BJ’s expanded its contactless shopping options to include curbside pickup at all locations, it said Friday. Members ordering online can have items delivered to their car. After being notified an order is ready for pickup, customers park in a designated curbside parking space and check in by app. An employee will bring the order out and load it into the vehicle, it said. BJ’s is also expanding its buy online, pick up in store service to include grocery items, it said.

The Food and Drug Administration acknowledged missing its statutory deadline under the FDA Reauthorization Act of 2017 for proposing the rule to create a category of over-the-counter hearing aids for people with mild or moderate hearing loss. Section 709 of the statute gave the FDA three years after enactment to release the proposed rule for public comment. The three-year deadline was Tuesday. "Although FDA staff are tirelessly working to meet the urgent needs of COVID-19 patients and health care providers during these unprecedented times, issuing the proposed rule remains a priority and we are working expeditiously to do so," emailed a spokesperson Thursday. The agency hopes to release the proposed rule in the fall, and "appropriate timing updates will be available at that time," she said. It will post the proposed rule in the Federal Register and open a docket for public comment, plus promote it through web updates and other "agency communications," she said. Section 709 is silent on how long the comment period should last, but requires the FDA to publish the final rule creating the OTC category no more than 180 days after comments close. CTA has a certification logo waiting to identify reputable OTC hearing aids meeting minimum voluntary performance criteria in the ANSI/CTA-2051 standard approved in January 2017 (see 2007180003). The logo is useless until the FDA creates the OTC category.

House Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and Communications Subcommittee Chairman Mike Doyle, D-Pa., urged the FCC to extend the priority window for tribes to apply for 2.5 GHz licenses by another 150 days. The commission agreed in July to extend the tribal window until Sept. 2, drawing criticism from Democratic Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks (see 2007310027). Tribal groups sought a six-month extension of the window beyond the earlier Aug. 3 deadline. “We are concerned that the FCC’s failure to provide” an “adequate” extension “means fewer tribes will be connected to lifesaving internet service,” Pallone and Doyle said in a Wednesday letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. “Tribes have been hit particularly hard during the COVID-19 pandemic, and high-speed internet service helps governments better succeed when it comes to public health interventions. The Rural Tribal Priority Window is one important remedy to the digital divide for Indian Country, but without more time, it will not succeed.” The FCC didn’t comment.

COVID-19 shelter-in-place mandates fueled a 33.6% year-on-year jump in U.S. home entertainment spending in Q2 to $7.9 billion, led by subscription VOD at $5.5 billion, said the Digital Entertainment Group Thursday. Electronic sell-through spending spiked 57% to $864 million. Overall first-half consumer spending across digital and physical home entertainment formats was $15.1 billion, up 25.7% vs. first half 2019. After years of double-digit drops, spending declines on DVDs narrowed to 6% in the quarter, it said. Q2 box office spending was off 23.9% to $1.67 billion in the quarter.

The holiday season amid COVID-19 “is going to be particularly tricky to plan,” said BJ’s Wholesale Club CEO Lee Delaney on a Q2 investor call Thursday. “A fair amount of work has gone into really thinking through the implications and how we should plan the stores and the online offerings” in the general merchandise business, which includes consumer tech products, said Delaney. It’s trying to “buy into new categories in a bigger way,” he said. “So we are looking at exercise equipment and textiles and consumer electronics and connected home devices, because our baseline assumption is you will still have a large amount of people either working from home or spending more times in their homes and the investment in people’s homes will continue. And so we are shifting the equipment pretty meaningfully in that direction.” Q2 general merchandise sales jumped 22%, partly on strong TV sales in the quarter, said Chief Financial and Administrative Officer Bob Eddy.

“Ditch the Home Office. Work From Las Vegas,” beckoned an MGM Resorts email Wednesday in a “Viva Las Office” promotion aimed at reinvigorating hotel and casino traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic. All MGM properties in Las Vegas are open except for the Mirage, Park MGM and NoMad, but weekend demand is “far more robust” than on weekdays, said management on a quarterly earnings call this month (see 2007310003). Three “luxury packages” start at $100 a night and include a 20% break on a room that’s “office-ready" with high-speed Wi-Fi and plenty of "video conference ready backdrops.”

China's COVID-19 response “can stand the test of time and history,” said a Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Wednesday. “China's enormous sacrifice and contribution to the global fight against COVID-19 is there for all to see.” President Donald Trump postponed trade negotiations with China because he regards its handling of the pandemic as “not even thinkable,” he told reporters in Yuma, Arizona, Tuesday. “With what they did to this country and to the world, I don’t want to talk to China right now,” said Trump. Asked if he was going to pull out of the phase one trade deal, Trump responded: “We’ll see what happens.”

Instacart is offering its shoppers free access to Doctor On Demand telehealth screenings for COVID-19, said the online grocery shopping service Wednesday. Shoppers who are “clinically diagnosed” will be eligible to receive up to 14 days of “extended pay” while they quarantine, it said. Instacart shoppers and the Gig Workers Collective threatened early in the pandemic to strike if the company didn’t take proper COVID-19 proper safety precautions (see 2003270048 or 2003270065). It eventually relented and increased benefits and safety protocols.

The National Association of Chain Drug Stores sought clarification of a March 20 FCC Consumer Affairs Bureau ruling on the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and public health communications during the COVID-19 pandemic (see 2003200074). The group sought clarity that the ruling “applies to calls and texts related to COVID-19 vaccines, when available, as well as flu vaccines, during the pandemic” in a filing posted Tuesday in docket 02-278.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group is working on a specification to enable wearables to use smartphone-based exposure notification system (ENS) protocols, it said Tuesday. Public ENSs, deployed by government health agencies, have used Bluetooth technology embedded in smartphones to notify people when they have been in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. Smartphones alone aren’t a practical approach to cover all segments of the population, it said. “Several population groups critical to managing the spread" of COVID-19 have “relatively low smartphone penetration, presenting a coverage challenge" for ENSs, said Elisa Resconi, physics professor at the Technical University of Munich. She's researching non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19. Wearables could be an effective way to extend the reach of an ENS, she said. More than 130 Bluetooth member companies joined the ENS working group to define a standard.