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How do you become fearless and financially secure enough to make enemies of New York’s wealthy and politically powerful? A seven-figure check from Amazon certainly helps.
Getty Images Spencer Platt
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara has jailed a hedge fund billionaire, taken one of the most successful hedge fund traders of all time out of the money management business, extracted multibillion settlements and guilty pleas out of global megabanks, and is now in the midst of an investigation of New York state powerbrokers that's already garnered an indictment and arrest of Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver.
He's a man who, many believe, gives few fucks. But while a righteous, fearless, take-many-prisoners philosophy of law enforcement may be the central motivation for his lonely crusade, there's another factor worth taking into account. It's easier to make enemies of the rich and powerful when you are already financially secure, and in 2011 Preet Bharara became a dotcom millionaire.
But only just. Bharara was an early investor in Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com, which was co-founded by his brother, Vinit. When Amazon acquired the company for $545 million in 2011, Bharara earned his cut. The number has not been previously reported, but was "a little over one million" in cash, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office told BuzzFeed News.
Bharara has typically demurred when asked by reporters to disclose just how much he made, saying at a conference hosted by The New York Times' finance site DealBook that he is not independently wealthy "compared to the people in this room." He also said that when he goes out to eat with Vinit, his younger brother picks up the tab, since he "came into a little bit of cash."
For a financial disclosure covering 2010, Bharara listed his shares as being worth between $1,000,000 and $5,000,000. His total profit from the investment can't be determined because it's not known how much he put in initially. On a 2009 questionnaire he filled out in connection to his appointment, he said his net worth was $1.65 million. That same questionnaire put the value of his 42,949 shares at $206,000. Bharara has three children and has earned a government salary for most of his professional life. In 2000 he started as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District, and in 2005 he became Democratic senator Charles Schumer's chief counsel.
In a 2013 financial disclosure, in which Bharara was not required to list his net worth, he listed a number of assets, none of which were individually valued at more than $500,000.
Bharara has shown no sign of slowing down his high-profile public corruption investigations, saying in a press conference following the Silver arrest to "stay tuned." Bharara has repeatedly said that he doesn't have ambitions beyond his U.S. Attorney job, despite frequent speculation that he has his sights set on higher office. One avenue for advancement was blocked when his neighboring U.S. Attorney, Loretta Lynch of New York's Eastern District, was nominated to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General.
Bharara told the Times in August that he has no interest in elected office. "My concern is I'm not sure I have a taste for anything but this."
Luckily, It's a taste he can afford, for now.
The gourmet burger chain had a huge opening day on the New York Stock Exchange, with shares rising more than 130%. Will the good times last?
NYSE / Valerie Caviness
Shake Shack, the gourmet burger chain that started out of a hut in New York City's Madison Square Park, is now a $1.7 billion company — all based on just 36 restaurants in the U.S. and another 27 overseas.
Celebrity restauranteur Danny Meyer's lauded fast casual hotspot held its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange Friday, and the response from investors suggested much confidence that the chain will eventually grow into a major presence across the U.S. Aggressive trading led to the opening price spiking to $47 per share, more than double Shake Shack's pricing of early shares at $21 each the night before.
After Meyer and his team rang the NYSE's opening bell, which included chanting and cheerleaders throughout the exchange's cavernous trading floor, the air of the room filled with anticipation as the trading price for shares of Shake Shack rose into the high $20s, then through the $30s and approached the $50 mark. By 3p.m., the stock was up by 130%, an opening day rally more reminiscent of a late 90s tech company than a burger chain.
Meanwhile, the street outside the exchange filled with the smell of Shake Shack's beloved burgers, which it was serving to the public free of charge out of a pair of food trucks it had lined up on Exchange Place. The trucks would later roam the city handing out free burgers to celebrate the IPO.
Inside the exchange, reporters and NYSE employees toasted the Shake Shack crew with burgers and cups of frozen custard as traders negotiated the stock's opening price. As the numbers on trading monitors grew higher, multiple IPO attendees remarked on the stock's huge "pop", or spike in price.
"This is insane!" one trader exclaimed. "It's like the GoPro of burgers!"
(Last June, GoPro went public on the NYSE with the stock popping by a more modest 31% on opening day.)
A frazzled assistant ran a cup of custard over to Meyer, who was beyond thrilled with the day's events, especially after the stock's huge pop netted him an estimated $400 million windfall. Shares of Shake Shack have continued to stay in the $48 dollar range throughout most of Friday and into the afternoon.
All morning, the floor buzzed about how high Shake Shack had climbed ahead of and even after its $47 per share opening. Some worried about a crash later in the day, as shares had climbed to unsustainable heights ahead of opening. Indeed, a buzzy restaurant brand declining in value after a manic opening day is not out of the realm of possibility — other names in the space, like Noodles & Company and Potbelly, have failed to maintain their high opening day share prices after only a few days or weeks of trading.
As for what's next in the fast casual food business, one restaurant industry analyst told BuzzFeed News that after Chipotle and other ethnic food concepts like Zoe's Kitchen and Noodles & Company, burgers represent only the tip of the iceberg.
"These concepts continued to grow very strongly," said Bonnie Riggs, restaurant industry analyst at consultancy NPD Group. "They've done an outstanding job in satisfying consumers need to place your order and get freshly prepared, good tasting food that they feel is reasonable and affordable."
Investors can now buy shares in fast casual food covering categories including Mexican, sandwiches, burgers and noodles, but many other popular concepts have yet to hit the markets. Riggs said craze for high-end salad places like Chopt and Sweetgreen is getting plenty of attention, and is likely to produce a public company at some point — although a fast-casual pizza business could come first. "After burgers, now, we're starting pizza," she said. "Then we'll start on freshly prepared healthy food, like salad, that's a bit healthier for you."
After pushing back against reports of a new “Lovin’ Beats Hatin’” advertising slogan, McDonald’s has released its lovin’-themed marketing campaign.
McDonald's
Love might not be able to conquer all, or save ousted McDonald's CEO Donald Thompson's job. But for a limited time, it will be accepted, occasionally, as legal tender in exchange for a burger and fries at McDonald's outlets.
In late October, the Wall Street Journal reported McDonald's would soon roll out a new advertising campaign built around the slogan "Lovin' Beats Hatin'", a play on (but not a replacement of) its long-running "I'm Lovin' It" line. A Super Bowl ad would help kick off the campaign, the report said.
The internet responded with a healthy round of ridicule, and McDonald's claimed there had been some degree of "misreporting" around the story, without fully denying it.
"It's highly speculative and premature to talk about Super Bowl ads and future campaigns," a McDonald's spokesperson said at the time.
But it's no longer highly speculative: here's the McDonald's Super Bowl ad. The's no Lovin' Beats Hatin' tag line, but it's all about the lovin', most specifically a cloyingly sweet central premise involving giving people free food in return for them showing some love to the people closest to them.
Starting Monday, Feb. 2, McDonald's will be randomly accepting a new form of payment. Customers who enter participating McDonald's restaurants* across the US at randomized, predetermined times between Monday, Feb. 2 and Saturday, Feb. 14 from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. local time each day will be selected to participate to Pay with Lovin'. Once a selected customer has completed his or her order and presented a method of payment, the restaurant Guest Service Manager or Lovin' Lead will explain that McDonald's is doing something special that day, and the customer will be given the option to pay for his or her order with an act of Lovin' instead. For instance, breakfast might cost a friendly fist bump to the crew member on duty, lunch could be paid for with a call to a loved one and dinner could go for a compliment.
The hip-hop mogul’s most ambitious business move is a big-ticket bid on a hi-fi streaming service.
Dr. Dre became the richest man in music last year in part by successfully building a digital streaming platform, Beats Music, and now Jay Z wants a piece of the action. The hip-hop superstar made waves in the music industry this morning with the announcement of his $56 million bid (464 million Swedish Krona) for Aspiro AB, the Swedish parent company of two streaming services, WiMP and TIDAL.
Pending shareholder and regulatory approval, Project Panther Bidco, a subsidiary of Jay Z's S. Carter Enterprises, will acquire all shares of Aspiro in an all-cash deal. Aspiro's board has recommended that shareholders accept the offer.
WiMP and TIDAL are marketed differently, but are essentially the same service. TIDAL, which launched last fall, is the U.S. version of WiMP, a four-year-old Spotify competitor that's only available in Scandinavia. Much like Spotify, TIDAL offers a large catalog of music — 25 million songs — for on-demand streaming.
But unlike Spotify, and most popular streaming services in the U.S., TIDAL uses a high-fidelity 16-bit streaming protocol, making it a leader in the growing trend of premium audio. It also doesn't offer a free tier. A subscription to TIDAL costs $19.99 a month, twice the cost of the most expensive version of Spotify.
Apple's $3 billion purchase of Beats Electronics last year included slightly less than $500 million for its Beats Music subsidiary, with many predicting that the streaming service will play a critical role in revitalizing Apple's own iTunes. The deal earned Dre, a co-owner of Beats Electronics with Jimmy Iovine, a reported $620 million — the most money a musician has ever earned in a single year.
Jay Z, who is a longtime friend and collaborator of Dre's, most notably on his 2006 comeback album Kingdom Come, has his own history of big ticket business moves. In addition to his clothing company, Rocawear, and full-service music company Roc Nation, he famously bought (and later sold) a share in the New Jersey Nets, helping to move the professional basketball team to Brooklyn in 2012. In 2013, he launched the sports agency Roc Nation Sports in partnership with the Creative Artists Agency.
Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images
The slight slowdown in the growth rate caps off the strongest year for the economy since the 1990s.
Bureau of Economic Analysis / Via bea.gov
The U.S. economy continued to grow in the fourth quarter, although not at the white-hot rate it had been in the second and third quarters of this year. The Commerce Department reported that gross domestic product grew at a 2.6% annualized rate in the fourth quarter.
The fourth quarter did not match the booming annualized growth rates of 4.6% and 5% in the second and third quarter respectively, bringing the year to a muted end. The 5% clip the economy reached in the third quarter was the fastest quarterly growth rate since 2003.
Overall, the economy grew only 2.4% in 2014 compared to 2.2% in 2013. But 2014 did have an especially strong labor market that created almost 3 million jobs, the biggest single-year job creation figure since the booming late 1990s.
The Commerce Department attributed the fall of at the end of the year to greater imports (which subtract from GDP) and less spending by the federal government, while spending by consumers increased by over 4%, compared to just over 4% in the third quarter. The fourth quarter number is, however, only an estimate that will get revised twice in the coming months.
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The “fine casual” burger chain will hold its initial public offering Friday, with the buzz swelling to the point of cultish fanfare. But how much will Shake Shack have to grow to live up to the hype?
Keith Bedford / Reuters
It's easy to see why the buzz around the initial public offering of Shake Shack, the New York-based upscale burger chain, is reaching the point of frenzy. Burgers have remained the most popular item ordered across all classes of restaurant in the United States, and in the booming fast-casual dining space where Chipotle is king, Shake Shack is the first to hit the public markets.
"It seems to be that our desire for and our love affair with burgers doesn't end," said Bonnie Riggs, a restaurant industry analyst at consultancy NPD Group. "We're ordering burgers at all types of restaurants for different reasons."
What's more, Shake Shack burgers are good. Really good. Just ask the analysts and prospective early investors who, according to sources, salivated over celebrated Manhattan chef Danny Meyer's masterpieces when Shake Shack served them on its road show to drum up potential interest in the IPO.
The strategy appears to have worked in charming the financial forces controlling investment in the earliest available shares of Shake Shack, those up for grabs before the company even begins its first public trade on the New York Stock Exchange Friday. The expected price range for the IPO has already increased from $14 to $16 per share to $17 to $19 per share as of Thursday.
"This is going to be an extraordinarily well-attended IPO," said John Gordon, a restaurant industry analyst and founder of the Pacific Management Consulting Group. "Five Guys and Smash Brothers did not get an IPO done, so they beat the other burger chains. Shake Shack is the first real fast-casual burger operation to come to market."
Shake Shack's Manhattan beginnings have also worked in its favor, both to attract early investors, many of whom are familiar with its storied product, and to command a high average ticket per customer.
"They're based in New York City, and sales numbers per store are extremely large in Manhattan," Gordon said. "But there's only one Manhattan, and as you get further out, there's no way you can hit those numbers. Stores in other parts of the country aren't going to hit those sales numbers."
Kathleen Smith, an IPO expert and principal at ETF manager Renaissance Capital, agrees, adding that Shake Shack may not be able to cultivate the kind of following it has from New York investment industry types outside of the city.
"When Fairway went public, a lot of New Yorkers were familiar with it and it reached great heights, then it came back down to earth," Smith said. "They have high margins in their New York locations; the question is how do you hold up those margins, because it's a different kind of economy. New Yorkers will pay for it. [Another] question is, when do you add stores and what do the stores look like that you're adding?"
Shake Shack is already considering the answer to this question, and its filings surrounding the IPO, the company said it plans to have 450 locations across the U.S. in the long term. There are currently just 30 Shake Shacks in America.
According to Smith, the 450 figure doesn't seem too extravagant.
"We didn't question that number," she told BuzzFeed News. "It passed our sanity test."
But in Gordon's estimation, the average Shake Shack ticket is roughly $15 per person, higher than the $10 per person figure the company has ascribed to the average check. This, he said, will potentially make it difficult to find enough locations for Shake Shack to be able to scale its business and an IPO valuation of around $600 million.
"Generally what happens is every restaurant that IPOs says they can get to a certain number of units," Gordon said. "Whether restaurants work or not, it's a very complex situation of finding enough people, pricing appropriately, and finding the right locations, which has been difficult for a decade. The average ticket is about $15 per person, that is going to mean that it's not going to work for everyone everywhere. It will have to be in densely populated urban areas with a higher income bracket."
Another potential hurdle for Shake Shack is the issue of the fast-casual bubble. Call it the Chipotle effect: Fast-casual chains like Noodles & Company, The Habit, Potbelly, and others have boomed in recent years, experiencing huge pops on IPO day and then slowly but surely coming back down to earth in the following weeks and months as interest dies down.
"These IPOs have really gotten kind of out of hand," Gordon said. "There almost needs to be an asterisk that the first years, the price to earnings multiple is always high, because investors continue to chase the next Chipotle. Everyone wants to get in on the next Chipotle, but the world has changed a lot."
Gordon adds that there remains a general shortage of publicly traded restaurants, as many were delisted or bought out by private equity from 2008 to 2011, and the industry is struggling to recover.
"So there is demand and interest for restaurant IPOs," Gordon said, "but historically they IPO and then they cool off."
Smith remembers this very theory manifesting itself in the form of Potbelly and Noodles & Company, shares of which are currently down 41% and 29% from their respective IPOs in the last two years. She believes Shake Shack could be setting investors up for a similar disappointing return once the IPO hysteria dies down.
"It's going to be a hot deal on day one," Smith said of Shake Shack. "It's a bit of a cult stock. You could get a 50 times earnings multiple, which is a stress on the name. It's starting to defy fundamental logic. They have some things working in their favor, like a high ticket value, [but] what they're targeting is a huge jump from their current base."
Still, other industry experts believe as long as Shake Shack is serving burgers — the kind that are so good they're unlike anything else in this burger-loving nation — then it should be able to thrive.
"What fascinates me about Shake Shack is that when I started doing this 37 years ago, the most popular thing people ordered in a restaurant was a hamburger," said Harry Balzer, chief food industry analyst and vice president at NPD Group. "And the most popular item people ordered yesterday was a hamburger. It can't lose! As a consumer, we all have this desire to try new things we already know. In this case, I don't have to go far to find people saying I'll try a new hamburger."
The massive retailer also revealed that it spent over $1 billion on its streaming video service in 2014.
Getty Images Matthew Lloyd
Amazon has tried a lot of new things in the last year, from becoming a smartphone maker to offering delivery within hours, not days. And Thursday, the company announced another novel development: An unexpectedly profitable quarter.
Amazon's earnings of $214 million were well above analysts expectations. As usual, Amazon continued to grow its sales quickly, going from $25.6 billion in the fourth quarter of last year to $29.3 billion this year. The sales figure, however, was slightly below analysts' expectations of $29.7 billion.
Relative to such giant revenues, the company's $214 million in profit may seem modest, and it's short of the $239 million it made a year ago. But the profit is a change from losses of $126 million and $437 million in the last two quarters.
Investors were happy with the results, sending Amazon shares up over 8.5% in after hours trading.
Like many American companies with large overseas business, Amazon's bottom line suffered from a strengthening dollar in 2014, which diminished foreign currency earnings. The company said its sales in dollar terms would have been $895 million higher had exchange rates been unmoved in the last year.
Amazon stock is down almost 20% in the last year, after enduring two quarters with bigger losses than usual. The third quarter loss of $437 million — the biggest quarterly loss in the company's history — more than offset its full-year profit in 2013, while it also suffered an embarrassing $170 million writedown of its Fire Phone inventory. For all of 2014, Amazon reported a net loss of $241 million.
But these big losses, as Amazon's patient investors know, are due to the company's enormous investments in infrastructure and new businesses. Amazon founder and chief executive officer Jeff Bezos said in a statement that Amazon spent $1.3 billion on Prime Instant Video last year. Some of that firehose of cash was directed toward producing original TV shows, including the hit Transparent, which recently won a Golden Globe for best TV series.
Bezos also said that Amazon Prime membership grew 53% in 2014, even though the price jumped from $79 to $99. Bezos said the company spent "billions" on free shipping for Prime users.
The chain is eliminating the role of “creative director” for the Gap brand. Incoming CEO Art Peck is coming in with a bang, after critics described Gap’s lineup as “dull and inspiring.”
Gap / Via Gap PR
Gap's incoming CEO Art Peck is coming in with a bang: last week, the chain announced plans to shut down Piperlime, and this week, it's getting rid of its namesake brand's creative director, Rebekka Bay.
The retail chain said it's appointing executive Scott Key as the head of customer experience at Gap and eliminating Bay's creative director role, resulting in her immediate departure. Key will oversee a freshly combined e-commerce and marketing division that's "charged with driving a powerful connection across these critical customer touch-points globally," according to a statement released today.
Bay was the subject of a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story last year titled: "Can Rebekka Bay Fix The Gap?" The executive, best known for creating H&M's minimalist COS line, joined Gap in late 2012 to bring back the namesake chain's magic, so to speak. The Gap brand, once the uniform of America, had lost much of its luster, and Bay sought to return it to its roots.
But her efforts, combined with a generally tough retail environment, haven't seemed to pay off. The Gap brand fared much worse than Banana Republic and Old Navy last year, with comparable sales sliding for eight straight months. The company's "Dress Normal" campaign, a play on normcore, didn't appear to resonate with consumers last fall, and Bay's designs were criticized by analysts for being flat and unexciting.
"We believe designer Rebekka Bay's team has so far been unable to inject the assortment with the type of excitement that incites customers to buy," Sterne Agee analyst Ike Boruchow wrote in an October note. "Most items convey the sense that one might already own them: plaid, florals, and denim washes that indeed seem too normal."
Jennifer Davis, an analyst at Buckingham Research Group, said she is "not surprised" by Bay's departure after the sales declines, deeming the merchandise "dull and uninspiring."
"Additionally, we believe that Bay's departure indicates that the upcoming spring floorset is also lackluster," she said in a note today.
Peck, previously the company's "digital guy," will officially start as Gap's CEO on Feb. 1.
Appointing Key as the head of customer experience while eliminating the Gap's creative director role seems in line with his formidable task of reshaping a global, nearly 3,600-store chain for the 21st century.
Gap owns Banana Republic, Old Navy, Athleta and Intermix. The company announced Friday that it would be shutting down Piperlime to focus on its five flagship brands, which Wall Street analysts also viewed as a Peck-driven decision.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Marc Lore, who sold his company to Amazon for $500 million, is willing to make one big promise about his new site: You won’t find a lower price anywhere.
Jet / Via jet.com
Since July of last year, entrepreneur Marc Lore has been posting coy updates to his Tumblr about Jet.com, a mysterious "new shopping experience" that would "empower customers like never before."
Speculation around the secretive project surged as Lore, who sold Diapers.com to Amazon for $550 million five years ago, raised a whopping $80 million in venture capital. He managed to hire more than 100 employees, sign a lease on a 40,000-square-foot headquarters in Hoboken — and still, hardly a hint.
Lore finally unveiled Jet.com this month, and it is, as promised, a unique proposition in online retailing. It's a $50-a-year, members-only online marketplace that promises to save customers 10% to 15% on everything they buy online. It doesn't matter where else you can find it — Amazon included — Jet guarantees a lower price.
How do you sell everything cheaper than everyone else does and still make money? Jet says it plans to make money only off membership fees, and will squeeze out every last cent of savings by identifying all the inefficiencies built into the online shopping system. The company claims it will teach customers how they can save hundreds of dollars in the course of a year by making small changes in how they shop online: tweaking shipping speed, return policies, and payment methods on purchases, all of which Lore says have baked costly inefficiencies into the system today.
In today's world, you typically don't know whether the stuff you order online is coming from one mile away or 1,000 miles away — and you don't really care. After all, prices don't fluctuate based on how much you're buying, or where your items are getting shipped from. Jet's technology is unique in that it drills down into those areas to identify where consumers can save, in real time.
A search for a baseball glove might return dozens of items, including some that come with a discount because they're being shipped from somewhere close to you. Are you OK with waiting a few days for a shipment? That could knock a few more dollars off the price. The same goes for waiving returns, because maybe you're buying a product you've already purchased before. And so on.
Jet says that by taking all these elements into account, it can guarantee the lowest price on the web, every time. That is, even lower than Amazon.
But trying to beat Amazon on price won't be easy. The e-commerce behemoth is famous for ruthlessly slashing prices to undercut rivals, happily accepting razor-thin profit margins and even losses, to win market share. Amazon's shareholders have shown supreme patience for such behavior, enabling the company's aggressiveness, and helping it maintain its status as the cheapest spot on the web. Lore knows his goal of offering the web's lowest prices will be a challenge — Diapers.com was a victim of Amazon's insane price-war behavior before selling itself to the company. Amazon was reportedly ready to lose $100 million in three months on diapers just to undercut Lore's business. The same could happen this time around.
"If Amazon makes a concerted effort to crush them, I could see that being a fatal blow before they really get off the ground," said Yory Wurmser, an analyst at eMarketer. "I don't think Amazon is going to do that initially because they would have to lower their prices across the board, losing huge amounts of money to compete against a startup before it's really taken off, and they're not going to do that. If they do it, they'll do it once it gathers some steam."
Jet will operate three of its own warehouses for selling big-brand consumables like toilet paper, diapers, and dog food. But the rest of the goods will come from all over: The site will work as a marketplace connecting shoppers to local stores, chains such as Toys "R" Us and Dick's, and even Amazon.
While Jet is working to get major retailers integrated into its system, and thus plugged into its algorithms that calculate price-cutting opportunities, it will also offer discounts on items available on almost any other e-commerce site. The secret to that is third-party affiliate fees, essentially referral fees that online retailers pay to sites that send shoppers their way. Jet will take those fees on your purchase, and deduct them from the bill. It's one way the site, which opens to the public in late spring, says it will guarantee the web's cheapest prices.
The real discount action, though, comes from Jet's system for encouraging more efficient online shopping habits. Lore argues that big internet retailers have trained their customers to essentially disregard the costs of shipping and fulfillment of their orders. Such costs can vary enormously depending on the specifics of each order and where it is being shipped to, but retailers have moved toward simplified, universal pricing, with the system-wide costs baked into their prices. He pointed to Amazon Prime, which charges $100 for a year of free two-day shipping, as a perfect example of such training.
"Ultimately, if you knew that every time you bought something from Amazon and you bought one item, you ought to pay $5 shipping, you would change your behavior, right? You would say, Wait a second, toothpaste, I wanted it, but it's $2 for the toothpaste and $5 to ship," Lore said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. "Their model is sort of like, 'Hey, why don't we get this person to prepay all this inefficiency?' So they say, 'Look, I think you're going to do these 20 orders that are really inefficient, so pay me $100 now, and then be inefficient. I'll just deduct it from the $100 you gave me."
Lore continued: "That's kind of the idea, and so it's not sustainable. That's why Prime went from $75 to $100, because you're actually training people to do a behavior that's actually costing the customer money. You're driving behavior that's bringing costs into the system rather than pulling them out. What Jet is doing is we're training people to basically build bigger baskets because it's much more efficient and much cheaper and we believe in that transparency."
To that end, shipping is free on orders over $35. (Coincidentally, Amazon just announced that $35 free shipping can be achieved through combining orders from different vendors.)
While the site works as a marketplace for other retailers, you don't know where your merchandise is coming from until you're ready to check out — on a baseball glove, for example, you'll just see the brand, as illustrated below.
Jet
The savings are tracked over time.
Jet
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“It’s tough to say goodbye to the McFamily, but there is a time and season for everything,” Thompson said in a statement.
McDonald's CEO Don Thompson, who will step down on March 1.
Adreees Latif / Reuters
The crisis at the world's largest fast food chain has claimed its highest profile victim: McDonald's chief executive officer Don Thompson is leaving the company on March 1, the company said today. The announcement came after a quarter where fast food giant lost ground all over the world, and a year of declining sales and grim results.
Thompson is stepping down after less than three years on the job -- a short tenure marked by the company's first sustained period of declining sales and existential questions about its future and relevance amid changing eating habits. The company said in a statement that Thompson would be replaced by Steve Easterbrook, currently its Chief Brand Office, as both president and CEO. Easterbook will also take a spot on its board of directors.
Thompson was appointed CEO in 2012, taking over that July for Jim Skinner, who retired after eight years in the top job and 41 years at the company.
"It's tough to say goodbye to the McFamily," Thompson said in the statement, "but there is a time and season for everything. I am truly confident as I pass the reins over to Steve, that he will continue to move our business and brand forward."
Investors cheered the leadership change, with McDonald's stock rising 3% in after hours trading. The stock has fallen 6% in the last 12 months.
As chief brand officer, Easterbrook was in charge of the company's marketing and digital efforts as well as its new menu items. Thompson's departure comes following dismal recent performance, with revenue falling 7% in its most recent quarter, and profits dropping 19%.
The drop was caused by a combination of the U.S. dollar strengthening against foreign currencies, fewer customers going to stores, and an especially sharp downturn in the company's Asian business. Scandal hit the company after pieces of plastic -- and in one case, a tooth -- were found in meals served at McDonald's in Japan.
In the United States, profit fell almost $300 million from a year ago. The company has promised a turnaround, including more diverse menus for different regions and more responsiveness to consumer taste. But it is struggling: While same-store traffic declined at McDonald's all over the world, the biggest fall was in the US, where same-store customer traffic fell more than 4% from 2013.
McDonald's also appointed its current chief financial officer Pete Bensen to the new role of chief administrative officer, and promoted its current corporate controller Kevin Ozan to the CFO role.
"McDonald's is an outstanding company with talented employees and these management changes are aimed at speeding the company's movement to its next phase of innovation and growth," McDonald's chairman Andrew McKenna said.
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Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
It was my fifth hour in the Royal Motors car dealership, and I was sitting alone at the only table in a small and stuffy room. I tossed around the wrinkled magazines spread out in front of me one more time — months-old issues of Men’s Health and Sports Illustrated — and craned my neck to look at the dealer on the phone in his office, his back to the window. Everyone had warned me against coming alone. “They’ll take advantage of a woman who’s by herself,” they said. “It’s not right, but it’s true.” I’d dismissed them. It wasn’t my gender that was going to be my problem. It was my bad credit — and any number of allies by my side, male or female, wasn’t going to help.
I was 25 years old, in my second semester of my senior year at Reed College — the idyllic, idealistic liberal arts college in southeast Portland, Oregon — when I decided I wanted to drive back home to New York after graduation. The only problem? This required a car. I’d successfully managed to avoid any purchases that would require pulling up my credit history for the past three years; such is the luxury of living off federal college loans in student housing. But reality was coming in the form of apartment searches and job applications, and quickly too. So why not bite the bullet and see what I had coming? Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought.
The salesman, John, seemed like my buddy. He had a good handshake, he was gregarious, and he didn’t — at least openly — seem to respect me any less for being a woman. Because I’ve never known how to participate in any sort of power plays, and because I continue to consider honesty the most shrewd tactic, I walked in and told him I didn’t care about cars, I didn’t have a lot of money, and I needed something reliable and cheap to get me across the country. He pointed me to a 2003 Toyota Corolla that was a rich navy blue and had 108,000 miles under its belt. We took it for a test drive. He asked me if I wanted to take a look under the hood, and I didn’t know what I was looking for, but sure, I said, and I bent over the machinery, hands clasped behind my back. “It all checks out.”
If I’d had it my way, I would’ve skipped these steps and started with the paperwork. Until then this was all hypothetical. John didn’t realize it, but I did. I knew what was waiting for both of us when he told me to take a seat while he ran my information with the bank. And I felt like I needed to apologize. This felt like deception. I’d come in an outfit that I hoped signaled sophistication but also formidability — skinny black jeans, black heeled ankle boots, black V-neck sweater with a white buttoned-up collar peeking from underneath it — and I’d made small talk about the tiny but notoriously expensive college I’d be graduating from within two months. This should’ve been easy. A nice girl probably getting her first car, parents probably have money. In and out.
But here we were, closing in on my sixth hour there, John calling a different bank for the third time. He walked out, looking as drained as I felt, and certainly less cordial than he’d been when we’d first met. He had my credit report in his hands, five pages long, covered in bright yellow and pink highlighter. “Have you checked your credit report recently?” he’d asked the first time around, perhaps assuming there was some kind of mistake. “I try not to,” I’d said, laughing weakly. I was not laughing now. This was his final offer: If I put $2,000 down, I could take out a $5,300 loan at 34.9% annual interest, with 34 monthly payments of $247.50, and ultimately pay $10,417.72 for a $7,000 car. It still felt like he was doing me a favor. Who but a person who believed so strongly in the wrongness of her past, and the necessity of her punishment for it, would sign? Part of me had gone into it certain I would be laughed out the office, and this seemed like the better deal. I drove the Toyota Corolla off the lot that day.
I got my first credit card in 2005, when I was 19 years old. I was shopping with my mom at Macy’s for some spring clothes, and the cashier asked if I’d like to apply for a store credit card. If approved, I’d get 10% off today’s purchase and I could use the line of credit to pay for it. No money out of my pocket? Having just dropped out of college, and still looking for a job, I couldn’t see the downside. “You might as well,” my mom said. “You can start building up your credit.” I was approved for $250 and my world felt newly opened.
I started waitressing soon after, and picked up so many hours I was making more money than I could spend, albeit not for lack of trying. I moved into a house with my sister and two friends, and we enjoyed a life of moderate decadence. My sister and I stocked our closets with clothes from Banana Republic, J. Crew, Express, and each time we swiped, we racked up loyalty points — whose only reward, of course, is greater opportunities to give up more of your money. (You’re a Luxe Banana Republic cardholder? Congratulations, your card is marble now, and you get triple the useless points when you spend.) I bought my boyfriend a guitar with what I’d started calling, tongue-in-cheek, fake money. Four years before my humiliating experience at Royal Motors, I leased a new Honda Civic with ease. I bought a MacBook with an Apple credit card that I quickly discovered had a MasterCard sticker on it. A passport to spend anywhere! And that’s where I used it: I went to New Zealand, Amsterdam, London, swiping, swiping, swiping, my limits reaching, reaching, reaching.
I was a lender’s dream: spending in the thousands, paying back enough so that I’d have more available to spend, but not so much that I was ridding them of their growing interest. It worked for both of us. That is, until I decided to go back to school. I had been taking classes here and there at SUNY Stony Brook, but in 2007 I decided to officially enroll full time. Right around then, I also decided I was tired of waiting tables. I got a job as a medical receptionist — a wonderful job, among wonderful people, but a job which cut my salary by at least half. Suddenly I wasn’t able to pay back more than the minimum amount due on my monthly bills. Then I was using one card to pay the balance on another. And then I was relying on cash advances to pay rent. I moved back home. I missed payments. I funneled 100% of my paychecks into my bills, and it still wasn’t enough. I met with debt reduction companies but they also wanted to be paid. I defaulted. I panicked. I avoided so many calls.
After about three years of swiping, and according to the bills I’d received when I decided to transfer to Reed and wanted to work out individual payment plans in preparation, my debt was distributed as follows:
$893 to J.Crew
$2,039 to Apple
$6,004 to Nassau Educators Federal Credit Union
$487 to Express
$639 to HSBC
$1,398 to Honda
$392 to Victoria’s Secret
$650 to Macy’s
$1,098 to Banana Republic
$1,366 to Guitar Center
$651 to Discover
$1,083 to Target
$480 to Lucky Brand
The total, in March 2009, was a little over $17,000. I had defaulted on all of it. So yes, John from Royal Motors, I was well aware my credit was fucked.
I’d been insulated from the effects of this fact in the utopian world of campus life, but that bubble was about to burst. Since then, I’ve sailed through different stages of acceptance, from the initial shame, to resentment, to, these days, a sort of darkly amused indifference. I’ve come to take a certain glee out of rendering speechless those young, eager cashiers who think I’m lying when I tell them I wouldn’t be approved for a credit card even if they tried, insisting Macy’s wants nothing to do with me since they threatened to sue me just a few years ago. Maybe it’s about making someone witness to the discomfort I’d felt for years. Probably it’s mean. I should stop. They didn’t create the system that wooed me, fluffed me up, and then cast me out as a pariah once they realized I couldn’t pay. Those were my mistakes. But they kind of run in the family.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
“This looks good to go, we’ll just need to run a quick credit check.”
I caught my mother’s eye. We’d been in the AT&T store for just about an hour one hot day last June, trying to switch our five-phone family plan over from Verizon. We’d called the family members, figured out which phones everyone wanted, declined insurance, and were waiting with debit cards at the ready when the salesman said the words we were hoping to avoid. I laughed.
“I can tell you right now; it’s not going to be good,” I said, and turned to my mom. “Should we just cancel the whole thing?”
“It can be anyone who’s on the plan,” the man butted in, eager not to lose the sale.
I assured him this wouldn’t make a difference, but he was reluctant to believe me. What I’ve learned is salespeople are always reluctant to believe a truth I would have no reason to lie about— perhaps they think it’s a form of false modesty. Either way, for the next 20 minutes, we offered up one social security number after another, each bringing back a worse figure than the last. We started with my father, believing his would be our best option. We were right, but his score was still low enough to require a $500 deposit per line. We tried our luck with mine, my mom’s, even my younger brother, whose only problem was, ironically, that he’s avoided credit cards and has no credit history. We were laughing the whole time, to the salesman’s bemusement. We told him we’d think about it and come back later. We didn’t.
My parents haven’t always had bad credit, but, for as long as I can remember, they have had money problems. My father is first-generation American, his parents immigrants from Italy; my mother was raised by a single mother, who died when she was 14. They married when they were 22 and 24, respectively, lived in my grandparents’ Bronx basement for six months to save some money, and then bought a house in Yonkers for $79,000 with 3% down and an FHA mortgage. A year later, they sold that house with a profit of $69,000 and bought a house twice the size, out on Long Island, for $160,000.
“That’s when we started a pattern of taking out loans on the equity of the house — doing renovations, building it out to fit our family,” my mom — who graciously let me interview her for this essay — told me over the phone earlier this month. “That’s what people did, though.”
Without getting into the gritty details of it, this didn’t end well. Twenty-seven years, five houses, one massive flood, and one defaulted mortgage later, they, like me, are back on their way to livable credit.
“What you have to understand is that your father and I never had any financial guidance,” my mom said. “We didn’t have parents to tell us, ‘Oh don’t sell that house, not now.’ The only time we saw an accountant was when we did our taxes. We were just trying to keep our heads above water. We were winging it, and sometimes we made the right choice, and sometimes we made the wrong one, and sometimes we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The result was a common story: We presented as upper-middle class, but were rarely flush. We weren’t spoiled, we didn’t take vacations, and I knew not to order appetizers when we went to Friendly’s. But we still went to Friendly’s at least twice a month. We still had presents under the Christmas tree. It felt like a shameful secret, made of that same sour stuff that would one day eat at my insides whenever I’d apply for a job, grow unhappy in my apartment, need to rent a car, or think for more than a passing moment about my future.
None of this is to say that I blame my parents for my bad credit. In fact, if there’s one tangible lesson I can remember them passing along to me, it was their explicit warning against living beyond your means. I was around 10 years old, eavesdropping from the back seat of the station wagon on a conversation about a family friend who’d had to declare bankruptcy. “Don’t ever sign up for a credit card,” my mom turned around to tell me. So how did she and my father end up falling into it, and why had she changed her tune by the time I was offered that first Macy’s card?
“The system doesn’t make sense,” she said in our phone interview, sighing. “You do need credit to get good credit, and you need good credit to survive. Plus, you know, you act out of fear, you act out of necessity. Your boiler breaks and you can’t afford a new one, but you need a new one, so you get a Sears card. And then you’re paying it off years later.”
And there is a compelling argument to be made for the fact that we spend money the way we saw it spent growing up. I knew we didn’t have a lot of it, but I knew we had a lot of stuff. It didn’t seem that weird when I did the same.
Today, my credit score is finally at a place that doesn’t make me cringe to view it. Every one of the accounts were paid off after much negotiation, and one year of garnished pay. Most negative items stay on your report for seven years past your last payment, which means I have quite a few years left to go, but that auto loan with the almost impossibly high interest rate? It’s likely saved my credit. After paying that account off in 2014, six months ahead of schedule and with no late payments, I was able to open a secured credit card with a $500 deposit — basically a credit card with training wheels. It’s the only card I have at the moment, but I’m told with good behavior over a long enough time period, I’ll be able to upgrade to an unsecured card, a real card, maybe even one where I can accrue airline miles or points. Last time I checked, my score was in the mid-600s, and that jump from “Poor” to “Not Good” is something I’m still celebrating. Maybe soon I’ll even be average.
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The company is both the largest publicly traded business in the world and growing like a startup. The result is quarterly earnings numbers that boggle the mind.
Chance Chan / Reuters
Laszlo Balogh / Reuters
Marissa Mayer has finally answered the biggest question facing the company. But she still has to figure out how to grow its actual business.
Denis Balibouse / Reuters
Yahoo will spin-off its large stake in Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, without incurring a massive tax bill, the company announced today.
Based on Alibaba's current valuation, about $39.5 billion of Yahoo's $46.6 billion market capitalization comes from its 15% stake in the Chinese company. When Alibaba went public late last year, Yahoo's take was more than $10 billion, before having to pay $3 billion in taxes. Yahoo won't be able to sell any of its remaining Alibaba shares until September of this year, due to a "lock-up" agreement. Marissa Mayer said in a broadcast that had Yahoo sold its Alibaba stock, it would have been taxed at around 40% and would have resulted in a $16 billion tax bill.
Yahoo said that it will form a new company whose stock will be distributed to Yahoo's existing shareholders. Yahoo also said that the new company will include "a legacy, ancillary Yahoo business."
Yahoo investors cheered the announced plan, with the stock up 6% in after-hours trading. The company did not announce plans for its stake in Yahoo Japan, a publicly listed joint-venture with Japan's Softbank. "We will continue to explore ways to maximize the value of Yahoo Japan," Mayer said. Yahoo's stake in that venture is worth about $7 billion.
"Throughout my tenure with the company, we have worked tirelessly on a tax-efficient alternative that would maximize the value of our Alibaba investment for our shareholders. A tax-free spin off accomplishes this and delivers value directly and exclusively to our shareholders," Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer said in a statement today.
What to do with the remaining portion of Alibaba without incurring too large of a tax bill has been the key strategic question for Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer and her chief financial officer Ken Goldman. Mayer said in October that Yahoo had " the best tax experts in the country, working intensively on structures to maximize the value to our shareholders of our remaining stake in Alibaba."
The company said it expects the spin off to happen in the fourth quarter of 2015, and it is awaiting a favorable decision on the move from the Internal Revenue Service.
Yahoo's core business — display advertising on its web and mobile products — has shrunk for most of the last two years as the value of the company has grown thanks to the breakneck growth in value of Alibaba. Since Mayer was named CEO in 2012, Yahoo's stock has more than tripled while its revenue, not counting payments to acquire web traffic, has gone from $1.08 billion to $1.18 billion. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected $1.19 billion in revenue for the most recent quarter.
The hedge fund Starboard Value, who acquired a stake in Yahoo last year, suggested in a letter in September that Mayer spinoff Yahoo's core business and acquire AOL, thus combining two of the largest web publishers. In a January letter, Smith expressed concern that Yahoo was considering large acquisitions, like the cable network Scripps or CNN, and would choose a not maximally tax efficient way of getting rid of its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes.
The lender just raised a new round of financing and will move into the student debt market as part of its bid to become the next big consumer finance company.
Earnest
Louis Beryl wants to create America's next big consumer finance company, and he wants to do it by, among other things, refinancing some of the $1.2 trillion in outstanding student debt.
The 36 year old Beryl is the cofounder of the online consumer finance company Earnest, and himself carries a triple figure debt load from his time at Harvard Business School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, which he enrolled in after leaving Lehman Brothers in 2008, where he traded financial products tied to energy.
Earnest, which announced today that it had raised $17 million from investors lead by Maveron, the investment firm founded by Howard Schultz, is plunging into the student-debt refinancing market. The company raised $15 million in funding last spring.
Much like it does already with personal loans, Earnest looks at a wide range of data including income, employment history, asset accounts, and other debts in order to price loans. Its personal loan rates are relatively low, from 4.25% to 9.25% for loans up to $30,000, while its student loan refinancing rates are even lower, 1.92% to 7.5%.
Beryl says that the reason they are able to make such cheap loans is because they have software do the underwriting, along with no traditional bank costs, like scores of loan officers, brick-and-mortar locations, or sponsorship of sports stadiums.
What will attract borrowers to Earnest, Beryl said, isn't just the low rates, but the service. Many student lenders pass on loans to investors and then they are collected and serviced by third parties. Earnest, however, keeps servicing in house and offers a variety of features that let borrowers adjust their loans by paying early, extending the term, skipping a payment, delaying or increasing the frequency of payments, with the cost or benefit of more or less interest payment easily displayed online.
"One of the things that gives us our top customer rating and really cheap customer acquisition costs is we have a ton of organic clients," Beryl said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. "We view it as we don't originate loans, we originate client relationships."
The other way the company keeps costs down is by catering to borrowers who are already in good financial shape. "The idea behind it is that we lend to financially responsible people, we do very very thorough underwriting, looking at a lot of data on any individual," Beryl said. "We still have zero loans in default, we don't have a single loan in delinquency."
Earnest is just one of many quickly growing companies from outside the traditional banking system that are offering personal loans directly to consumers. It won't disclose how many loans outstanding it has, but Beryl said it was projecting "several hundred millions of dollars" worth of loans in 2015. Lending Club, which went public last year, has issued over $6 billion worth of loans.
One thing constraining Earnest's size is its funding. Traditional banks fund their loans through a combination of selling stock and borrowing money through products like CDs. Other online lenders sell loans to investors, while Earnest funds itself through credit facilities and raising equity from venture capitalists.
Beryl said that as its balance sheet expands, it will pursue securitizing loans (packaging them into bonds for investors), but will keep servicing the loans in-house. "Let's just say that if we do billions of dollars of loans, we're going to have to figure out some sort of securitization for that to make sense," Beryl said.
Right now, about a fifth of its 35 employees are in customer service, but as the company's balance sheet expands, the half of the company now that's devoted to technology will grow much slower (you don't need that much more software to underwrite vastly more loans), while the proportion of the company that does customer service will grow. "We can't hire fast enough," Beryl said, "We're going to expand into all areas of consumer finance."
Earnest
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Standard and Poor’s declared that Russia’s debt was junk rated, thanks to “the effect we expect Russia’s weakening economy to have on its financial system.”
Maxim Zmeyev / Reuters
The ratings agency Standard and Poor's lowered its rating of Russian debt to BB+, otherwise known as below investment grade or junk. The ratings agency attributed the latest downgrade to lower prospects for economic growh in the next few years and the "heightened risk that external and fiscal buffers will deteriorate due to rising external pressures and increased government support to the economy."
The ratings agency also said that the country's financial system was "weakening," and thus making the Central Bank of Russia's efforts to support the economy less effective.
The Russian economy has been hammered both by EU and US sanctions and, more significantly, the plummeting price of oil. Russia is one of the world's leading oil exporters and has seen its currency, the ruble, has fallen precipitously in the last year. Today, one dollar buys about 68 rubles, a year ago it would have bought only 35.
Standard and Poor's projected that Russia's inflation rate would rise to above 10% this year, thanks to imports getting more expensive. S&P also criticized the Russian government, saying that its "institutional and governance effectiveness" is a "a rating weakness." S&P projected the Russian economy would basically cease growing in the next three years, saying it would likely grow by only .5% a year through 2018.
Russia has had to support some banks that have suffered thanks to the declining economy and depreciating ruble, including almost $2.4 billion to National Bank Trust. The government announced a plan last week to recapitalize Russian banks with almost $16 billion.
The other two major ratings agencies, Fitch and Moody's, have Russia's debt at one step above junk-level.
Other countries with BB+ rated sovereign debt are Indonesia, Turkey, and Bulgaria.
The snow storms that paralyze cities across North America are expensive, but still nowhere near as costly as tropical cyclones, droughts or heat waves.
Carlo Allegri / Reuters
The costliest storm in recent memory was the 1993 blizzard which affected 24 states and caused $5 billion in losses.
Munich Re / Via munichre.com
That made 2014 the fourth costliest year of blizzards on record. Aon Benfield, an insurance broker, said that winter weather in January had the fifth largest economic impact of any weather event last year.
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The World Economic Forum isn’t just for rich humans - some very influential dogs are also in attendance. With some photographic help from our reporter on the scene, can you figure out what makes these pooches tick?
The brand is Gap’s smallest, with annual revenue of less than $100 million.
Piperlime / Via Facebook: Piperlime
R.I.P. Piperlime: 2006-2015.
Gap said today that it will be shutting down Piperlime, which sells designer shoes, clothing and accessories, by the end of April to focus on its five other brands. Piperlime brought in less than $100 million in annual sales, or less than 1% of the sales brought in by the company at large.
"The decision was made to allow the company to focus on its top priorities," spokeswoman Liz Nunan said in an e-mail to BuzzFeed News. "The key priorities for the company heading into the new fiscal year are to focus on its portfolio of five brands – Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Athleta and Intermix, as well as digital and global growth."
Gap introduced Piperlime as an online-only shoe store in 2006, then expanded into clothing and accessories, carrying both little-known labels and pricier items from Kate Spade, BCBG and Levi's. It opened a store in Manhattan in 2012. Just a few years ago, Gap was touting Piperlime as its fastest-growing online property.
Gap has since acquired another chain that plays in the designer business, when it bought fashion boutique Intermix in 2013, though Intermix is more of a luxury retailer than Piperlime.
Nunan said the decision "was not made based on any competition or conflict from Intermix."
Richard Jaffe, an analyst at Stifel, noted that Piperlime's closure represents "the beginning of changes that will be forthcoming under the new CEO Art Peck." Peck begins as Gap's new CEO next month.
Congrats Twitter, but for IPOs.
Box closed the day valued at $2.8 billion.
Online data storage provider Box Inc Co-Founder and CEO Aaron Levie © rings the opening bell to celebrate his company's IPO at the New York Stock Exchange January 23, 2015.
Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters
Despite making everything in Switzerland about 15% more expensive, the Swiss National Bank’s decision to lift its cap on the value of the country’s currency has given many at the World Economic Forum a reason to smile. And to speculate.
Ruben Sprich / Reuters
DAVOS, Switzerland — Well before the piano bar at the Hotel Europe — the main after-hours party hub for attendees of the World Economic Forum — started to heat up for the night, piano player Barry Colson was ebulliently high-fiving a handful of the movers and shakers who had begun to trickle into the venue.
It was Tuesday night, the eve of the forum's first official day, and five days after the Swiss National Bank lifted a cap on its currency, sending the Swiss franc skyrocketing more than 15% in mere hours. The piano bar was set to host a number of events throughout the week, including this evening, when it would swell to over a hundred people crowding around Colson to hear him play an hours-long slew of American oldies.
But it wasn't the spirit of anticipation and admiration that Colson was celebrating — it was the rise of the Swiss currency. Its sudden increase had just elevated him a little closer to the wealth of those who surrounded his piano, though not anywhere near them at all, really. There were more than a few billionaires here.
"I made three grand more already this month than last year, all off the franc!" shouted Colson, a Canadian who has a monthlong residency at the Hotel Europe around forum time. He shared a high-five with a nearby partygoer, then both held hands aloft in a victory pose for a photo.
"The people here," he said, motioning to the hotel's bar staff, "they're all over the moon!"
The next evening, one of the revelers who'd heard Colson croon Don McLean's "American Pie" to a crowd of swaying VIPs 24 hours earlier praised the Swiss franc's jump. It meant an unexpected post-Christmas bonus for him and his Geneva-based colleagues.
"Oh, it's wonderful!" said the public relations executive in a taxi back from one of the many caviar-and-champagne-fueled parties that dot this idyllic Alpine town during the forum. "It's fantastic. I just got a 15% raise!"
In a handful of shops that line the town's main promenade, workers were thrilled at their respective raises, but also a little worried about what the franc's increased value would mean for tourists coming to town after the WEF concludes on Saturday.
"For us it's very nice," said Tina Wilhelm, the proprietor of McPaperLand, a stationery and toy store near the "protest" area of Davos, where activists are corralled during the WEF and allowed to make their issues known at the opposite end of town from the Congress Centre. "But for tourists, we have a lot from Germany and France; it is now more expensive. Already to ski it is 70 or 80 francs. Then, if you want to eat up there it's another 120 francs. We hope they still come."
(Today, one Swiss franc is worth $1.14. It was trading almost exactly equal to the dollar prior to the Swiss National Bank's surprise decision.)
A steady stream of customers filed into the Migrolino market, just down the promenade. Along with the Pronto Co-op grocery chain, it was among some of the larger businesses in town that cut the prices on their items after the franc rose, in a bid to encourage tourism in the area once the forum's millionaire and billionaire visitors leave town.
"It's great," said the Migrolino's smiley store manager, who identified himself only as Sandro. The franc's sudden rise is "much better than all the other things going on in the world. People have already bought their apartments for the forum this year, so they come and spend. But after and next year, it might go down."
Indeed, for those who make their money outside of the country and were merely stopping through for the annual gathering of the global business and political elite, the currency's rise sparked conjecture and indifference. Davos and the surrounding Alp towns are notoriously expensive, especially when the WEF comes to town, but most attendees are either fabulously wealthy or able to pass on their expenses to a company or government. In many cases, they're both.
A basic hotel room with scant amenities can go for 600 francs a night during the WEF. A stick of deodorant at the local pharmacy costs 16 francs, and it will set you back 120 francs to have your hair shampooed and blow-dried at the town's main salon, if you so choose. Need a ride to Klosters, Davos' neighbor town 7.5 miles to the northeast where hundreds of forum participants stay? That will be a staggering 100 francs, not including tip.
Still, you were hard-pressed to find anyone really complaining too much about the currency's sudden increase.
"We booked everything in advance and paid for it in advance," said Ben Rattray, CEO of crowdsourcing petition website Change.org. "So I didn't really notice."
Perched at a coffee bar inside the Congress Centre, Natalie Jaresko, Ukraine's finance minister, noted that the owner of her favorite shop in Klosters, the Pine Cone, had bemoaned the franc's increase and its potential impact on the the already slow tourist season the region was experiencing due to a lack of snow. But here at the forum, she said, attendees didn't seem too worried.
"It hasn't affected me very much," Jaresko told BuzzFeed News, as two nearby women in full-length mink coats and brightly patterned Louis Vuitton silk scarfs angled for the bartender's attention to score their free banana smoothies and cappuccinos.
Noting the women's smoothies, Jaresko added, "We get all of this free food at the WEF, so maybe it's costing them more. But I don't think it's affecting many people attending here."
Free food and booze is ubiquitous at a number of many official WEF-sanctioned events, as well as, of course, the countless — perhaps thousands — of parties, offsite panels, country-sponsored lunch buffets (the "Make in India" lunch appears most popular), and marketing pop-ups ("activations, in marketer speak) that overtake nearly every square inch of town.
Expense accounts abound, so individuals may not feel the rapid drain of their bank balances all that acutely. But what about companies, many of whom deploy small armies to man their activations at various Davos branding pop-up hot spots like the Pepsico Café (known throughout the rest of the year as Schneider's), where everything on the menu, from pizza to pasta to sandwiches, is made from ingredients of Pepsi products, or Ernst & Young's networking outpost, EYHaus, at the Hilton Garden Inn?
At least one Fortune 50 company's chair didn't seem all that concerned with the currency rise's effect on the week's total bill, but more with the economics behind it.
"I was traveling to Switzerland on the day it was announced," Steve Almond, global chair of Deloitte, told BuzzFeed News. "It made me think, Do markets behave rationally? It reminded me of some of the causes that led to the global financial crisis."
Others harbored a more micro and rather mystifying theory on just what was behind the timing of the franc's rise. One attendee, wishing to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from the forum, said he'd heard some attendees express shock that the WEF's founder and global big shot, Klaus Schwab, once described by The New Yorker as probably the most connected man in the world, couldn't convince the head of the Swiss National Bank to delay the big currency decision until after the forum had concluded.
It's a revealing theory, one that ascribes almost supernatural power and influence to Schwab, But perhaps, after breathing too much thin Alpine air and experiencing the dizzying display of global power and wealth Schwab's people manage to put on each year, you can't blame some for seeing the WEF's leader in near mythical terms.
But cooler heads dismissed such talk. "There's no way that could be true," said Warren Fernandez, editor of the Straits Times, Singapore's largest newspaper, and a media leader at the WEF. "There's just way too much riding on that decision. It's too significant."
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The fast food giant is still in a sales slump in the U.S., while international operations suffered from a weak European economy, Russian sanctions and supplier problems in Asia.
Mike Blake / Reuters
"Our results declined as unforeseen events and weak operating performance pressured results in each of our geographic segments," CEO Don Thompson said in a release.
McDonald's CEO Don Thompson
Adrees Latif / Reuters
But it wasn't just a currency thing. Globally, same-store sales fell 1%, thanks to "negative guest traffic in all major segments."
Rest in peace, dear friend.
The page you always skipped to as a kid.
BONUS: That little girl's sweet overalls.
What’s it like to be a man at Davos? BuzzFeed News investigates.
Ruben Sprich / Reuters
Tewodros Ashenafi, Southwest Holdings.
Miriam Elder/BuzzFeed
Sergei Dreznin, spouse.
Miriam Elder/BuzzFeed
Herman Bulls, Jones Lang Lasalle.
Miriam Elder/BuzzFeed
RIP, purveyor strange gadgets you don’t need but inexplicably desire. The catalogue retailer cited the changing retail environment for its demise.
Ammon Beckstrom / Via flic.kr
The iconic in-flight magazine SkyMall filed for bankruptcy today, saying the increasingly competitive, constantly changing retail environment had pushed it out of business.
The magazine has struggled to keep up with changing technology, continuing to focus its business on hawking kitschy, often useless items for sale from the back seat pockets of airplanes while its customers transitioned to buying online and with their mobile phones.
SkyMall was a popular diversion during long flights, entertaining people with pages and pages of frivolous products like yeti statues, cat toilets, and face exercisers. But that changed: "With the increased use of electronic devices on planes, fewer people browsed the SkyMall in-flight catalog," said CEO Scott Wiley in court filings. The lifting of regulations that prohibited using cell phones during takeoff and landing was among the magazine's final death knells.
Wiley said the costs of printed products have also made carrying the magazine "unattractive" for airlines. Delta terminated its contract with SkyMall in August.
The bankruptcy filing was first reported by the Wall Street Journal .
SkyMall's revenue was sliced almost in half after the rapid rise of mobile phone and Internet use on airplanes, falling from $33.7 million in 2013 to $15.8 million in the first nine months of 2014.
Leaking money, the magazine has been passed among several private equity firms and media companies. Xhibit Corp bought the company in 2013.
George W. Bush’s signature education reform turned standardized testing into a multi-billion dollar industry. But with change approaching, those making money from the system say the good times will continue.
SAUL LOEB/AFP / Getty Images
At the center of what is gearing up to be the biggest political battle over American education in decades, leaders across the political spectrum are calling loudly for the end of the test as we know it. Standardized testing was shaped by George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act into a central pillar of the American education system — a federal mandate on which the fate of low-performing schools rested.
But the 13-year-old No Child Left Behind is in the process of being dismantled, and lawmakers' first priority is to to change the standardized testing regime. They plan to remove many of the high stakes attached to tests, slash the number of exams students must take each year, and even, under some proposals, eliminate No Child Left Behind's central mandate, that students must be tested every year.
But the testing industry — a multibillion-dollar market built, in large part, on the shoulders of No Child Left Behind — isn't worried.
Thirteen years after the law was enacted, widespread testing is so ingrained in the American education system the companies who profit from it see little threat from plans to remake elementary assessment. No matter what the federal government decides, experts say, states are likely to keep annual testing around in some form or another, likely with high stakes attached to them.
For the companies that rule the testing world — Pearson, which has a 40% market share in the industry, McGraw-Hill, and a handful of large nonprofits — No Child Left Behind is already an afterthought. They are riding the high of the huge revenue boost created by implementation of the Common Core standards, and expect demand to increase in 2015 as states and school districts look to develop new and innovative types of assessments and tools to analyze their students' results.
Some experts said they even saw potential for the testing industry to see a boost from a new version of No Child Left Behind.
"I don't see things changing for us much in terms of the size of our business," said John Oswald, the vice president of Educational Testing Service, a large nonprofit test maker. With No Child Left Behind's mandates over, Oswald said, "People are just going to be moving towards other kinds of testing."
In 2002, when it was signed into law by George W. Bush, No Child Left Behind was unarguably a boon for testing companies. The law required new, different tests, and lots of them: enough for students to take a test every year from grades three through eight, and once in high school. The federal government pumped tens of millions of dollars into each state's budget — from 2002 to 2008, annual state spending on tests rose from $423 million to $1.1 billion, according to the Pew Center on the States.
The money was used to develop a battery of data-rich tests that would be used to measure how many students in each grade were "proficient" in reading and math. Unlike in the years before No Child Left Behind, those tests suddenly carried consequences: Schools were graded based on whether they brought enough students up to proficiency each year, and could face increasingly dire consequences if they did not, including possibly being shut down.
A new version of No Child Left Behind would almost certainly remove the federal sanctions that made NCLB's tests high-stakes for schools, which some see as a potential threat to large education and testing companies like Pearson and McGraw-Hill.
Lily Eskelsen García, the president of the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union, said that education companies have long relied on the threats posed to schools that fail tests in order to sell test-aligned curriculum and test-prep materials.
"As the consequences and punishments go up, the profits have gone up astronomically," said García, who is a prominent critic of the industry and of NCLB-style testing. "Schools are frightened of failing. And then a salesman walks into the district and plunks down their products, saying, 'Here's how we can keep you off the failure list.' ... It's a perfect business model."
Scott Marion, an associate director at the Center for Assessment, agreed this could be a danger for McGraw-Hill and Pearson, which sell educational materials alongside their tests. "If [districts] don't feel as much pressure, they may not be as compelled to buy materials," Marion said. "That's definitely a threat. And it could be a good threat — getting rid of test-prep materials would be a great thing for student learning."
But the high-stakes nature of testing is likely to remain in some form, said Marion. "A lot of people point solely at NCLB, but states drive accountability now more than the feds," said Marion. "State legislatures have some pretty tough provisions" for schools that don't succeed on tests.
Experts say that the testing industry sees its future in the Common Core, which began to take hold nationwide in 2011. Adoption of the stringent standards, which are being used by 43 states, necessitated designing new and different types of testing in addition to NCLB exams. Common Core tests function differently than NCLB tests, measuring students against standards of college and career readiness rather than NCLB-era "proficiency." Common Core tests are also designed to measure higher levels of thinking, proponents say.
In the years after the Common Core was widely adopted, the testing industry saw a boom that rivaled that of NCLB: The industry grew 57% from 2010 to 2012, according to the Software and Information Industry Association, a trade group. It now has annual sales of more than $2.5 billion.
As part of the remaking of No Child Left Behind, many lawmakers — even those who want to keep mandatory annual testing — are looking to reduce the number of tests students take each year, saying too much classroom time is devoted to test-taking and test preparation. Even that is unlikely to have much impact on the industry, Oswald said. Revenue from testing is broken into two categories: money that comes from administering tests, and money that comes from creating new ones.
While administrative dollars might drop, Oswald said he expects the demand from states to create new tests to stay the same — and perhaps even increase. Right now, most states that administer Common Core tests use assessments developed by a large group of states, called a consortium. But a recent trend — fueled by growing anti-Common Core sentiment — of states leaving those Common Core testing groups to develop their own exams is likely to mean more contracts and revenue for the testing industry.
That is a trend that could gain traction under a new draft version of No Child Left Behind proposed by ranking Senate Republican Lamar Alexander. Alexander's draft is all about giving power to states rather than the federal government, which will likely mean more states breaking out and developing their own tests — good news for testing companies.
"States are going to be allowed to do some different things. That kind of diversity of marketplace is kind of good for creative and thoughtful companies," Marion said.
There is also increasing demand for so-called "formative" assessments, which are informal tests used by teachers at different points in the year to monitor progress. McGraw-Hill, whose testing arm is second only to Pearson among for-profit companies, has invested in these kinds of tests, as well as in technology and data analytics that allow on-the-go assessment of student performance. Traditional standardized testing has become an increasingly small part of McGraw-Hill's business, said Jeff Livingston, who heads education policy for the company, instead replaced by more creative types of assessment.
McGraw-Hill is betting that the next time Congress considers an elementary education act, traditional testing will be a thing of the past. "The notion of having to stop class and give a state exam will be ridiculous," Livingston said. "There will be so much info available digitally in real time that teachers will always have a sense of where the student is as they're interacting with lessons."
