6 Most Important Things in Business Today

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 13, 3:36PM EDT · Published May 16, 5:06AM EDT

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6 Most Important Things in Business Today — © courtesy of Tesla Motors Corp.

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) Prime members will get special deals from its Whole Foods business. According to Reuters:

Amazon.com Inc and Whole Foods Market are making a surgical strike in the already brutal grocery price war.

On Wednesday, Whole Foods debuted a much-anticipated loyalty program that offers special discounts to Prime customers, including 10 percent off hundreds of sale items and rotating weekly specials such as $10 per pound off wild-caught halibut steaks.

Kellogg Co. (NYSE: K) will stop selling products in Venezuela. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Kellogg Co., citing the “deterioration” of a country in the midst of an economic meltdown, said Tuesday it was closing operations that employed 400 workers and produced the majority of the breakfast cereal consumed by Venezuelans.

“The current economic and social deterioration in the country has now prompted the company to discontinue operations,” the Battle Creek, Mich.-based company said.

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Oil supplies hit a three-year low. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Commercial oil stocks in industrialized economies have fallen to their lowest level in three years, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday, in the latest sign that the global supply glut has been mopped up and the market rebalanced.

In its closely watched monthly oil market report, the IEA said commercial oil inventories for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries declined in March by 26.8 million barrels month-on-month to 62.819 billion barrels. That’s 1 million barrels below the latest five-year average metric widely used by oil market participants to assess the rebalancing process.

Lord & Taylor will start to sell items on Walmart Inc.’s (NYSE: WMT) website. According to the world’s largest retailer:

Walmart.com and Lord & Taylor today announced that the companies will begin to roll out the new Lord & Taylor flagship store on Walmart.com in the coming weeks. The flagship, which will debut with more than 125 brands, including Tommy Bahama, Vince Camuto, Miss Selfridge, La La Anthony, Lucky Brand, H Halston and Effy, will be part of Walmart.com’s broader fashion destination.

Big investors cut their positions in Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL). According to Bloomberg:

Institutional investors haven’t been this skeptical on Apple Inc. since at least the financial crisis.

They reduced their holdings in the iPhone maker by about 153 million shares in the first three months of the year, an analysis of 13F filings showed. That’s the biggest decrease since at least the first quarter of 2008 when Bloomberg started tracking the data. It’s also the most among any S&P 500 stock in the first quarter.

Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) will lose more key employees, according to CNBC:

Tesla’s energy unit lost two executives after CEO Elon Musk announced a “thorough reorganization” of the company, Bloomberg reported.

Stationary storage unit product director Arch Padmanabhan, and Bob Rudd, a former SolarCity executive who led commercial and utility sales, have both left the electric car company, sources told Bloomberg. Padmanabhan told Bloomberg he is working on a new venture.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.