what comes to mind to you?

Well, that headline number is up a bit from 3.3% in March.

It's the highest annual rate we're seeing since May of 2023.

That spike, though, as you noted, it's being heavily fueled by we saw an energy index surge of 17.9% over the last 12 months.

Energy commodities spiked 29.2%.

Gas prices up 28.4%.

Fuel oil rising 54.3%.

Core inflation, right, so excluding volatile food and energy costs, also accelerated to 2.8% annually, hitting a monthly increase of 0.4%.

But consumers are seeing price hikes in everyday categories, right?