Dollar Tree really has a discount for everyone. A group of private equity investors agreed to buy the flailing Family Dollar chain for $1 billion, a sharp loss for the Dollar Tree, which acquired it ten years ago for roughly $9 billion.

Brigade Capital Management and Macellum Capital Management will take over the nearly 7,000 Family Dollar stores. That’ll halve the number of stores Dollar Tree operates under its umbrella.

Why couldn’t Dollar Tree make Family Dollar work?

When Dollar Tree bought Family Dollar in 2015, it outbid rival Dollar General in hopes of cementing its status as the king of budget retailers. But Dollar Tree quickly learned that it had snapped up poorly maintained stores and found that Family Dollar had a different customer base that proved to be challenging to serve.

• Family Dollar serves lower-income shoppers and sells a range of household items at varied, but still cheap, price points. Dollar Tree’s customer base tends to have higher incomes and tends to use the store for craft and party supplies that predominantly cost around $1.
• But when Family Dollar and Dollar Tree stores were near each other, they were just similar enough to cannibalize each other’s foot traffic. The business also faced stiff competition from retailers like Amazon and Walmart.

The icing on the small, heavily discounted cake was the Justice Department slapping Family Dollar with a record $41.6 million fine for selling items that were stored in a West Memphis warehouse that was littered with not just live rats, but dead and decaying ones as well.

After it drops the Family Dollar baggage…Dollar Tree said yesterday it’s gaining market share among its higher income customers and may aim to offset President Trump’s tariffs by raising prices at some locations. In 2021, the chain increased prices to $1.25 saying it would allow stores to offer a wider range of products.—MM

This report was written by Matty Merritt and was originally published by Morning Brew.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

About an hour outside of Boston, Amazon is building the future of its warehouse business. Here, in a 350,000-square-foot facility, the shipping behemoth has headquartered its robotics hub, where the company designs, tests, and manufactures cutting-edge machines that will operate side by side with workers in its fulfillment centers—and, in time, replace many of them. 

Amazon is not known for its robotics prowess, but the e-commerce giant has quietly invested billions of dollars in the field for more than a decade, beginning with its acquisition of warehouse automation startup Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012. Robotics is now central to Amazon’s efficiency and safety goals as the company seeks to produce autonomous, mobile machines that can pick up and sort packages.

I had the opportunity to visit the Massachusetts hub earlier in March—the new center opened in 2023 as an offshoot of the original Kiva facilities, which are about 50 miles away and still operational. Amazon handles the entire design and manufacturing process in-house, with programmers, hardware engineers, and testers all working under one roof to produce robots that will soon operate across Amazon’s global fulfillment network. 

Joseph Quinlivan, Amazon’s vice president of global robotics, has been with the company for its entire robotics journey, starting at Kiva and joining Amazon after the acquisition. “The great thing about Amazon is that it operates in many ways like a startup and has a startup mentality of speed,” he told me. “You don’t get bogged down with bureaucracy.”

He gave me a tour of Amazon’s innovative approach to robotic design, which includes brainstorming rooms for software engineers that are cluttered with whiteboards and overlook the sprawling factory floors. Quinlivan showed me his personal favorite: a robot called Proteus, which resembles an oversized Roomba, transports bins carrying packages, and can operate independently and side by side with employees.   

The future of work

Robots like Proteus are designed to replace repetitive motions by warehouse workers. Injuries are a major concern for the $2 trillion company, especially after a Senate investigation last year led by progressive Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders put a spotlight on safety failures at Amazon’s fulfillment centers. The investigation found that injuries are nearly twice as high as the industry average. Amazon rejected the investigation’s findings, describing it as “an attempt to collect information and twist it to support a false narrative.”  

Still, Quinlivan acknowledged that Amazon’s push into robotics is focused on the “most challenging tasks” carried out by workers, such as lifting and moving items. “[Safety] is front and center,” Quinlivan said, arguing that the newer generation of machines will be able to automate rote tasks 10-fold more than the previous one. “That’s where we start.” 

Automation, of course, also conjures fears of replacement. Amazon says that it has invested more than $1 billion in upskilling, or training employees for different roles. “It’s creating new, exciting jobs and opportunities for potentially a group of people that wouldn’t have that opportunity,” Quinlivan said. 

Robotics is integral to Amazon’s plans to get packages from your shopping cart to your door with increasing speed. But as the company fends off accusations of worker safety issues and job loss, its rapidly evolving slate of machines is also a symbol of the company’s relentless pursuit of productivity.  

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Fans of Studio Ghibli, the famed Japanese animation studio behind “Spirited Away” and other beloved movies, were delighted this week when a new version of ChatGPT let them transform popular internet memes or personal photos into the distinct style of Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki.

But the trend also highlighted ethical concerns about artificial intelligence tools trained on copyrighted creative works and what that means for the future livelihoods of human artists. Miyazaki, 84, known for his hand-drawn approach and whimsical storytelling, has expressed skepticism about AI’s role in animation.

Janu Lingeswaran wasn’t thinking much about that when he uploaded a photo of his 3-year-old ragdoll cat, Mali, into ChatGPT’s new image generator tool on Wednesday. He then asked ChatGPT to convert it to the Ghibli style, instantly making an anime image that looked like Mali but also one of the painstakingly drawn feline characters that populate Miyazaki movies such as “My Neighbor Totoro” or “Kiki’s Delivery Service.”

“I really fell in love with the result,” said Lingeswaran, an entrepreneur who lives near Aachen, Germany. “We’re thinking of printing it out and hanging it on the wall.”

Similar results gave the Ghibli style to iconic images, such as the casual look of Turkish pistol shooter Yusuf Dikec in a T-shirt and one hand in his pocket on his way to winning a silver medal at the 2024 Olympics. Or the famed “Disaster Girl” meme of a 4-year-old turning to the camera with a slight smile as a house fire rages in the background.

ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which is fighting copyright lawsuits over its flagship chatbot, has largely encouraged the “Ghiblification” experiments and its CEO Sam Altman changed his profile on social media platform X into a Ghibli-style portrait. In a technical paper posted Tuesday, the company had said the new tool would be taking a “conservative approach” in the way it mimics the aesthetics of individual artists.

“We added a refusal which triggers when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist,” it said. But the company added in a statement that it “permits broader studio styles — which people have used to generate and share some truly delightful and inspired original fan creations.”

Studio Ghibli hasn’t yet commented on the trend. The Japanese studio and its North American distributor didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment Thursday.

As users posted their Ghibli-style images on social media, Miyazaki’s previous comments on AI animation also began to resurface. When Miyazaki was shown an AI demo in 2016, he said he was “utterly disgusted” by the display, according to documentary footage of the interaction. The person demonstrating the animation, which showed a writhing body dragging itself by its head, explained that AI could “present us grotesque movements that we humans can’t imagine.” It could be used for zombie movements, the person said.

That prompted Miyazaki to tell a story.

“Every morning, not in recent days, I see my friend who has a disability,” Miyazaki said. “It’s so hard for him just to do a high five; his arm with stiff muscle can’t reach out to my hand. Now, thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is.”

He said he would “never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.”

“I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself,” he added.

Josh Weigensberg, a partner at the law firm Pryor Cashman, said that one question the Ghibli-style AI art raises is whether the AI model was trained on Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli’s work. That in turn “raises the question of, ‘Well, do they have a license or permission to do that training or not?’” he said.

OpenAI didn’t respond to a question Thursday about whether it had a license.

Weigensberg added that if a work was licensed for training, it might make sense for a company to permit this type of use. But if this type of use is happening without consent and compensation, he said, it could be “problematic.”

Weigensberg said that there is a general principle “at the 30,000-foot view” that “style” is not copyrightable. But sometimes, he said, what people are actually thinking of when they say “style” could be “more specific, discernible, discrete elements of a work of art,” he said.

“A ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ or ‘Spirited Away,’ you could freeze a frame in any of those films and point to specific things, and then look at the output of generative AI and see identical elements or substantially similar elements in that output,” he said. “Just stopping at, ‘Oh, well, style isn’t protectable under copyright law.’ That’s not necessarily the end of the inquiry.”

Artist Karla Ortiz, who grew up watching Miyazaki’s movies and is suing other AI image generators for copyright infringement in a case that’s still pending, called it “another clear example of how companies like OpenAI just do not care about the work of artists and the livelihoods of artists.”

“That’s using Ghibli’s branding, their name, their work, their reputation, to promote (OpenAI) products,” Ortiz said. “It’s an insult. It’s exploitation.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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