Activist investor Hestia Capital has proposed a majority slate of seven directors to replace current board members at Pitney Bowes, citing poor performance and what it termed strategic missteps over the past decade, with the company responding that Hestia is not interested in a good faith discussion.

The recent Cyber Weekend was a boon for online mining of consumer data, with major social media players using cookies to track users’ activity across the internet, including of course ecommerce websites, often without permission, then sell the data to advertisers.

With Chinese New Year starting Sunday, and manufacturing and logistics operations virtually shut down there for two weeks, experts say retail inventory levels are in a good place given recent gluts and proactive restocks, but the weeks following will bear watching and might bring issues.