I'm coral Jesus.

Welcome to our viewers watching Worldwide, the Caribbean country that's 90 miles away from US soil has a turbulent history.

In the 20th century, Cuba went from being controlled by one dictator to being controlled by another Fidel Castro, who led the revolution to overthrow Cuba's government.

In 1959 aligned his country with the communist Soviet Union, Cuba became a communist country itself.

It's government took control of private businesses in all aspects of Cuban life.

That, combined with the Cuban government's human rights abuses, soured relations with the democratic United States.

It put a trade embargo on Cuba, limiting Americans ability to do business with the communist country and pressuring Cuba to make democratic reforms.

When the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse in 1990 it stopped its support for Cuba.

The island lost billions of dollars in Soviet economic help every year, and that crushed Cuba's economy.

In more recent years, its government has tried to improve conditions by loosening some of its economic controls while still keeping its grip on political power.

Over the past 10 years, Cubans have been allowed to buy electron ICS and cell phones, buy and sell used cars and stay in hotels.

The country is in the news now because it just announced that Cubans will be able to start their own businesses or get jobs in most fields of work.

Previously, Cuba's government would Onley allow private workers in certain fields like barbering, repairing tires or posing with tourists.

And it still plans to prevent people from working in 124 different kinds of jobs.

Though it didn't specify what those jobs are, A CNN correspondent on the island says the Cuban government will probably keep total control over health care in the media.

Still, the change will open up more than 2000 different fields.

To Cuban workers.

It's a major economic reform.

It could lead to more opportunities and hope for Cubans.

But the British Broadcasting Corporation reports that the changes are likely to happen slowly as a lot of the country's current private workers air in the tourism industry and that's been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and the U.

S embargo.

12th trivia, which of these Internet browsers was launched First Internet Explorer, Mozilla Safari or Netscape.

In 1994 the Netscape Navigator started helping people with an Internet connection browse the World Wide Web.

Netscape also introduced something called SSL Secure Sockets Layer, which became the first Internet standard for protecting people's private information.

This, of course, gave rise to online shopping because before SSL, people were concerned that sensitive info like credit card numbers wasn't safe in cyberspace.

In fact, in Amazon's early days, folks commonly called the company to give their payment info over the phone.

Though online shopping has dramatically changed how people shop in recent years, it carries an additional challenge for retailers, their arm or returns of things ordered online than things bought in the store.

You might be surprised at what happens when you shipped something back.

Free returns their customers insurance policy for shopping online.

But what happens to those returns after you give them back might surprise you.

So customers really believe that the product just goes into the black hole or ends up being resold to another customer.

In many instances, that's not the case.

In reality, many of these products never return anywhere.

Instead, they may end up here, or even here, you know, easily.

25% of all these returns get destroyed.

In fact, returns have become such a headache for retailers that in some cases they're just refunding customers and letting them keep or donate the unwanted items.

The cost of getting the product back from the customer is much higher then.

Traditional logistics getting the product to the customer turns out, free returns are far from it.

Okay, there's a very large disparity between the amount of returns that happen from consumers that buy products online versus in the store.

You know, brick and mortar store.

We typically get somewhere between five and 10% returns.

But online we get north of 30% returns in 2020.

The coronavirus pandemic pushed online shopping and returns to record highs.

C B R E.

A commercial real estate service, estimates that Americans will end up returning $70 billion worth of online purchases post holiday season.

That's a staggering 73% growth from the previous five year average.

Here's why that's a problem.

Entire returns Business in another self is just extremely complex.

Big retailers already used data to improve the shopping experience on the front end.

Wal Mart believes data should play a bigger role in the returns process to We're constantly digging into the data to understand why customers were bringing stuff back, and we actually can solve a bigger portion of the end of the life cycle of the product by stopping the return from ever occurring.

So if I know that I have an item that is low quality, we worked with the manufacturer to fix it or we quit selling it.

That's because accepting a return isn't always easy, either.

Ah, warehouse optimized for fulfilling orders, now has to receive a product and inspect it.

Then someone needs to decide whether it can be resold or not in the end, and online return can require up to 20% more space and labor than one made in store.

Those costs are part of why opt or or return solution.

Company estimates that returning a $50 item can cost a retailer 59% of its sale price.

Often the math just doesn't add up.

The best return is the one that never happens, but when it does happen is about stopping the return or finding alternate ways where the customer brings it back toe handle the island to handle the return, and that's where liquidators come in.

So this is a product that came in one of these pallets.

Liquidators like this one are the middle men between retailers and resellers, way short organized process and figure out methods to get them to the right home.

And that's it.

That's really what we do here.

They buy returned merchandise, then sort and evaluated before auctioning it to discount stores and authorized resellers.

You'd be able to resell them at a profit because you would be purchasing them at a really fraction of what the actual cost is.

But some returns never make it to a liquidator.

Products ending up in landfills.

Customers don't really even think about as part of the purchase process.

Every year, returns produce an estimated £5 billion of waste in landfills.

It's generally risky to remind consumers how potentially wasteful their consumerism is.

So in general, retailers are hesitant to lean too heavily into those kind of awareness campaigns.

The solution is complicated, but WalMart, for one, says online shopping could actually help reduce the number of returns made, My customer goes online and tells me I'm returning this item.

For these reasons, I'm Mawr APS to harness the information than I am if you just walk into a store and drop it off and it's not just data tools like better sizing predictions for clothes and shoes can help reduce the likelihood of customer purchases.

The wrong size.

Ai chatbots can help answer customers questions quickly and keep labor costs down.

For retailers, even augmented reality is helping customers try out products before they buy.

It's been unmanaged for years.

Return rates were allowed to grow the rate of sales.

If you effectively manages thing, you can control your fate of where this is going.

Absolutely.

In an odd way, this is a partially self correcting problem.

As the return problem gets bigger for all these retailers, there's more.

Financial resource is available to fix the problem, so there's ah, happy outcome where less of this stuff ends up in a landfill just because there's more money to be made by keeping it out of the landfill.

E.

Yeah, Four score and seven years ago, well, actually, a lot less than that was when an artistically inclined man in New York became dedicated to the proposition of sculpting snow.

His latest effort has neighbors and passers by stopping, staring and snapping pictures.

Robert Shot says, conditions were just right.

First there was snow.

He wasn't traveling.

He was healthy.

He didn't have to commute to work in the city.

And while his sculpture may perish from the earth, his communities admiration lives on.

What a great way to be Lincoln, the past to the present.

Maybe in future years he'll be biding his time, trying to trump his previous efforts, bringing Barack such a Georgia's tradition that takes a claim ton of time but still bushes him to Riggan a fresh each year by car, turning out sculptures that never get Gerald presidential ponds they command respect.

Wanna give a shout out to the Conrad Schools of science?

The students watching from Wilmington, Delaware.