Uber Buys ezCater for $2.3B, Walmart Brings Its Shipping Rates to ShipStation & Giant Launches GLP-1 Store Tours

[upbeat music] Hello, everyone. This is Omni Talk Retail. I'm Chris Walton, and you are listening to the Retail Daily Minute, your quickest, fastest breakdown of all the day's top retail news. Today's podcast is brought to you once again with the help and support of Zenline AI, because you have likely heard about AI agents 1,000 times this year, but are also probably wondering what they can do for you as a retailer. So visit tryzenline.ai to book a call and see how agents can bring you more margin. Today is October 7th, 2026. And this morning we've got news on Walmart's new shipping tie-up with ShipStation for its marketplace sellers and giant companies in store tours for GLP-1 shoppers. But we begin today with Uber making a big bet on the office lunch. Uber has agreed to acquire ezCater, the Boston-based platform for catering and workplace meals, in a $2.3 billion all cash deal. According to Chain Store Age, ezCater takes orders from more than 140,000 restaurants nationwide with partners that include Denny's, Five Guys, and Del Taco. Now, the numbers here all come from Uber's own announcement, so take them accordingly. But Uber says ezCater generated more than $2.5 billion in gross bookings over the last 12 months, that it is growing in the high teens year over year, and that its average order tops $400. Uber also says it expects the deal to help its margins, and Uber's CEO called catering, quote, "A big business," end quote. That $400 average order is the whole story here for me. A scheduled corporate lunch placed days in advance and paid for on a company card is a very different animal than a single burrito at 9 o'clock at night. And Uber plans to plug ezCater into both Uber Eats and Uber for Business, where it already sits inside a lot of corporate expense accounts.

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All right, we are back, and our next story comes from the Marketplace Wars, where Walmart is launching Ship with Walmart, a new option that gives Walmart's marketplace sellers access to Walmart's negotiated shipping rates directly inside ShipStation, the logistics platform a lot of small sellers already use to run their orders. According to Chain Store Age, again, sellers can buy eligible labels right alongside their existing carrier accounts with no integration to build, and eligible orders that ship on time can get up to $100 in protection on lost item claims. I like the thinking here too. Rather than forcing sellers deep into its own tools, Walmart is going where those sellers already work, the same dashboard where they manage their Amazon, TikTok Shop, Shopify, and eBay orders. If you're trying to win over third-party sellers, being the easy label to click inside a tool they already live in is smart, and it gives Walmart another on-ramp next to Walmart fulfillment services for sellers who don't want to hand over their inventory. That said, again, this is