
Search
or Search by TOPIC



Search Supply Chain Videocasts

Sign-Up Free Newsletter

Supply Chain by the Numbers

Feb. 19, 2026

Supply Chain by the Numbers for Feb. 19, 2026

Amazon Robot Retires Early. US Manufacturing Flat again in January. Lots of CDL Schools Closed. Electric Vehicles Massive Writeoffs


h
4
That’s about how many months it took Amazon to shut down deployment of its Blue Jay fulfillment center robot, first installed in October. Blue Jay, a multi-armed robot designed to sort and move packages, was for use in the company’s same-day delivery facilities. At the time, the company was testing the robots at a facility in South Carolina and said it took Amazon significantly less time to develop Blue Jay — only about a year— than it did to develop its other warehouse robots, a speed the company credited to advancements in AI. Amazon spokesperson Terrence Clark told TechCrunch that Blue Jay was launched as a prototype — although that was not made clear in the company’s original press release. But something didn’t work out.

550

That’s the number of commercial driving schools in the US that train truckers and bus drivers that must close after investigators found they employed unqualified instructors, failed to adequately test students and had other safety issues, the federal Transportation Department announced Wednesday. The move marks the Transportation Department's latest effort to improve safety in the trucking industry. And unlike its previous actions last fall to decertify up to 7,500 schools that included many defunct operations, this latest step is focused on what it deemed were active schools with significant shortcomings that inspectors identified in 1,426 site visits.



97.5
That was the level of US manufacturing output in January, as represented in the monthly index from the Federal Reserve Bank, which was released this week. That was up just a little from December (with a score of 96.9), as the index has been in range that has seen it hover around the 96 -98 level for more than six months, with no real growth, but not recessionary declines either. However, January output was 2.4% up versus the same period in 2025. But at an index level of 97.5, it means US manufacturing output is now below that of the baseline year of 2017 (index = 100) now nine years later. It is also well below the all-time high of about 108, reached in late 2007.



$50 Billion
That is the total of recent write-downs from Ford, GM and Stellantis related to electrical vehicles. Why? The easy answer is lack of demand – sales of EVs were down more than 30% in the fourth quarter, after the Trump administration ended a $7500 tax credit on EV purchases expiring in September. “Instead of plowing billions into the future knowing these large EVs will never make money, we are pivoting,” Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley has said. Ford now says it will make one low-cost EV pickup by 2027. Auto companies and battery makers are scaling back. After pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into US manufacturing, they are downsizing investments, canceling projects and pivoting plants to support making more traditional gas-powered vehicles.

Q

Feedback

No Feedback on this article yet.