The daily business briefing: December 6, 2016

Amazon tests a brick-and-mortar grocery store, oil edges down on fears of lingering glut, and more

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1. Amazon experiments with smart grocery shop

Amazon.com on Monday unveiled its first brick-and-mortar convenience store, an 1,800-square-foot small-format grocery shop in downtown Seattle it calls Amazon Go. The smart retail outlet allows customers to use an Amazon app to grab items and check themselves out without going through a register. It hopes to open more than 2,000 grocery stores if the test goes well. Amazon also is experimenting with a drive-through format, and plans to open two drive-through outlets in Seattle over the coming weeks. The e-commerce giant already has tested brick-and-mortar bookstores.

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Harold Maass, The Week US

Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.