Labor disputes in U.S., Canada could disrupt supply chain ops (chainstoreage.com)

For the third quarter to date, more than 93 percent of First-Class Mail was delivered on-time each week. For the past fifteen weeks, more than 93 percent of Marketing Mail was delivered on-time. Through the first eleven weeks of the third quarter, the average time for the Postal Service to deliver a mailpiece or package across the nation was 2.4 days. Third quarter service performance scores covering April 1 through June 10 included: *First-Class Mail: 93.5 percent of First-Class Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, an increase of 5.7 percentage points from the fiscal second quarter. *Marketing Mail: 94.8 percent of Marketing Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, an increase of 2.6 percentage points from the fiscal second quarter. *Periodicals: 86.5 percent of Periodicals delivered on time against the USPS service standard, an improvement of 5.1 percentage points from the fiscal second quarter.

Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt began his tenure with a baptism by fire. He took over the role in September and made some tweaks to B&N’s holiday merchandising and a few personnel changes. He was expecting to make more extensive changes early this year. But then Covid-19 forced B&N to close all but 24 stores to in-person shopping. By early July, all but one store had been reopened, Daunt told PW. The company is following all local mandates, including limiting the number of customers in each store at a given time, establishing social distancing protocols, and creating designated areas where customers can leave books they have touched but decided not to buy (those books are then sanitized before being returned to shelves).

Cochrane is delighted to announce the signing of a new contract with John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., to publish the Cochrane Library for the next 10 years from January 2021. The agreement guarantees major investment into future development of the Library to sustain Cochrane as the world’s pre-eminent collection of high-quality evidence to inform global healthcare decision making. Cochrane’s Chief Executive Officer, Mark Wilson, warmly welcomed today’s announcement: “The Cochrane Library is central to Cochrane’s mission of producing and making available to the world high-quality, relevant, accessible systematic reviews and other evidence synthesis. Traffic to the Library has greatly increased over the past seven years as we have made it accessible in 12 languages and we have built a publishing platform that will enable us to deliver new journals, new databases and new features that will help us meet that mission as never before. We are confident we have a strong strategic partner with whom to work on the longer-term publishing challenges and opportunities.”