Alaska Airlines is taking a flyer on a subscription service, joining the recurring-payment ranks of Netflix, Amazon and Peloton as the travel industry recovers from its pandemic woes, Nathan writes.

Why it matters: The subscription economy is taking over more areas of our lives, offering new payment and service options while threatening to disrupt businesses that can’t keep up.

• And as the fifth-largest carrier in the U.S., Alaska has the heft to shake up the marketplace.

How it works: Subscription options include six, 12 or 24 round-trip flights annually from 13 destinations in California to each other and to Phoenix, Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada.

• Customers can pay as little as $49 monthly for the cheapest six-trip option, Flight Pass.
• A more flexible option, Flight Pass Pro, starts at $199 a month, providing flights that can be booked up to two hours before departure.

The big picture: The airline industry could use a source of dependable revenue as it continues to suffer from a decline in travel due to the pandemic.

• “They want the same things that a typical retailer or other private enterprise would want, which is recurring revenue that is predictable and customer loyalty,” says Adam Levinter, CEO of Scriberbase and author of “The Subscription Boom." " Subscription models provide an anchor for all of those things."

Our thought bubble: The devil is in the details with deals like this. People won’t pay if the value isn't there.

The bottom line: One-off flight purchases aren’t going away. But if this works, expect others to follow.

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Retail sales receipts grew even bigger last month amid depressed levels of consumer sentiment, Hope writes.

• The current divergence between spending and mood reflects the major opposing forces in this strengthening economy. It also potentially foreshadows a slowdown in demand.

State of play: Retail sales grew 3.8% in January from December, an initial reading from the Commerce Department said today. (Prices grew 0.6% in January.) 

Meanwhile, U.S. consumer sentiment has fallen to a more than 10-year low as inflation has been rising at its fastest pace in 40 years.

What to watch: When and how big any kind of slowdown may start.

Go deeper.

🤔 Fed officials stressed "flexibility" at its January meeting. (Axios)

📉 Roblox and Shopify sales were hurt by a declining pandemic. (Boston Globe)

👶 Twitter's new CEO, Parag Agrawal, will take a few weeks of paternity leave. (WSJ)

Self-driving technology companies are striking while the iron is hot, Hope reports.

• Waymo Via, the self-driving truck unit under Google parent company Alphabet, announced a new deal today with one of the biggest logistics companies in the world — C.H. Robinson.

Why it matters: As the trucking industry continues to face worker and equipment shortages, companies like Waymo have landed significant partnerships with companies in the freight sector.

• Details: Autonomous trucks from Waymo Via will make deliveries of C.H. Robinson’s customer freight between Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, a 240-mile stretch of road, as part of several pilots.

The big picture: Investors see a lot of potential in companies that can solve the problem of carrying freight long distances, Axios’ Joann Muller has reported.

• Companies like Walmart have started testing the technology for shorter routes too — the so-called “middle mile” of the supply chain. 

Go deeper: How autonomous trucks could fix our broken supply chains

It’s not easy to cuddle over Zoom, but that’s exactly what some professional cuddlers have been doing during the pandemic, Nathan writes.

How it works: When COVID-19 erupted, touch therapists like Indigo Dawn shifted their sessions from in-person to remote video.

• “For a long time with the virtual sessions, I was teaching people to give themselves touch, and even practicing that myself of receiving oxytocin from self touch,” Dawn wrote in the Washingtonian.

What's next: Dawn, who uses they/them pronouns, wrote that some of their clients are gradually coming back to in-person sessions — and the clients are often quite talkative about life.

Our thought bubble: Everyone needs to cuddle.

“We never spent a dollar on security in our restaurants prior to COVID."