Why A Marxist Social Policy Is Gaining Ground In Silicon Valley - Daily Business

Thierry Ehrmann / Flickr / Via flic.kr

This week, the startup incubator Y Combinator put up a job listing for a researcher to study basic income, a policy where the government would, as described by Y Combinator boss Sam Altman, give all citizens "enough money to live on with no strings attached."

There are other ways to describe the UBI ("universal basic income"), the cutest being "mincome" (short for minimum income), but the parameters include just that: all citizens get a base amount of money, unconditional on employment status or other factors.

"If you give people freedom — and you free them from the worry and stress of paying for food — some people will do nothing," Altman told BuzzFeed News in an interview. "And some people will create incredible new wealth."

It's an idea that has united Marxists and libertarians, making unlikely comrades of anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and billionaire investor Peter Thiel. Some proponents argue the policy would raise the standard of living, return a degree of labor market power to working people, and compensate unwaged work by women. Others believe direct cash payments are a more efficient way for the government to distribute money than the current welfare system.

To these pluses, Altman adds the promise of a "truer" meritocracy.

"Fifty years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people," Altman wrote. "I also think that it’s impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income."

The notion of paying people for nothing, which has been gaining popularity in recent months, last had traction at the level of government in the 1960s and 70s, when both conservatives and liberals voiced support for versions of the policy. Conservative economist Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon each favored variations of basic income, as well as Democratic politicians such as George McGovern.

'Pepper', humanoid robots, are displayed at a smartphone stall to illustrate their applications for corporate use.

Yoshikazu Tsuno / AFP / Getty Images

The idea in, its new tech context, is a kind of Soylent for economics, a synthetic miracle cure-all for poverty, manufactured by the same method and minds that tackled hunger by making a hipper, nerdier version of nutritional shakes.

After all, basic income is not such a far cry from unemployment benefits, the Earned Income Tax Credit, social security, or a souped-up version of Obama's recently proposed "wage insurance." But when techno-utopian VC firms get involved, a semi-radical social safety net study becomes a futuristic moonshot to sketch a blueprint for society once robots eliminate most kinds of work.

"I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale," Altman wrote.

BuzzFeed News spoke with to learn more about the proposal. Here's what he had to say.

Given that a number of studies have looked at basic income in the past, what's behind the decision to fund more research now?

I think those past studies are not super relevant to the world in 2016. It’s such a different time in the world. Technology in 2016 enables people to accomplish much more, with much less, than at any time in history.

Which technology in particular do you have in mind?

I don't think it's any one technology. I think it's where we are on the general exponential curve of technology. We are not so far away from a society where we have enough for everyone.

Also, in the world today, many people can create new innovations. However, with the fear of poverty that so many people face, it's very difficult to take the risks to do that. I don't think we can have equality of opportunity without something like a basic income.

Do you think favor for basic income has reached a level of saturation in Silicon Valley?

I think there are still a lot of people who think it’s a really horrible idea. And there are a lot of people who look at how quickly everything’s changing and see this as something on the scale of the industrial revolution or cultural revolution in terms of changing the potential of what people can accomplish when you take away the fear of not being able to pay rent or for food.

If you give people freedom — and you free them from the worry and stress of paying for food — some people will do nothing. And some people will create incredible new wealth. We see this all the time at Y Combinator with people who wouldn’t be able to start up without support from us.

People dress as robots for Halloween in West Hollywood.

David Mcnew / AFP / Getty Images

You mentioned you've been interested in basic income for a long time. Did you come to it via conservative thinkers like Milton Friedman, liberal theorists, or some combination?

I honestly can't point to the time I became interested in this. [It's been] sort of a gradual process over the past 10 years. As you point out, it comes from a lot of places — it's one of the few ideas that I've heard staunch support for from liberals, conservatives, libertarians, authoritarians, etc.

What do you think it is about basic income that appeals so much to some in the tech community, rather than proposals such like welfare, unemployment benefits, food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, or wage insurance?

I'm not entirely sure. Speaking for myself, it seems fair, it seems simple, and it seems like it could be good for society.

Mannequin robots perform different poses during a demonstration at the annual International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo.

Yoshikazu Tsuno / AFP / Getty Images

There seem to be good indicators that on-demand economy workers can't all count on making minimum wage. Might a basic income help underwrite gig economy startups, by raising the floor for contingent workers? Or could you see basic income undercutting the model?

I'm not sure. It would certainly give the workers much more power [and] flexibility.

One of the questions you mention trying to answer is, "Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things?” To push against that — would it be so bad if people do both — if a basic income enables more play? A recent article on basic income cites theorist Kathi Weeks on the question:

"Weeks argues that it is only politically and socially acceptable to ask for time for two things: work and the family. Asking for anything else is considered extravagant, unrealistic, and worse — lazy. Yet life is not contained in these two spheres, and it neglects the wholeness of existence to try to shuttle it away into these two areas."

Of course it'd be okay. I personally love playing video games. On a more serious note, I don't think hard work for its own sake is valuable (only if it actually creates new value). I think we are heading towards a world where we don't need everyone to work. If some people are happy and fulfilled playing video games, more power to them.

(Edited and condensed for clarity and length.)

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Are you as good as you’re gonna get? Dan Miller

Are you as good as you’re gonna get? Pat Flynn on Will it Fly? Is the primary purpose of a business to make money? How can you identify your “unfair advantage?” 10 lbs in 48 Days Will people give me money to fund my passion? Did starting a business improve all areas of your life – or just your career? “If you’re as good as you’re gonna get, then your life is as good as it’s gonna be.”  Butch Bellah ...

The post Are you as good as you’re gonna get? appeared first on Official Site Dan Miller.

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Lyft Class Action Settlement Fails To Reclassify Drivers As Employees - Daily Business

John Sciulli / Getty Images for Lyft

Drivers suing Lyft as part of a class action lawsuit in California settled their complaint outside of court on Tuesday.

The $12.25 million settlement does not reclassify the more than 100,000 Lyft drivers in the class as employees, which the attorney in the case, Shannon Liss-Riordan, said she had "hoped for" in her statement. The drivers will continue to be classified as independent contractors, without access to the same benefits and protections of Lyft employees.

In an email to BuzzFeed News, Liss-Riordan calculated that drivers who drove more than 30 hours a week in half of the weeks they spent working on Lyft "should get on average more than about $1,000" each. She said the size of this settlement is around 20% of what she would have expected Lyft drivers to be awarded had she won the case.

Boston-based attorney Liss-Riordan has become well-known for her crusade to reclassify contract workers in the on-demand economy as employees. In a statement, she called the settlement a "good resolution," and said, because of an arbitration clause in the Lyft drivers' contracts, it was unlikely her firm would have won the case.

"It would have been very difficult if not impossible to achieve global changes at Lyft other than through a settlement agreement," she said.

In a separate statement, Lyft's general counsel Kristin Sverchek said the company is "pleased," and committed to building a social safety net for its drivers.

Lyft drivers will see some benefits from the settlement going forward. These changes include an update to the company's Terms of Service that will, in theory, make it harder for drivers to get kicked off the platform.

"Lyft will only be able to deactivate drivers for one of a list of enumerated reasons, and drivers who are at risk of deactivation will be given notice of this risk and opportunity to cure the shortcoming before deactivation," the statement reads. Drivers who feel they have been wrongfully terminated or unfairly compensated will be able to take those claims to a "neutral arbitrator" — a process that Lyft will have to pay for.

This outcome does not impact the status of the class action suit led by Liss-Riordan against Uber, which is still slated to be tried on June 20 of this year. Liss-Riordan explained that, for a variety of reasons including number of drivers and age of the company, a payout to drivers in the case against Uber could be significantly larger if her firm goes on to win at trial.

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EU Commissioner Confirms She Will Investigate Google Tax Deal If Asked - Daily Business

It is believed both Labour and the SNP have made formal complaints about the company’s tax settlement.

Francois Lenoir / Reuters

The EU's competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, has said she would be prepared to look at Google's tax settlement with Britain, should she receive a formal complaint. The SNP's economy spokesman, Stewart Hosie, says he has sent her a letter calling for an investigation and it is understood Labour will too.

Last week Google agreed to pay £130 million in underpaid tax dating back to 2005.

Vestager told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "If we find that there is something to be concerned about if someone writes to us and says, 'Well, this is maybe not as it should be,' then we will take a look."

John McDonnell, Labour's shadow chancellor, dismissed the agreement between Google and the government as a "sweetheart deal". Labour claims the internet giant was actually paying an effective rate of 3%.

Three days ago Treasury minister David Gauke denied Labour's allegation but refused to say what tax rate Google had agreed to pay the government, due to "taxpayer confidentiality".

Yesterday in parliament, David Cameron was forced to defend the arrangement after being challenged by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. The prime minister said the money "should have been collected under a Labour government".

Google has long been criticised for its tax structures: Margaret Hodge, a Labour MP and former chair of the public accounts committee – which will grill Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and Google in February – has called them "devious, calculated and, in my view, unethical".

Peter Power / Reuters

The company's European headquarters are based in Ireland, which has a lower corporation tax rate than the UK, and it has used company structures in Bermuda, which has a corporation tax rate of zero, to shelter its profits.

These arrangements are legal. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has said the UK's corporate tax system is at fault for allowing internet companies to pay less tax than high street chains.

At the time the deal was struck, Matt Brittin, head of Google Europe, told the BBC: "The rules are changing internationally and the UK government is taking the lead in applying those rules so we'll be changing what we are doing here. We want to ensure that we pay the right amount of tax."

A spokesperson for HMRC described the deal as a "substantial result". The chancellor, George Osborne, was similarly upbeat.

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Amazon Stock Crashes After Company Reports Record Profit - Daily Business

Yes, profit.

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Amazon

Amazon stock had soared in the lead-up to what many expected would be a positive earnings report. It was up up almost 9% on Thursday, and its share price more than doubled in the past year.

But investors sold off the stock in after-hours trading following the earnings report, and the stock was down almost 13%. Amazon reported a $482 million profit for the quarter, which was more than double the $214 million profit in the same period in the previous year, but well below what analysts expected. It was also the largest quarterly profit Amazon has ever reported.

For the quarter covering the last three months of 2015, it had $35.7 billion worth of sales, up 22% from $29.3 billion a year ago but slightly below what analysts had expected.

One bright spot was Amazon web services, the company's cloud computing business. It reported $2.4 billion in revenue, just above what analysts expected, and $687 million in operating profit — a huge number given that all of Amazon made about $1.1 billion in operating profit for the quarter.

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A New Frontier In Low-Carb Snacking: Meat Snacks, Like Lunchables For Adults - Daily Business

Venessa Wong / BuzzFeed News

There's a new player in the high-protein snacking game long ruled by yogurt, jerky and nuts: Meat processor Tyson is currently rolling out a new brand called Hillshire Snacking that involves single-serve packs of grilled chicken bites and "salame"-and-cheese plates.

Some will likely find the idea of tossing a box of pre-grilled chicken into your purse off-putting, but Tyson — which acquired Hillshire Brands in 2014 in a move to add more profitable consumer brands — thinks we are just at the start of a meat-snacking revolution.

There are a number of reasons why the company is launching a line of refrigerated, meat-based snacks. First, young consumers are leaning towards "fresh" foods over shelf-stable ones. According to market researcher NPD, "From 2003 to 2013, consumption of fresh foods — fruits, vegetables, meat, poultry, fish, and eggs — grew by 20 percent to over 100 billion eatings." Second, people are really into protein, a trend that fueled the Greek yogurt boom. Third, as always, they value convenience — meat and cheese aren't new, but now you don't even have to bother putting it in a ziplock bag.

"From the beginning, we knew this was a big idea," said Jeff Caswell, vice president and general manager of Hillshire Snacking. "Strategically we knew that introducing a protein snack that had unique flavors, targeting that upbeat food explorer was going to be successful."

It's a category that is growing in grocery stores. Sales of "refrigerated meat, cheese, cracker, dessert" products rose by nearly 13.5% in 2015 to $1.8 billion, according to data from Chicago-based market researcher IRI. The largest producers now are Kraft, which makes Lunchables and Oscar Mayer P3 (launched in 2014), Armour, and Hormel.

Caswell, for his part, rebuffs the description of Hillshire Snacking as an adult Lunchable: "This is really designed and being consumed by people that were that were not in the combos category before."

Venessa Wong / BuzzFeed News

Hillshire Snacking has been long in the making. Tyson started testing the brand in 2014 in 500 stores, primarily in Denver, Cincinnati and 250 Target stores. The meat and cheese plates cost $2.99 and the chicken bites $2.49. In 2015, the young brand's annual sales reached about $7.3 million, according to IRI.

What did Hillshire learn from this long test? Mainly, they decided to arrange the meats and cheeses like shingles instead of in a single stack. "People were more interested in seeing the product and the slices in the pack," Caswell said, so Hillshire refined the "salame" display.

Hillshire Snacking began rolling out nationwide in grocery stores this month.

Venessa Wong / BuzzFeed News

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Internet, But Over The Air: How A Startup Plans To Take On The Cable Companies - Daily Business

Starry

Internet.

But through the air.

Chet Kanojia is not the first person to have this idea, but his new startup, Starry, promises to revolutionize how the internet gets delivered to people's homes — instead of using cables, it plans to use the air. If it can pull it off, Starry will bring some much-needed competition to the broadband market, where cable companies often have a local monopoly. But that's a giant "if."

Kanojia's last company, Aereo, also had grand visions of disrupting the airwaves, through tiny antennas that sucked up free-to-air TV signals and streamed them to viewers over the internet. It looked promising, until the Supreme Court ruled it was violating copyright laws, in a decision that effectively killed the company.

The secret sauce this time around is the use of high-frequency radio spectrum, which has been used for point-to-point communications in the military and in scientific research, but is still a fairly novel proposition for use by an internet service provider.

Using this spectrum means you can transmit huge amounts of data quickly, but it comes with drawbacks — in particular, it only works over short distances. To get around this, Starry requires a series of devices: Rooftop antennae every couple of kilometers, connecting to receivers on household windows that broadcast into the home.

Starry claims this setup can provide internet at faster speeds, with no data caps and at a lower cost than cable companies. The big savings come, Kanojia said, from the much lower cost of building out the infrastructure for the service. No digging trenches along roads and sidewalks, no mile after mile of cable and the maintenance crews that come with it.

"It's frankly amazing technology," Kanojia said. He estimated that the per-home cost of building out the service would be $25, not the $2,500 he said traditional fixed-wire broadband costs. But rolling out those huge networks of rooftop devices won't be easy.

And the details are still limited: Starry and its representatives declined to comment on where the service would launch outside of Boston (where it will have a trial this summer), how much it would cost, how much money the company had raised, or its valuation.

“Plug it in, set it up, and in a few minutes like magic, you have faster than broadband internet, through the air,” a slick promotional video said.

The company has about 50 employees, including several senior executives from Aereo. It has big name investors like Tiger Global, the private equity firm KKR, and Aereo backer IAC. While Kanojia's last venture flamed out after its defeat at the Supreme Court, he earned many fans in the tech industry for his hard-charging approach to shaking up an old, cushy set of incumbents.

And this time, he doesn't expect lawsuits to be his biggest headache — instead, the challenge will simply be delivering on the promise of a "magical" alternative to rolling out a cable network. "I don't see a legal problem," Kanojia told reporters. "It's a huge execution problem."

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Circuit City Is Rising From The Dead To Target "Millennials" - Daily Business

Hmm.

Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty Images

Circuit City, the electronics retailer that filed for bankruptcy in 2008, is coming back from the dead, with investors planing to open new stores less than a decade after shuttering more than 700 of them.

The chain is being resurrected by Ronny Shmoel and Albert Liniado, a pair of "New York area retail vets," according to the trade magazine Twice, which spoke to the pair. Shmoel and Liniado did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The pair bought its brand, domain name and trademarks last year and plan to open stores "targeted directly at millennials," Twice reported. There are plans to open 50 to 100 corporate-owned Circuit City stores by the end of next year, Twice reported, with a first location opening in June.

The main question is: why?

Circuit City closed its last store in 2009, and while it briefly existed online as part of TigerDirect, that ceased in 2012. Its death, fueled by the rise of Best Buy and Walmart, has been well chronicled in lots of news stories, cautionary business school case studies and even a book by its former CEO.

While the new Circuit City stores will be smaller and better-located than those of yore, the idea comes less than a year after RadioShack filed for bankruptcy — and that retailer is still operating more than 1,000 similarly-sized stores. Consumers can also buy the same goods Circuit City wants to sell at Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon and more.

The new Circuit City locations will sell their own brands of cables and power banks, as well as smartphones, tablets, laptops, headphones and so on, with the goal of becoming a trusted destination for vendor-authorized consumer electronics.

Ultimately, the two men bringing Circuit City back seem to believe that the name and logo will compel consumers.

The resurrection plan will be driven by Circuit City's "tremendous traction and brand awareness," Ronny Shmoel, one of the two men leading the launch, told Twice.

LINK: End Of An Era: RadioShack Files For Bankruptcy

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Twisted And Broken: "The Big Short" Director On The Worst Of Wall Street - Daily Business

Paramount

Verfremdungseffekt is the German word for Sex Panther.

OK, that's not true at all. Sex Panther in German is Sex Panther. Verfremdungseffekt means "alienation effiect" or "estrangement effect" in German, and it might provide the secret to how Adam McKay, the director of Anchorman and Talladega Nights, made The Big Short, an Oscar-nominated hit about credit default swaps that's so far grossed over $87 million.

Don't worry, it makes as least as much sense as the financial crisis.

Adam McKay spoke to BuzzFeed News from Washington, D.C. where he was in town to attend a (storm-delayed) screening and discussion of the movie with a former Fed official, a fund manager, and financial journalists; he was attending a dinner hosted by Planet Money founder Adam Davidson, and trying to see populist Democratic senators Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren.

The D.C. milieu suits McKay's adaptation of Michael Lewis's financial crisis chronicle. The movie is very Hollywood (starring Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, and Steve Carrell); it's wonky (a major plot point in the film is banks dragging their feet in correctly pricing complex financial instruments); and it's explicitly meant to stir up outrage at the nexus of Washington and Wall Street.

"Our goal was more than to effect direct change, which would be a little crazy, but to get the conversation going again and inform people," McCay says.

He's not exactly an unbiased observer. He relishes criticism of the movie from conservative outlets like Forbes, the Wall Street Journal's opinion pages, and the New York Post, which called his film "a $28 million campaign ad for Bernie Sanders." The Post "flat-out hates the movie, which I love," he says.

Paramount

McKay's political views are not hard to figure out. While much of Hollywood has gone all-in for Hillary Clinton — the entertainment industry and the financial industry are the third and fourth biggest donors to Clinton's campaign; Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks chief Jeffrey Katzenberg have both given the Hillary Clinton Super PAC Priorities USA Action $1 million — McKay donated $2,700 to Bernie Sanders in May, although he's shied away from a formal connection or endorsement of the campaign.

"I wanted the movie to speak for itself, I didn’t want to be known as the Sanders guy who made a movie," he says. "I didn’t want to think of it as a right wing / left wing issue, I wanted to let the movie have an impact."

But McKay did say that Sanders' anti-Wall Street rhetoric and his support for breaking up large financial institutions (as opposed to Hillary Clinton's focus on regulating the dangerous activities of a range of financial institutions) does in fact jive very well with The Big Short.

"My focus is on the banks capturing government, that’s really the thing and it’s the thing we can do the most about," McKay says. Or as the Vermont senator puts it, "Congress does not regulate Wall Street; Wall Street regulates Congress."

Sanders is not shy about associating himself with the movie — a video tweeted by the campaign shows a woman asking him if he had seen it. "Damn right I have" Sanders replies, saying it was an "excellent film."

A filmmaker to the left of the Clintonite wing of the Democratic party is nothing new in Hollywood, and nor are movies that criticize the financial industry. What McKay did in The Big Short was deliberately jump into the weeds of the more arcane aspects of the financial crisis using the agents of simplification and superficiality — the entertainment industry — that he thinks blinded America to the internal rot of the 2000s.

"Why did our culture miss this, the numbers were so obvious that there was a problem, how did our culture miss this?" McKay asks.

Verfremdungseffekt!

Paramount

To help explain, he uses what he calls "the 24 hour entertainment culture" both to build out the mid 2000s period he covers and to directly explain what happened. (This criticism of the inanity of the entertainment-news complex is a major theme of, yes, Anchorman, McKay told New York magazine.)

So we have Margot Robbie in a bubble bath giving an explainer on the rise of mortgage-backed securities, and Selena Gomez and University of Chicago professor Richard Thaler using side-bets on blackjack to describe the synthetic collateralized debt obligations that allowed investors and banks to make near-infinite bets on the direction of housing prices.

There are also little bits of the culture of the pre-crisis era: a Ludacris video, a Britney Spears interview, South Park, the cult-y rock band The Polyphonic Spree. "I was lucky that the explosions with those products happened to coincide with that point of the popular culture," McKay says.

"What were we paying attention to, what were the stories, what were the vibes of this country?" McKay muses, and says what he's doing is "kinda like John Dos Passos," whose 1930s U.S.A. trilogy combined narrative with biographical sketches, newspaper headlines, advertisements, and lyrics from popular songs to create an all-encompassing portrait of the United States in the early 20th century.

There's also something distinctively European about McKay's approach. In his willingness to use untraditional tools in a politically-minded film, McKay puts himself into a long line of artists well to the left of Bernie Sanders, like the German playwright Bertolt Brecht and the French director Jean-Luc Godard. The two Marxists thought that narrative disruption, breaking the fourth wall (at one point in The Big Short, Ryan Gosling's investment banker turns to the camera and explains that the current scene never really happened), and direct insertion of cultural artifacts could help provoke critical thought from the audience more than traditional narrative methods.

In Godard's A Married Woman, for example, discussions of the Holocaust and trials of Nazi officials give way to a montage of print underwear ads and characters mouthing advertising copy. "Certain forms of advertising are going so far as to become people's own thoughts," Godard said.

"I thought it was important for the movie to be straight ahead with the audience that everything is being spun twisted as advertising," McKay said about The Big Short.

The Big Short's quick cuts, montages, and stock footage disorient the viewer, evoking the twisted markets where investors betting that housing prices would collapse enabled banks to sell more products to investors who wanted to bet against a collapse of the housing market.

This all magnified the eventual impact of the crash, which was only softened by hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars that helped, in one egregious instance, a giant insurance company pay out its obligations to big banks. The stars of the film, who made righteous bets against Wall Street and the housing market, end with a hollow victory: they win the bets, but watch in the process as the rot at the heart of the financial system, and the country, is exposed.

"The stage began to tell a story. The narrator was no longer missing, along with the fourth wall," McKay explained. "The background adopted an attitude to the events on the stage — by big screens recalling other simultaneous events elsewhere, by projecting documents which confirmed or contradicted what the characters said, by figures and sentences to support mimed transactions whose sense was unclear."

OK, McKay didn't really say that. It was the German playwright and "estrangement effect" theorist Brecht in "Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction."

Here's what McKay really said: "They never imagined that things were so twisted and broken that it would end up that their investments were paid back by a bailout."

He's talking about the protagonists of The Big Short, who worry about whether the banks that took their bets against the housing market would stay in business long enough to pay out the winnings. Anchorman's dim weather guy Brick Tamland put it best: "There were horses, and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident.”

"We’ve had some effect," McKay says.

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There's Now A Concert Venue Named After Express - Daily Business

Express / Via express.com

There is now a concert venue named for mall chain Express in its hometown of Columbus, Ohio.

The LC Pavilion, which hosts acts like Ellie Goulding, Vance Joy and The 1975, will be renamed to Express Live!, the retailer said today. It was previously named for an apartment builder in the area.

While it's not unusual for a retailer to buy the naming rights to a venue — i.e. Levi's Stadium, Target Field — Express is substantially smaller than those companies, with just over $2 billion in annual sales. (Levi's has annual sales of $4.8 billion, while Target's is $73 billion.) It's also a throwback for those who best remember Express from high school, when it somehow occupied a place in suburban minds as a destination for both professional-looking clothes and club-wear.

PromoWest Productions / Via Facebook: promowestlive

"Music plays an integral role in the identity and social interactions of EXPRESS shoppers, who follow an influx of artists on social media," the retailer said in a statement without specifying how much it paid for the rights. "Attending a performance at the newly named EXPRESS LIVE! venue offers the ultimate connection and experience for a true fan."

Presumably, it will also get big music acts and concertgoers to tweet, 'gram and Facebook post that they're at "Express Live!", though whether they will use upper-case letters and an exclamation mark remains to be seen.

Express, which has also partnered with Kate Upton and basketball player Stephen Curry in the past year, has been doing relatively well in a tough retail environment, especially as it ramps up its outlet business. It's posted increases in its same-store sales for the past three quarters and expects another for the fourth quarter, and saw its stock rise 18% last year.

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Meet The Guy Who Solved Uber's Insurance Problem - Daily Business

William Alden / Via BuzzFeed News

Two years ago, Uber faced a problem that could have been financially ruinous. Sure, the ride-hailing company has fought with regulators and incumbents over virtually everything — from the way it classifies drivers to the amount it charges for rides — but this problem was particularly big: Insurance companies didn't want to cover its drivers.

Waging this fight would require mighty powers of persuasion and even the ability to help create a new type of auto insurance. To do it, Uber hired a young executive with exactly zero experience in the insurance business.

Gus Fuldner, Uber's 33-year-old head of insurance, doesn't look or act like the archetype of the Silicon Valley disruptor. He's no Travis Kalanick, Uber's pugnacious, outspoken CEO. In square-toed shoes, with a stooped posture, and blond hair parted down the middle, Fuldner comes off more like a junior economics professor. His idea of fun is obsessing over Bitcoin, credit card networks, or the ownership structure of the Green Bay Packers — all topics he has discussed in his more than 200 answers on the question-and-answer site Quora.

Fuldner's style was on display in early 2015, when in little-noticed testimony before a government commission in South Carolina, he challenged a longtime insurance lawyer on a technical point. The totality of Fuldner's insurance experience at that time was one year at a startup that many insurers viewed with suspicion. The lawyer, Thom Salane, several decades Fuldner's senior, noted that he had been representing insurance companies for 35 years.

With all the restraint of a graduate student who has just devoured every book on a particular topic, Fuldner said the lawyer didn't know what he was talking about.

"Mr. Salane’s reference to an 'aggregate limit' suggests he is confusing an auto liability policy with a general liability policy, which covers non-auto risks such as slips and falls in an office," Fuldner said. "General liability insurance generally contains an aggregate limit, but auto insurance does not."

Setting aside the particulars of this argument — Salane, in an email to BuzzFeed News, said Fuldner's comment was "technically correct but essentially missed the point" — the exchange showed a methodical strategy that Fuldner would deploy countless times in 2014 and early 2015, in a quest to legitimize the weird and potentially risky new business of letting everyday people charge strangers for rides in their cars. His lobbying efforts led major insurance companies to drop their animosity toward Uber and, in many cases, offer new insurance options that catered to Uber drivers. Statehouses around the country have since enshrined Uber's preferred insurance model in laws defining the rules for the nascent on-demand car industry.

"Had Gus not singlehandedly gone around the country, Uber would potentially be out of business. I mean, the regulatory landscape would be vastly different," said Andrew Boron, the former director of the Illinois Department of Insurance. "Gus engaged. He was all over the place, talking to everybody."

Auto insurance may not be the flashiest issue Uber has ever encountered, but it posed a major challenge for the company and its rivals. The non-professional, part-time drivers powering its popular UberX service in most cities — not quite taxi or limo drivers, and not quite personal-use drivers, either — defied categorization by insurers. Feeling that drivers were abusing their personal insurance policies by carrying fares, some insurance companies would simply cancel those policies. Many in the insurance world, like Salane, argued that Uber or its drivers should buy taxi-like commercial insurance — policies that would be prohibitively expensive given UberX's low rates.

The problem centered on a curious window of time known as "period 1." Drivers enter period 1 when they turn on the Uber app, searching for fares, and they leave it when the app connects them with a passenger — at which point Uber's own insurance policy kicks in. What made period 1 so radioactive was that it was a type of commercial activity that personal auto insurers hadn't previously considered (there's no "period 1" when you hail a taxi or call a limo). Personal insurance contracts expressly excluded coverage if drivers were to "carry persons or property" for money, but the contracts had no clauses excluding period 1.

Uber, for its part, was reluctant to extend its own insurance policy to cover period 1, even though drivers were ostensibly working for Uber during that time. The company says it feared that drivers might abuse the coverage by keeping the app on without any intention of picking anyone up, or by turning the app on after getting into an accident.

Even as this dispute simmered, Uber continued to expand its UberX service, alarming insurance companies, which take a conservative approach to new risks. To an insurer, a taxi, which is driven around the clock, is a much bigger risk than a personal car, which might be driven a couple hours a day. An UberX car looked terrifyingly like a taxi-level risk, paying personal-level insurance premiums.

"Our policies were never designed to handle ridesharing activity because the industry didn't exist," said Mariel Devesa, the head of innovation at Farmers Insurance. "Whenever you have a new technology and a new industry that comes up, the first response is to be protective."

Into this mess came Fuldner, a Stanford MBA who had studied economics and computer science at Yale. Though he had never worked in insurance, he had a tolerance for fine print and a knack for deciphering structured language. Insurance regulations are a patchwork, with different laws in different states, and insurance contracts are full of technical jargon. Fuldner started reading.

"He has this tremendous ability to grab a 35-page document, consume it very, very quickly, and then retain the majority of the knowledge out of it," said Bill Gurley, an Uber board member and a partner at the venture capital firm Benchmark, which was an early investor in Uber. "The ability to synthesize vast amounts of information — in this case, 50 states and all the data that you need — that's something that's very hard for one human to be able to do. There's too many variables, too many permutations, too many things to hold in your brain at one point in time. I've never met anyone on that dimension that's stronger than Gus, in my life."

Via quora.com

Fuldner had been hired by Benchmark in 2011, out of Stanford's business school, and was tasked with searching for investments in consumer internet and financial technology companies. His specialty was payments, having worked on financial services projects at McKinsey & Company after college. As a teenager in Milwaukee, Fuldner started a one-man computer consulting business, and he was part of a team that won the national Fed Challenge high school economics contest (the prize included a scholarship and a Federal Reserve messenger bag). At Yale, he was among the first employees of Higher One, an education finance startup that is now traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Fuldner's initial work for Uber, while still at Benchmark, was to help the company with payments in France, he says. He started spending more time at the Benchmark portfolio company, until being hired in late 2013 to run insurance.

"It was, in Travis's mind, 'Oh, insurance is financial services,'" Fuldner told BuzzFeed News, referring to the Uber CEO. "In reality, there's not a huge connection between the two. It's not really the same companies or the same regulators. But I got the connection."

"One of the advantages of playing in the insurance space is that the product is the contract," Fuldner continued. "An insurance company sells a contract, and everything about that product should be written in that contract."

While Uber has become infamous for bending local rules, Fuldner became a living, breathing rulebook, able to cite obscure insurance provisions and explain how they worked. In emotionally charged debates, even some of Fuldner's opponents appreciated his measured approach.

"Insurance is so complicated that, within 30 seconds, if you're talking to an elected official, their eyes glaze over," said Boron, the former Illinois insurance regulator, who was subjected to Fuldner's persuasive powers. "He was able to, in a clear, concise, interesting way, explain the issue."

Fuldner and his team crisscrossed the country on a campaign to win over lawmakers and insurers. They traveled so much that Fuldner memorized airline flight patterns and booking rules, allowing him to string together flights in unexpected ways to make last-minute meetings. By observing flight attendants, he even figured out how to fix United Airlines' in-flight wifi — making him the techie equivalent of the doctor on board who rings his call button to help a passenger.

"Gus studied what they would do to fix it," said Curtis Scott, the senior insurance lawyer at Uber, who traveled with Fuldner last year as United rolled out a new wifi system that was prone to breakdowns. "On flights where the wifi was broken, he would ask the flight attendant to come over, and then nicely explain a process that they could do to get the wifi to work." (The trick, essentially, was to shut the system down and turn it on again.)

Via dms.psc.sc.gov

Colorado was the first state to pass a law to regulate Uber and its rivals; today, 29 states, including California, Illinois, and Texas, as well as the District of Columbia, have passed similar legislation. Among insurance companies, 11 now offer some form of insurance for UberX drivers; in the beginning of 2015, none did. The detente was capped by a remarkable press release in March 2015, from Uber and a collection of insurance companies, which had teamed up to persuade politicians to turn their compromise into law.

The solution they came up with is a little convoluted and, perhaps unsurprisingly, seems to benefit Uber and the insurance companies while requiring drivers to pay up for full coverage.

Under the compromise, period 1 — that tricky stretch when drivers have the app on, searching for fares — officially became a thing in the insurance world. Uber agreed to let auto insurers exclude coverage for personal-use drivers during period 1; a number of insurance companies actually rewrote their contracts to reflect this. Excluding period 1 from normal insurance policies had the somewhat counterintuitive effect of allowing UberX drivers to keep using those policies.

But it also meant drivers' policies wouldn't cover them during that period. Uber, during period 1, provides drivers with liability coverage with relatively low limits, and it doesn't provide any protection for the driver's car. (The insurance that kicks in when drivers accept a fare, which Uber buys from the specialty insurer James River, is much richer, with up to $1 million in liability coverage.)

This is where the new insurance products come in. In California and other states, for example, Farmers Insurance now sells drivers a "ridesharing" add-on to extend their normal insurance policies into period 1. Such options cost extra — the Farmers add-on in California charges premiums that are 8% higher than normal — creating an additional burden for drivers.

Harry Campbell, the creator of the Rideshare Guy blog and podcast, said he felt it wasn't fair that Uber didn't provide collision coverage to protect a driver's car during period 1.

"For a company like Uber, I think in certain situations they should be going above and beyond what's legally required," he said.

Fuldner, for his part, is now helping Uber expand overseas, with a particular focus on China, a huge but troublesome market. He spent three years in Hong Kong while at McKinsey and can speak limited Mandarin, he said. Last year, he negotiated a deal with China Taiping, a Chinese state-owned insurance company, to provide insurance for Uber passengers there.

Uber's challenges in China are much bigger than insurance: Its business is threatened by a powerful Chinese rival and, according to media reports, has recorded sizable losses. Fuldner, too, faces a steep learning curve in China, though he doesn't seem to be bothered by that reality. For international work, he said, he tends to ask local law firms or insurance brokers for help understanding the rules.

Besides, this wouldn't be the first time he's learned his job on the fly. Kate Sampson, the former head of insurance at Lyft, Uber's only real American rival, said Fuldner's lack of insurance experience in this country turned out to be an asset.

"I wouldn't call Gus naive, but I would say not having that insurance background really helped," said Sampson, who is now the head of the San Francisco office of Marsh, an insurance broker. "Not coming from insurance, he has no preconceived notions about what an insurance company might do or not do."

William Alden / Via BuzzFeed News

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"Natural" Is A Totally Meaningless Label On Foods - Daily Business

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Many shoppers are willing to pay more for "all natural foods." And, according to a new report by Consumer Reports, they're all suckers.

Unlike such claims as "organic," there's no formal definition of "natural," according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which controls how foods are labeled. Among the roughly 1,000 shoppers recently surveyed by Consumer Reports, there was no common understanding of what "natural" means to them.

Because the term is misleading, “Ideally, we’d like to see federal regulators ban the natural label," Urvashi Rangan, director of the Consumer Reports Food Safety & Sustainability Center, said in the March issue of Consumer Reports. "But if they don’t get rid of it, then they must give it real meaning.”

Food marketers keep a close eye on what consumers value in their diets, and what they'll pay extra for. "Wellness claims are driving the biggest growth on a long- and short-term basis," said Genevieve Aronson, a spokeswoman at research firm Nielsen, in an email. This focus recently has led a number of fast food chains like Panera and even Pizza Hut, as well as packaged food manufacturers like General Mills to commit to removing artificial ingredients from their products.

More than 60% of consumers think that foods labeled "natural" were made with no pesticides, artificial ingredients, artificial chemicals, or genetically modified ingredients, according to Consumer Reports' survey.

Consumer Reports

Yet the FDA has not established a formal definition of "natural." What it has instead is "a longstanding policy concerning the use of “natural” in human food labeling." In other words, while there is no FDA definition of "natural" that has the force and effect of law, the agency can use its interpretation to determine whether a specific use of the term on a product is false or misleading.

The FDA's interpretation, however, is not comprehensive and does not account for many concerns consumers have today. The agency states on its website:

"The FDA has considered the term “natural” to mean that nothing artificial or synthetic (including all color additives regardless of source) has been included in, or has been added to, a food that would not normally be expected to be in that food. However, this policy was not intended to address food production methods, such as the use of pesticides, nor did it explicitly address food processing or manufacturing methods, such as thermal technologies, pasteurization, or irradiation. The FDA also did not consider whether the term 'natural' should describe any nutritional or other health benefit."

The agency is asking the public to comment on the use of the term "natural" on food labels through May 10. It will help the FDA determine if and how consumers should understand this term.

What Is An Artificial Ingredient, Anyway?

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The 5 Biggest Food Trends For 2016, According To Whole Foods

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Apple Warns Revenues Could Decline, For First Time In More Than A Decade - Daily Business

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Apple reported an $18 billion profit for the final three months of 2015, beating analysts expectations, but warned its revenues could decline in the coming quarter — a drop that would be the first such quarterly year-on-year decline in 13 years.

The company's shares have fallen 11.5% in the last year going into Tuesday's earnings report, with several of Apple's suppliers warning of soft demand for new iPhones. Apple's stock has fallen further than the tech-heavy Nasdaq, which is down 4% in the same period, and the S&P 500, which has fallen 7%.

Apple’s results were hammered by a more expensive dollar — which makes their sales overseas less valuable — and economic turmoil, especially in large emerging markets like Brazil and Russia. Apple chief executive Tim Cook said that had currency values stayed the same over the year, Apple's revenue would be about $5 billion higher than it actually was. Facebook had $4.5 billion in revenue its most recent quarter.

“Our results are particularly impressive given the challenging global macroeconomic environment. We're seeing extreme conditions unlike anything we have experienced before just about everywhere we look.,” Cook said in a call with analysts. “$100 of Apple's non-US dollar revenue in Q4 of 2014 translated to only $85 last quarter due to the weakening currencies.”

Apple's cash hoard continued to growth: the company has $216 billion in cash and securities, $200 billion of which is held overseas.

iPhone sales peak each year in the holiday season, and they were flat in the last quarter of 2015 relative to the same period a year prior. For the coming quarter, Apple projected revenues between $50 billion and $53 billion, down from the $58 billion it made in the first three months of 2015. If Apple's revenue falls into that range, it would be its first annual revenue decline in the second quarter since 2003, almost four years before Steve Jobs presented the iPhone.

Apple sold 74.8 million iPhones, just below what analysts expected but slightly ahead of the 74.5 million iPhones Apple sold in the last three months of 2014, in what was one of the most successful quarters in corporate history.

Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images

Via Apple/BuzzFeed

Apple sold 16.1 million iPads, short of analysts' expectations of 17.3 million and well short of the 21.4 million the company sold in the same period last year.

Stephen Lam / Getty Images

Apple/BuzzFeed

Apple's total sales in Greater China, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, were $18.4 billion, up from $16.1 billion a year ago. Greater China is Apple's second highest revenue region, ahead of Europe, which provided $17.9 billion in revenue.

Chinafotopress / Getty Images

The “other products” segment, which includes the Apple Watch and Apple TV, had revenues of $4.4 billion. The watch launched in the third quarter of Apple’s fiscal 2015, when the “other products” segment had $2.6 billion in revenue.

Stephen Lam / Getty Images

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Is Coach Cool Again? - Daily Business

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Coach has been working hard to rehabilitate its image for the past few years, after realizing it was too closely associated with outlet discounts and uninspired bags that looked like they were dipped in pools of the letter C.

Those efforts just might be paying off.

Coach said today that in the three months ended Dec. 26, about 35% of its handbag sales were in the "above $400" price range, compared with 30% last year, suggesting consumers are viewing the brand more favorably. It also sold less logo product than in the past, with such items making up less than 5% of retail sales in North America, and less than 30% in its ubiquitous outlets.

While comparable sales in the region still declined, it was less than the past couple of years, and Coach's profit beat analysts' expectations. The company remains far less profitable than it once was: in its most recent annual results it reported $531 million in adjusted net income, down 50% from the $1.1 billion reported in 2013.

"The Coach brand is very much on its way to evolving from an accessible luxury handbag and accessories brand to one of the most relevant modern luxury brands in fashion," CEO Victor Luis said on an earnings call today. The results reflect "the most significant progress to-date on our transformation plan," he said.

Coach, founded in 1941, has been criticized in recent years for diluting its full-price business with outlet stores, accelerating its loss of market share to newer brands like Michael Kors and Kate Spade. As of June, Coach had 258 retail stores in North America compared with 204 outlets, the latter of which mostly sell cheaper, made-for-outlet goods. A decade earlier, it had 193 full-price stores and 82 outlets.

Coach / Via SEC Filings

Luis has contended this isn't a problem for consumers, even as those numbers continue to move closer together, noting that there's only a 10% overlap between the two. If he's right, that's big for the brand, which relies on the booming and profitable outlet channel — Goldman Sachs analysts estimated in a Jan. 21 note that outlets make up more than 90% of Coach's North American operating profit.

"Consumers don't think in terms of number of doors," he said at a conference last summer. "What consumers think of is promotional impressions and that's what we are really looking to manage."

Luis has referred to that reduction in "negative impressions" as key part of Coach's so-called transformation. To that end, Coach went from sending a whopping 1.3 billion emails tied to online outlet store flash sales in the year ended June 28, 2014, to less than 300 million as of last year. It has also pulled back on the frequency of loyalty sales at its regular stores, and eliminated rampant Coach promotional events at North American department stores.

The Coach of yesteryear.

Coach / Via ebay.com

As it works to give off a higher-end vibe, the company has also started referring to itself as "a leading New York design house of modern luxury accessories." As recently as 2013, it was calling itself "a leading marketer of modern classic American accessories."

On Tuesday, Coach outlined the "craftsmanship bars" it's installing in some major stores, staffed by "dedicated leather services specialists," who will offer services like monogramming and leather cleaning. It introduced a new store uniform in October so staff can look and feel "more stylish and elevated."

A big part of the company's pitch is its long history, especially as it tries to win fans among 20- and 30-somethings. (Executives noted in 2014 that the so-called millennial generation values "authenticity.") It recently launched a "Heritage" campaign and is selling a "Coach Vintage" collection comprised of its four "most iconic" bags throughout its history.

LINK: How Coach Became Coach Class

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The Uncertain Future of the Walmart Worker - Daily Business

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Worker groups dedicated to improving pay and conditions at Walmart have had a dramatic beginning to 2016, with a rapid succession of news both good and bad for the company's staff.

On the upside, Walmart staff have received a modest pay raise and a rare, favorable labor board ruling — without a single Walmart employee officially belonging to a union. The union-backed and independent campaigns attempting to organize Walmart staff are considering both as victories, though the pay rise can also be attributed in part to a tightening labor market.

But on the flip side, the big box chain has announced it will close hundreds of stores, leading to thousands of layoffs. And the planned raise to $10 an hour for entry-level workers hired after Jan. 1 only takes effect after they successfully complete a six-month training program called "Pathways."

Some labor theorists say a company on the ropes is more vulnerable to efforts by activists, but it remains to be seen what the net result of the recent events will mean for workers. With an estimated 10,000 employees affected by the store closures, the National Labor Relations Board ruling ordering the reinstatement of 16 former staff fired for participating in worker protests is a largely symbolic win. And a raise in hourly pay, while welcome, doesn't necessarily come with the steady schedules or hours that would mean a substantial difference in pay at the end of the week. (Walmart has denied that cuts in hours are related to wage increases.)

"This wage increase is a step in the right direction, but it’s not a commitment to full-time, family sustaining jobs," said Dan Schlademan, an organizer with worker group Our Walmart, in a statement.

Jess Levin, a spokesperson for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union's Walmart campaign, similarly stressed the importance of the recent closures and inconsistent hours to workers. "[Walmart] just closed hundreds of stores, destroyed thousands of jobs, and devastated countless small communities, but now they are trying to convince America they’re giving our workers a raise?" she said in a statement. "After Walmart’s last wage increase stunt, many workers almost immediately saw their hours cut and take-home pay go down."

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Our Walmart has called on the retailer to re-hire all 10,000 employees affected by the closure of 154 U.S. stores (of a total of 269 worldwide), citing "between 15,000 and 50,000 posted job openings at any given time" at Walmart and the fact that "95% of the stores slated to close this month are within 10 miles of other Walmart locations."

The store slated to close in Juneau, Alaska, is one of the 5% that is not, however, and the city is now working to help the newly jobless employees there find new work, since the closest store is in Ketchikan, 300 miles away.

The day after Wednesday's pay raise announcement, a Federal Administrative Law Judge found that Walmart engaged in systematic retaliation against workers who participated in strikes in 2013, and recommended ordering the reinstatement of 16 workers, posting legal notices in 31 stores, and scheduling employee meetings in 29 stores to inform workers of their rights to organize.

Walmart spokesperson Kory Lundberg said in a statement that the company "disagrees with the Administrative Law Judge’s recommended findings" and "will pursue all of our options to defend the company because we believe our actions were legal and justified."

"We are focused on providing our hard working associates more opportunity for success and career growth by raising wages, providing new training, education and expanded benefit options," he said.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Colby Harris, one of the 16 fired Walmart workers the judge recommended for reinstatement with full backpay, said he participated in about a half dozen strikes between 2012 and 2014. Since being fired, he has worked for the UFCW's Walmart campaign, which he will continue to do while Walmart appeals the judge's findings. On Thursday, Harris will be in Texas, helping freshly laid-off Walmart employees look for new positions and land on their feet, he said.

And if Harris ultimately gets his old job back? “I’d go back to work and organize my store,” he said. “No question."

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Dov Charney's Last Attempt To Win Back American Apparel Has Failed - Daily Business

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American Apparel founder and ex-CEO Dov Charney just lost his best chance to regain control of the flailing clothing company.

On Monday, a Delaware bankruptcy court approved a reorganization plan backed by the company's bondholders and new management, passing over a competing plan presented by Charney and investors Hagan Capital Group and Silver Creek Capital earlier this month.

Charney has been fighting to get back into American Apparel since he was served with a surprise termination letter in June 2014, and his alliance with Hagan Capital and Silver Creek represented his best change — and perhaps his last. A major part of Hagan Capital and Silver Creek Capital's bid, valued at about $300 million, was to reinstall Charney, the firing of whom they called a "shortsighted mistake."

The public battle between Charney and American Apparel's new management played out again in bankruptcy court last week, with Charney claiming the company was stolen from him, and that his plan was the only way to save it. Lawyers for American Apparel, meanwhile, said the new proposal was "inferior" and opposed by bondholders.

The New York Times reported that Charney was interrupted several times by the court's judge while testifying last week, who asked him to stop "free associating." The news outlet quoted him as saying: "I’m a merchant, I’m a creative artist, I’m a photographer, I’m a marketer, I’m an industrialist...I don’t want to hand over my company. This is coercion."

The bankruptcy court judge said today that the new proposal didn't offer enough reason to reject the bid from bondholders, according to the Times.

American Apparel praised the court's decision in a statement today, saying it's "focused on exiting Chapter 11 and fully implementing its strategy." The retailer believes it can successfully turn itself around under its new management team.

LINK: Ousted American Apparel Founder Could Return With Takeover Offer

LINK: The American Apparel Saga Has Ended In Bankruptcy

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McDonald's Sales Are Booming Thanks To All-Day Breakfast - Daily Business

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Despite what some McDonald's owners characterized as a chaotic start to all-day breakfast last October the launch has ended up being a raging success for the Golden Arches.

Domestic same store sales rose by 5.7% during the last three months of 2015, the company reported on Monday — its best performance in nearly four years.

"All day breakfast was clearly the primary driver of the quarter," McDonald's CEO Steve Easterbrook said on an earnings call. Not only did it exceeded expectations, but also the sales bump from all-day breakfast "lasted longer through the quarter than a typical launch period does."

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Globally, McDonald's maintained upward sales momentum as well, as global comparable sales rose 5% during the quarter. However, "macro-economic concerns, particularly in France, negatively impacted quarterly sales performance," the company stated in a press release.

Comparable sales last quarter rose 4.2% in "lead markets" (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), 3% in "high-growth markets" (China, Italy, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands), and 5.9% in the remaining markets.

The bump from all-day breakfast, however, is expected to slow.

"We don't want to be a single initiative turn around plan," Easterbrook said. "So we continued investment in food quality. The development of this value platform. And as we continue to reinvest in the fabric of our restaurants, we're confident the in-store experience will continue to improve."

In stores, the company is remodeling restaurants based on updated style guides that abandon its long-running "cafeteria look." At the drive-thru, where McDonald's makes most of its money, the chain is trying to improve order accuracy and speed.

McDonald's will also continue to learn about demand for customized burgers, which is being offered at some locations where customers can build their own burgers via a new kiosk ordering system. "Customization is important," said Easterbrook. "We don't know quite how much customization customers truly wish. [They want] a little bit of flexibility but don't want to overcomplicate it."

Another important initiative for McDonald's in 2016 is its mobile app, which has already been downloaded 7 million times. The company told BuzzFeed News in the fall that it would start testing mobile ordering this year.

After 60 Years, McDonald’s Is Getting Rid Of Its “Cafeteria Look”

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Olive Garden Will Now Deliver Giant Platters Of Pasta For Catering - Daily Business

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Have you ever left a big dinner — say, a corporate function, or a wedding — and wished the food was just a giant Olive Garden buffet instead of whatever the caterers put on offer? If so, suffer no more. On Monday, the Italian restaurant chain is launching a nationwide catering delivery service.

This is for your big spending, high rolling Oliver Garden eaters: Orders will need to be $125 or more, and there's a 15% delivery charge on top of that — until, that is, your titanic pasta order exceeds $500, at which point the delivery fee for the balance above $500 drops to 5%. You should still tip your delivery person, too.

The chain started testing catering delivery in a few locations last June, and has already catered a wedding in Florida with about 300 guests and filled a $10,000 order for an office event with about 1,000 employees, according to Dan Kiernan, its executive vice president of operations.

Olive Garden has been working its way out of a sales slump that began when middle-income consumers cut back on dining out during the recession. The ones that kept eating have been lured by lower-priced fast casual chains liked Chipotle. That wasn't all that went wrong: investor Starboard Value even criticized Olive Garden's cooking methods (like not salting the water to boil pasta) in an epic 294-page presentation in 2014.

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Catering has been part of Olive Garden's strategy since 2013 to boost its take-out and delivery sales. Olive Garden restaurants, which each make about $4.4 million on average per year, already make more than 10% of sales from to-go orders, and the goal is to boost that ratio to 20% with pick up, catering, and — perhaps eventually — delivery of small orders too. “Twenty percent of over $4 million is a heck of a business inside an Olive Garden,” Darden CEO Gene Lee told investors in December.

Olive Garden has long had a catering option, but customers previously had to pick up the orders from the restaurant. "It's a lot of work to have three, four, five bags full of these pans of food and fit it into the car, carry it to the event, and get ready," said Kiernan. The restaurants will reorganize existing staff to deliver the catering orders.

In case you've never catered an event with Olive Garden, imagine this. Your platters of Chicken Alfredo, Five Cheese Ziti al Forno and Lasagna arrive in disposable aluminum trays. All deliveries come with "grated cheese, serving and eating utensils, table covers, plates, napkins and Olive Garden’s signature mints," according to the company, and the delivery person sets up the table for you. Olive Garden also will sell you chafing dishes, racks, and fuel if you want them. Catered breadsticks, of course, are not unlimited.

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Here's What Facebook Knows About Young People And Money - Daily Business

They’re scared of debt, and not big fans of investing (unless it’s done by robots).

Happy Couple With Piggybank

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Facebook knows a lot about young people — information it gathers and analyzes to shape its product and to let advertisers know who they can reach. On Monday, the company is sharing a snapshot of that knowledge, focused on what people aged 21 to 34 think about money and finance.

Researchers at the social network have put together a a white paper on the topic, using survey data, the company's own Audience Insights tool, and analysis of conversations and content on Facebook itself.

The study was done to help "financial services marketers understand what millennials on Facebook talk and care about," Facebook's Industry Director Jerry Canning said. Young Facebook users tend to be "first-adopters of new technology and are driving the changes that are shaping the future of banking," Canning said.

From Venmo to Robin Hood, Wealthfront and Affirm, there are a bevy of fast-growing financial services apps that offer everything from investment advice to money transfers, with a tech-heavy spin. They're all marketed to young people, and some of them are big advertisers on Facebook.

Even Facebook Messenger offers person-to-person payments (all of Facebook's messaging products are run by David Marcus, who prior to joining the social network was the president of PayPal, the most successful financial company of the last tech boom).

Here's what Facebook's study had to say about young people and money:

There are lots of affluent young people on Facebook

Kazuhiro Nogi / AFP / Getty Images

Two-thirds of the 70 million Facebook users in the US aged 21 to 34 are college graduates, more than half of them own a home, and 46% have a household income of over $75,000.

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Starbucks Gives Up On The Teavana "Tea Bar" Business - Daily Business

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Starbucks once saw a massive future selling tea in the U.S. It acquired tea retailer Teavana in 2012, and in October 2013 opened its first Teavana Tea Bar. "Tea presents a $90 billion global market opportunity, and we are excited to celebrate the first retail example of how our two companies are coming together,” said Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz during the launch.

Now, just 27 months after opening the first of five brewed tea outlets, Starbucks is largely abandoning its tiny chain of standalone tea bars. The company announced on Friday that it will convert the three Teavana tea bar locations in New York into Starbucks stores by the end of April. It will close its Beverly Hills location. Only the Seattle location will continue to operate.

While Starbucks just reported record revenues in its most recent quarter, today's announcement reflects the coffee giant's setbacks growing its other smaller brands. Maybe Americans just aren't that excited about tea, even when it comes endorsed by Starbucks.

Teavana isn't the first retail operation Starbucks has abandoned. In July, the company announced that it was closing all 23 La Boulange stand-alone locations and the two manufacturing facilities that serve those them (La Boulange baked goods are still served in Starbucks cafes).

Starbucks also closed its Evolution Fresh retail location in San Francisco, but kept three stores open in Washington.

Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, and Oprah Winfrey visit the Teavana Fine Teas + Tea Bar in New York in 2014.

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There are still 350 Teavana shops that sell packaged teas and gift sets, and the brewed teas are also offered in Starbucks cafes. "Focusing our investments on bringing an up-leveled tea experience to our customers through Starbucks stores and our Teavana specialty stores will allow us to reach more customers through our broad footprint," said Teavana spokeswoman Alisa Martinez in an email.

This of course, was not the plan. Starbucks was betting on a large and growing population of American tea drinkers to support the expansion of the tea bar concept.

"The Teavana Tea Bar is a critical first step for us to meet the needs of tea drinkers everywhere by providing a place where tea enthusiasts and casual tea drinkers alike can learn about, enjoy and share in the tea experience,” said Cliff Burrows, Starbucks group president for the U.S., Americas, and Teavana in 2013.

It's possible that Teavana tea bars might find a more eager tea-drinking audience in China, Starbucks' second largest market, where Starbucks is expecting much growth in the future. If the tea chain does open in China, however, it will be far from the only tea shop around.

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