Stand-up comic Nate Bargatze is building a theme park. The park, to be called Nateland, will span more than 100 acres and include roller coasters, live shows and more with an estimated price tag of $350 million. The park’s three sections will be based on the famed comedian’s life. While renderings of the proposed park have been released, an exact location has not. He says he wants the park within an hour’s drive of Nashville, his hometown.

Bargatze has brought in design firm Storyland Studios. The team also has identified local and state tax incentives.

Fox News tracked him down for a comment on the proposed park,”If I was going to just focus on arenas or that kind of thing, it felt like it was going be too much me… I wanted to focus on a place that I could have for people to bring their families to, and destinations to create memories with your families. I don’t think there’s a ton of that,” he said.

The Kroger Co. is pulling back from developing a network of automated e-commerce fulfillment centers and will instead focus on expanding its brick-and-mortar grocery store network.  

The grocery chain announced it would close three of its eight robotics-powered fulfillment centers. The centers marked for closure are in Groveland, Florida, Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, and Frederick, Maryland. 

The company has also scrapped plans for another fulfillment center in Charlotte but will still build a previously planned fulfillment center in Phoenix.

With the announcement, the Cincinatti-based grocer admitted that its pandemic-era gambit to invest in robotics-focused warehouses to expand its market reach was dragging its e-commerce earnings into the red and creating significant headwinds for its bottom line.

“We haven’t allocated enough capital to growing stores because we have allocated a lot of capital in other areas like fulfillment centers,” Kroger Chairman and interim CEO Ronald Sargent said on an earnings call Thursday. 

The company anticipates taking a write-down of approximately $2.6B in 2026 because of the closures. As part of that, Kroger will make a one-time payment of $350M to UK-based robotics company Ocado, which built the robotic fulfillment systems.

Sargent said Kroger plans to open 14 new grocery stores in the fourth quarter and increase new-store builds by 30% throughout 2026. In June, the chain said it will actualize a net loss of 30 stores over 18 months as it closes 60 underperforming locations but opens 30 new ones, according to Food Business News.

GlobalData retail analyst Neil Saunders characterized Kroger’s push to focus on automated customer fulfillment centers as a “misadventure” undertaken during the tenure of former CEO Rodney McMullen, who resigned in March after an internal investigation into his conduct.

While the automated warehouses drove down the cost of picking and packing groceries for online orders, Kroger wasn’t able to deliver the groceries at the scale needed to offset the additional shipping costs of servicing a farther-flung network, McMullen said, according to CoStar. 

Kroger said it will now deepen its relationship with the third-party grocery delivery services Instacart, DoorDash and Uber Eats instead.

Since the announcement and earnings call, Kroger’s stock price has lost some 6% of its value, hovering near a six-month low of $63.31 in midday trading Friday.

New York City-based pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. has stopped its $350 million manufacturing plant project in Everett, marking a pivot in the company’s strategic expansion after its $43 billion acquisition of Bothell-based Seagen.

The Everett facility, located at 215 Shuksan Way, was originally part of Pfizer’s plan to bolster its manufacturing capabilities, reported the Puget Sound Business Journal. Seagen, a global biotechnology company focused on cancer treatments, signed a lease on the 269,097-square-foot facility in 2021, and Pfizer had announced plans to build a medical production facility from the ground up at the site.

The operations and therapeutic products initially slated for production in Everett are now moving to a plant in Sanford, North Carolina. Now, the closure of the proposed project will result in approximately 120 layoffs. “This decision is not a reflection on the performance of our colleagues but is in alignment with our site capacity design to meet the needs of the business,” Pfizer said in a statement.

Walmart plans to own and operate a milk processing facility in Valdosta, Georgia. The new facility will cost $350 million to build. The company will break ground later this year and create nearly 400 Walmart jobs in the Valdosta community. The plant will produce dairy products that will be distributed to 750 Walmart and Sam’s Clubs stores in the region. The ingredients will be sourced from local farmers.

It’s the second milk processing plant Walmart has built, after one that opened in 2018 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, helping it control production of one of the most price-sensitive grocery commodities. The company previously bought all its milk from other dairy companies.

The retail giant is following the lead of other large grocers such as Kroger, which has long run its own dairies.