Amazon & the Robots: So It Goes

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Amazon (AMZN +0.20%) closed Monday at $213.49, barely a twitch upward. It’s a company that sells everything, and now, apparently, wants to drive you around in something it built. Zoox, the robotaxi project, is expanding to Phoenix and Dallas. Testing, of course. Everything is testing. As if life itself wasn’t enough of a trial run. The stock nudged up a bit. Not much. It’s hard to get excited about incremental gains when you consider the vastness of space and the inevitability of heat death. So it goes.

UPS (UPS 2.43%), a company that delivers things with humans, is rethinking its relationship with Amazon. Less business, they say, because Amazon’s packages aren’t always the most profitable to haul. It’s a simple equation, really. Margins. Everyone is obsessed with margins. As if squeezing a few extra pennies out of each transaction will somehow stave off the void. Trading volume was up, a lot of shares changing hands. People buying, people selling. A frantic dance before the music stops. Oil prices, predictably, threw a tantrum. Up, then down. The market mirrored it. Everything mirrors everything else, eventually.

How the Markets Moved Today

The S&P 500 (^GSPC +0.83%) added a little something, finishing at 6,796. The Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC +1.38%) climbed a bit further, closing at 22,696. Numbers. Just numbers. Alibaba Group (BABA +1.47%) and Microsoft (MSFT +0.17%) also moved, predictably. The cloud, it seems, is still a thing. For now. They say progress is inevitable. I’m not so sure. It often feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. So it goes.

What This Means for Investors

The price of oil caused a bit of a wobble today. A reminder that we’re still reliant on digging up ancient sunlight. It soared, it dipped. The market followed. Amazon, meanwhile, is building self-driving cars. Or, more accurately, retrofitting SUVs. A small step for a robotaxi, a small step for humanity. A step toward what, exactly? I haven’t the faintest idea.

UPS’s decision to prioritize its own margins over Amazon’s packages is a small skirmish in a larger war. A war over efficiency, over control, over the very definition of delivery. It’s a game of diminishing returns, really. We’re all just trying to get things from point A to point B before the universe collapses. So it goes.

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2026-03-10 00:02