There were, sadly, no Oompa-Loompas at the recent NRF conference in New York, but the spirit of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was alive and well on the trade show floor. Reminiscent of the 1971 film (and the 1964 Roald Dahl novel), where those who found golden tickets in their chocolate bars could tour a magical candy factory, One Source, a technology solutions company, ran a promotion centered around a 2-carat diamond.

One Source placed nearly 3,000 jewelry boxes in rooms across five hotels where attendees stayed. One contained a lab-grown real diamond worth $1,100, but the rest—wah-wah—were fake. Only by coming to Booth 1846, which was staffed by One Source Event Manager Angela Wright, who’d conceived the promotion, could attendees determine if theirs was the real diamond.

To learn more, including the surprising way it all turned out, we asked Wright to walk us through it.

Keep reading here.—AAN

Amazon’s recently announced $200 billion investment in building a robust AI infrastructure, including data centers and chips, will determine the next decade of its leadership, especially given Google’s recent comeback in AI.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the tech giant will invest in capital expenditures across Amazon.com, but predominantly in its cloud computing division AWS, because of “very high demand.”

“Customers really want AWS for core and AI workloads,” Jassy said on the company’s latest earnings call. “And we are monetizing capacity as fast as we can install it. We have deep experience understanding demand signals in the AWS business and then turning that capacity into strong return on invested capital. We are confident this will be the case here as well.”

Keep reading here.—VC

On Wednesdays, we wear pink spotlight Retail Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

Melissa Minkow is global director of retail strategy at digital solutions company CI&T.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? I identify key existing, new, and emerging consumer behaviors that will impact how they shop so that CI&T can build the most resilient, productive technology solutions for retailers and brands. My goal is to demonstrate to the market that CI&T knows what’s best for its retail clients through content creation that showcases our deep understanding of what will work in the industry and why.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? It requires a lot of time not in meetings, just absorbing and thinking. If I want to put out a high quantity of content, at a high quality level, I need a lot of “input” time for that level of output. And, oftentimes, the less the inputs I’m consuming and synthesizing are about retail itself, the better. I do always, always, always read Retail Brew though because I stick to the retail news most of the time rather than retail opinion. If I’m reading retail thought leadership content, I’ll risk echoing someone else’s ideas. Outside of retail news sources, my inspiration for retail ideation typically comes from shifts in the worlds of pop culture, art, travel, dating culture, etc.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Every year I write up some sort of “future of retail” piece where I get extra imaginative and say what I’d love to see retailers do or offer in terms of user experiences. The one I wrote last year had some especially creative ideas in it. Hopefully I can top it this year.

Keep reading here.—EC

Consumer confidence is at its lowest level in years—but Americans are still opening their wallets. From credit card data to iPhone sales, new indicators show spending remains strong despite economic anxiety. Here’s what’s driving the disconnect.