Not by as much as the company had indicated it could have. Its the first hike since the service was introduced. A lot happening in the Retail Sector today. Data showing a slight increase in february sales. Results from Dollar General and jcpenney relaunching its home goods department. And some new information in the gm ignition switch recall. The automaker now telling affected owners not to weigh down their key rings with anything more than the car key and key fob. Well talk more about that. First up, though, amazon is raising the price of its prime Subscription Service to 99 up from 79. The first increase sense the service was introduced nine years ago. Prime offers free twoday shipping and access to thousands of streaming movies and tv shows. Amazon said those who sign up for prime in the next seven days can lock in the 79 rate. Nice to be grandfathered if you act quickly. The big question, though, is and you, david, know this company pretty well by now i do. How much do people exit the program because of the price increase . Yeah, you know, they had put out there the possibility of a 40 increase and, of course, then you come in with 20 and it seems like a relative bargain. But as i tweeted amazon knows its customers and their behavior better than any Company Period in terms of what they can do when it comes to data, big data and everything else. One has to believe they have researched this in every way possible. Still, interesting to note just, you know, anecdotally a lot of the conversation after my tweet on, for example, twitter was, im leaving, im leaving, oh, you know, theyre still not going to be profitable. Of course, this does go back to the basic profitability of the company, which is in the fers party business, namely amazon is sourcing the goods and storing them and having them in inventory and shipping them to you, does the company continue to actually lose money and much will a 20 increase address that. We dont know how many prime members there are. We dont know anything about anything. We know very little. The company doesnt give us a lot of information and its investors are happy not to get it apparently because theyve continued to award them on an extremely high multiple. We think at least 20 million prime members, though, that at least is the number out there. They added many during the holiday season. A million. You can do the math. What this will mean for the company in terms of additional profitability or certainly some have said 200 million in incremental revenue for a company with margins this slim might move the needle if nobody leaves, right . Without a doubt. Yeah. The question is how many people. Theres also been a belief, you know, theyre developing this streaming Music Service and interviews ive been doing were working on a documentary on amazon and so in interviews that ive been doing for that people had brought up the idea, i wonder if theyll tie that in, i wonder if theyll add some new Value Proposition when they raise the prime price. That does not seem to be the case. To be clear we believe amazon prime is a lossmaking venture, do we not . We believe that amazon does not make money in the in the shipping on the shipping. In other words, two days. The cost of actually what goes on, all the Fulfillment Centers that they are building, for example, to get closer to urban centers and all the people who man those Fulfillment Centers, even though many of them making 12 to 14 an hour, yes, the basic idea of getting you that package in two days is not a moneywinning proposition. If they lost customers, they would lose less money. Thats not the way jeff bezos sees it at all. There are two surveys that they would lose both for the journal and cirp they would lose half of their customers. 50 . Let me put it the other way around, less than half said they would renew if there was a price hike to 99. The parlor game is the over under 10 , 2 , that would be amazing. I would take amazons data and what it knows well beyond any survey that anybody has come out with. What you need to know whether they are purely shipping customers and they want to get a deal there or whether they moved over to the value added to the prime video and, therefore, more likely to renew. Prime is very important for this company. Prime members typically buy more stuff as a result of being prime members. And so there is the fly wheel which is something very important at amazon. Just things keep rotating faster and faster as a result of it. Yeah. The stocks going to be up today at least at the open. Well talk more about it later. Retail sales for february did accelerate 0. 3 despite the winter chill. Also Dollar General out with earnings. Jcpenney redoing their home goods. We want to get more insight on all things retail and the state of the consumer. Joining us on set david henry Vice President and ceo of kimco reali realty, great to have you back. Good morning. Thank you for kicking us off. 0. 3 is not bad. A nice beat. Some are saying the economy is sort of coming out of the rough winter. Is that what the number tells you . It was a slow start certainly with the cold weather and also a little bit of a sticker payroll shock. A lot of retailers are saying the first week of january when employees got their paychecks they looked at higher payroll reductions and higher taxes and that may have paused everything a little bit. But i think were back on track. National Retail Federation predicts 4 retail sales growth this year and they are sticking with it. I think it will be a strong year. Most National Retailers are expanding again. Strong growth plans across the board. Weve been talking about it seems every morning a new round of store closures, right . A radioshack and a staples and even some already in progress that were announced earlier last year. How much is coming online in terms of vacancy . You have to be careful when you see the headlines of radioshack or staples, for every one of those there are three others growing like crazy that dont make the headlines. Aldees will grow to 2,000 stores over the next five years. Tjx and ross stores alone are going to grow 200 stores per year, so you have a lot of retailers doing very well that more than offset the store closures that you see. Overall in the next two years 82,000 new stores are going to open up across the u. S. Youre not that concerned. Every day we sit here and talk about fashionbased retail malls, for example, that seem to be getting hurt by amazon which we just talked about, by everybody doing things on their mobile phone or even if they go to the store, actually not buying something there. Youre not seeing that in your business . Of course, ecommerce is a factor. But, again, you have to keep it in perspective. Total credit card sales, only 6 are internet ecommerce based. So you still have 94 of sales on credit cards still brick and mortar sales of some sort or another. Most of the nonecommerce retail blends their store operations in with online sales. Macys, for instance, tells us for everything ordered online and returned on store they sell 1. 30 for every dollar returned. Nice ways to blend them together. Williams sonoma with a comp brand metric, meaning combining online and bricks and mortar up 10 , that will be a record high on williamssonoma. Weve got Dollar General out today, what smells the sweetest . The Restaurant Business is growing like crazy. A fun fact. 50 subways a week open up in the United States each week. People are eating out more often. One dunkin donut opens every day and that drives these are franchises and people kind of giving it a chance, arent they . Yes, right. What about mall traffic overall . The press is continually full of the idea of malls shutting down, that the traffic is plunging . I know youre going to say were at the Community Level so its slightly different. What is the general landscape there and how can more owners boost the traffic thats going through or is it up to the retailers individually . Lets start with the very good malls. Nothing has changed about the very good malls in the United States. Most of the Real Estate Investment trusts own the prime malls in the United States. Traffic if anything is up in the very best malls in the country. The b malls that are programs anchored by a pennys and a sears, theyre struggling a little bit more. But the very best malls in the United States are doing fine. In kimcos case we are about neighborhood and Community Shopping centers, were the drugstore, the dry cleaner, the pizza parlor thats what you see every day and most of that is internet resistance we would argue. The health club is another example. People coming every day. Right. But you mentioned jcpenneys and sears, we talk about them a good deal here. What do you believe is the future for both of those retailers . Identify think you have to put them in two different categories. Sears and kmart have not been investing back in the stores which generally is not a good sign. Sears, kmart are placing a major bet in converting their brick and mortar to more of an Online Business membership only. Well have to see how that works. Pennys i believe deserves come credit for putting a lot of money back into their stores. A lot of the stores have been refreshed. Theyve turned sales around a bit. You mean postjohnson. Yes, sir. We talk about the dijon dejohnsonfication of the stores. He did launch the capx. He spent a lot of money. But they are back to basics and they are offering coupons and discounts and trying to get their old shoppers back. Thank you for being here. General motors is telling owners they should avoid weighing down their key rings with anything more than the key and the remote to their car as new details emerge on its massive ignition switch recall. Phil lebeau is what is becoming a nightmare for mary bar ra i would imagine. Its a long way from being over. The entire recall originally was an indication from General Motors they had a first sense of problems with the ignition in 2004. Well, now according to new documents the company filed last night they actually knew about the problem potentially as early as 2001. General motors saying at that time a technician who was working on a preproduction saturn ion first noticed stalling in 2001 and then in 2003 a dealership technician observed a stall, changed out the ignition, so those are two incidents before General Motors first reported seeing problems with this vehicle or these types of vehicles and that was in 2004. And you mentioned the heavy key chain. Once again General Motors is telling those who own one of these 1. 6 million vehicles that they should only be using the key in the ignition and the key fob on the key chain nothing else. It should not be weighted down. That could cause some problems with the ignition. They are telling these owners to do this until the car gets fixed. The recall notices, by the way, they went out this week to 1. 3 million owners here in the u. S. 1. 6 worldwide. The fixes will start next month. General motors working along with delphi in terms of getting new ignition switches out to the dealerships. The fix itself shouldnt take that long, its a matter of getting all the pieces in place in order for it to take place. Shares beaten down big time this week, carl, but you see a bit of perhaps a bump back today. Its premarket and trading a little bit higher but well have to see what happens throughout the day today, because its been a rough week for General Motors. And it will be a long year for the lawyers. When we come back shares of plug power and other fuel Cell Companies obviously surging after the Companies LastQuarterly Results but what do we make of the 380 jump so far this year . Also ahead the live interview of the ceo of petsmart. And a lot more squawk on the street live from post in a moment. Moment. Usic defiance is in our bones. Defiance never grows old. Citracal maximum. Calcium citrate plus d. Highly soluble, easily absorbed. Or how ornate the halls are. Tall the building is, it doesnt matter if there are granite statues, or big mahogany desks. When working with an investment firm, whats really important is whether the people behind the desks actually stand behind what they say. Introducing the schwab accountability guarantee. If youre not happy with one of our participating Investment Advisory services, well refund your program fee from the previous quarter. Its no guarantee against loss and other fees and expenses may still apply. Chuck vo standing by your word, thats what matters the most. Shares of plug power up. Helped by a jump of Product Service revenue. The stock is up 380 this year, and ballard and fuel cell have also been on a tear. Plug powers ceo appeared on this program and he expects his company to become profitable in this year. In 2014 well make money and its because weve been building this company for five or six years. We focused on a market where fuel cells could make a difference today. And we put it into ehecktronic trucks. We convinced customers like bmw, walmart that our units dramatically improve the product i. Of their organization. Got to make a disclaimer, of course, market cap here relatively low given the companies we normally talk about, but this is quickly becoming as we talked about with jim yesterday sort of the poster child for froth in the current market. One of the cult stocks to a certain extent. A penny stock last year. It was. Less than a dollar. Thats just shocking. You know, history will tell you most of the time these things dont pan out. But but they are getting orders. I wouldnt want to pass judgment. I know there have been various people on both sides of this. We had a Research Report earlier this year saying the stock is worth 50 cents a share. But they are getting orders from walmart and fedex. And walmart is the makeorbreak account. They may be very dependent on that. Well see. But, man, you are getting it hit on both sides. The longs and the shorts have been torn apart this week because of the wild moves. When we come back, whats first and foremost on art cashins radar today . Hell tell us on post nine after the opening bell. And following its june ipo gogo has been heading mostly skyward, a talk with the ceo of the wifi inflight provider. One more look at the futures and well get the opening bell here in about 20 minutes. In todays market, a lot can happen in a second. With fidelitys guaranteed onesecond trade execution, we route your order to up to 75 Market Centers to look for the best possible price, maybe even better than you expected. Its all part of our goal to execute your trade in one second. Im derrick chan of fidelity investments. Our onesecond trade execution is one more innovative reason serious investors are choosing fidelity. Call or click to open your fidelity account today. [ girl ] my mom, she makes underwater fans that are powered by the moon. She can print amazing things, right from her computer. [ whirring ] [ train whistle blows ] she makes trains that are friends with trees. My mom works at ge. My mom works at ge. No two people have the same financial goals. Pnc investments works with you to understand yours and helps plan for your retirement. Talk to a pnc investments Financial Advisor today. As the search still continues for missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 u. S. Investigators are reportedly saying that the flight may have flown on for four hours after reaching its last confirmed location. Weve got more now live. Sri, over to you. Reporter simon, as you said, it was another day. We started this day with some hope, but that hope was dashed ultimately later on. And let me just start off by saying what generated this hope. The first one was a story while an official piece of data, satellite data, from the chinese, which did apparently show what could have been floating objects in the south china sea. Some of them quite considerable in area size. 21x24 meters one of them was. Now, that caused a lot of excitement. Planes were dispatched from malaysia and vietnam but they turned up nothing. And then we got the real shocker when the malaysian transport minister told the press over here a few hours earlier where i am that the satellite images were issued by mistake. The malaysians contacted the Chinese Embassy here in kua kuala lumpur and said they were issued by mistake and shouldnt have been issued in the first place and the chinese were investigating them. So, this is turning out to be a real exercise in complicated messages, contradictions and at one point the chinese were very critical about the way the may laishens were handling this operation and now the shoe really seems to be on the other foot. This is a big backward step, in other words, for the in terms of the cooperation and the mutual trust when you consider the Multinational Coalition that is looking for this aircraft. Then finally we have another report in the wall street journal that generated a lot of excitement, the chatter here, that the aircraft could still be airborne. Was airborne, about hours after it disappeared off the radar screen. Rollsroyce and boeing are in town. They have technical teams here and are trying to get to the bottom of this investigation. But what had happened was that this was, again, categorically denied as inaccurate. And last known point of transmission was at 1 07. So, its really been hope after hope has been dashed here. If there is anything a grain of positivity to take away from this, its this, that the search does go on. And it is being extended but for how long. The relatives here of those passengers on 370 are becoming increasingly despondent. Not a shred of evidence has been turned up yet, simon . Thank you, sri. Youve got to wonder who is being straight with