Welcome to Axis ProRata, where we take just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

Sponsored by TSX Broadway.

I'm Dan Premack.

On today's show, a new bidder emerges for USA Today, and President Trump gives us a bit of a shutdown surprise.

But first, the future of retail.

So the big retail news last week was Sears' on again,

off again, death, I guess, having first rejected a $4.5 billion takeover bid from Chairman

Eddie Lampert, but then leaving the door open a bit for a deal after Lampert raised his offer

to $5 billion. But the reality is no matter what happens to Sears, that's a ghost of

retail past, not a retail future. For that, Axios had a weekend deep dive that left us with a few

big things to consider. And the first is that vanity may save Main Street. So if you take a walk

through any larger mid-sized town, you're apt to see a lot of nail salons and waxing

salons and tattoo parlors and gyms, the sorts of things that can't be easily replicated online.

In fact, between 1990 and 2017, the U.S. saw a 247% increase in nail salons, while seeing

double-digit decreases in things like hardware stores,

bookstores, and shoe stores. Second, don't overstate the impact of millennials. Yes, it's true that

wealthy millennials are relatively unlikely to go to a store, but middle and lower income millennials

have the same shopping habits as everyone else. And third, a lot of these trends in retail

that we keep reading about, things like cashierless stores or pop-up stores from big digital first brands,

those are mostly manifesting in big cities, not in smaller ones, let alone in rural areas. That means

that the internet, which was supposed to help democratize retail and our

access to products, actually may be creating a new sort of digital divide, because, you know, progress.

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