Consumer and Retail Sector

Uber is partnering with drone delivery company Zipline to launch airborne Uber Eats deliveries later this year, backed by a strategic investment from the ride-hail giant. The companies are targeting one million daily drone deliveries by the end of 2029, starting in Zipline's existing market of Dallas-Fort Worth before expanding to dozens of additional U.S. cities. The rollout matches a strategy Uber used with Flytrex last year, combining platform access with minority funding to scale autonomous delivery without building proprietary hardware. Zipline recently closed an $800 million Series H funding round that valued the startup at $7.6 billion. Meanwhile, DoorDash launched its own regulated drone delivery program, DoorDash Air, following Federal Aviation Administration rules proposed under a 2025 order from President Donald Trump.

A bespoke Ferrari Luce fetched $40 million at an RM Sotheby’s charity auction in California, setting a record for the highest price paid for a new car. The sale of "Chassis 0," the first production chassis in the Luce program, far exceeded RM Sotheby’s pre-sale estimate of more than $1.1 million and topped the previous record set by a Ferrari Daytona SP3 that raised $26 million in 2025. The auction comes nearly three months after Ferrari unveiled its first fully electric model at a base price of €550,000, a debut that triggered an initial market backlash and criticism over its LoveFrom-crafted design. Despite early skepticism and a sharp drop in Ferrari shares following the May unveiling, the stock has since rebounded 27% from its post-launch closing level of €284.05 as the company raised full-year guidance and reported strong earnings. All proceeds from the Monterey Car Week sale will be donated to the Ferrari Foundation to support educational initiatives.

Sainsbury's paused the use of facial recognition technology in its East Dulwich supermarket after wrongly accusing a customer of shoplifting and ejecting him from the store. Matt Arnold, a 46-year-old comedy promoter, was approached by two managers at a self-service till and told he could not be served due to an earlier incident, despite having scanned his items and Nectar card. As he left, Arnold saw an overhead CCTV monitor displaying a red circle around his face. Sainsbury's head office apologized to Arnold the following day, attributing the incident to human error rather than a software failure. Both the supermarket chain and Facewatch, the technology supplier, maintain that the surveillance system operates with a 99.98% accuracy rate. However, the East Dulwich branch suspended the Facewatch system as a precautionary measure while staff undergo additional training. The incident follows a similar occurrence last September when another shopper, Warren Rajah, was wrongly ordered out of a Sainsbury's branch in Elephant and Castle by the same software.