WFH Whodunnit: Families, benzos or both?

Big box retailers peer into the future, the housing hold steady looks unsteady, who (or what) broke the office, and good reads on AI, amazing charts, bad actors in healthcare and a new kind of office

Random Walk delivers on a Thursday now!

4 mini-essays, which are admittedly mediations on RW themes from earlier this week:

• The Oracle of Bentonville

• Shopping is dead! Long live shopping!

• Housing hold steady . . . steady . . . steady

• WFH Whodunnit: families or benzos or both?

6 good reads for the long weekend:

• Apollo’s Torsten Slok reveals all

• There are moats in AI and why Meta is different

• What is ChatGPT and how does it work?

• A new kind of office experience

• Germany is recessed

• The Rise and Fall of Envision or how some bad actors in healthcare took it on the chin

Many happy memorials to you all.

Things we think

The Oracle of Bentonville

Walmart WMT 0.00%↑ and Target TGT 0.00%↑ aren’t the same, but they are similar, and when they tell you that consumers are looking for discounts and avoiding big ticket items, you listen.

Walmart had a nice quarter, noting specifically its gains among higher-income households—it’s possible that Walmart has gotten more posh, but it’s more likely that higher-come folks are trading down:

Ta…