Assorted Links Thursday

My pre-weekend reading: Culture for the Left-Brained Leader: Strategy, Tactics, and Implementation for Transformative Results.

Instead of trying to recruit Amazon to your town, what if you recruited a few dozen of Amazon sellers?

The majority of sales on Amazon are now made by independent sellers on its marketplace, through which $300bn worth of goods flowed last year, according to Marketplace Pulse.

Reaching the top of Amazon’s listings, even for the most innocuous of products, can translate to millions of dollars of sales.

So in the past 18 months, at least 69 start-ups have raised some $7bn to begin buying up successful Amazon sellers, in the hope of building a collection of top brands. The biggest roll-up player, Thrasio, has raised almost $2bn.

How everybody miscalculated housing demand: The pandemic has revealed a supply/demand imbalance in the Housing Market, but the reasons are far less obvious than assumed.

The best and worst places to be as reopening, variants collide. The best: 1) Norway 2) Switzerland 3) New Zealand 4) France 5) United States.

The 20 Republican-led states that reduced unemployment benefits in June did not see an immediate spike in overall hiring, but early evidence suggests something did change: The teen hiring boom slowed in those states, and workers 25 and older returned to work more quickly.

I really need this drone for droning the inside of old factories and warehouses.