Tag: retail

Break out your computers. Rebuilding post-pandemic requires more than hammers and bulldozers

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As we start to emerge from the pandemic, it’s tempting to daydream about all the ways our lives will go back to normal. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. Too many lives were lost. Too many businesses were disrupted or bankrupted. Too many aspects of the infrastructure that we take for granted every day, and which were already weak, have been fundamentally transformed or even destroyed by the impact of COVID-19. What we need to focus on is rebuilding that infrastructure. I’m not talking about bridges, roads, and power plants (although we certainly need to focus on physical infrastructure too). I’m talking about the basic foundation of trust, communication, and interaction in our modern world. I’m talking about code. Online overnight A year ago companies had to reconfigure overnight for a socially-distanced reality that requires connecting in new ways. OK, maybe it took three nights. But it was either that, or shutting down — quite possibly forever. Retailers, including big name-brand chains , got crushed if they weren’t prepared for a rapid transition to digital. In the midst of the crisis, businesses didn’t have the luxury of gradually plotting out and implementing a long-term strategy. They had to restructure their business-critical communications — immediately. Retailers who thought they had years to fend off Amazon suddenly had hours to figure out how to become delivery-only. Bankruptcy filings for businesses with $50M or more in assets soared 194% . Schools who had dabbled with technology found themselves 100% online over a weekend, while 93% of U.S. Read More …

How the Tesla of chicken hit a ludicrous growth mode thanks to ghost kitchens

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Ben Pasternak had a problem. The founder and CEO of alt-meat startup Nuggs had seen plenty of initial buzz and success for his plant-based chicken nuggets, signing on investors that include AgFunder, McCain Foods, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and former Whole Foods CEO Walter Robb since its founding in 2019. But as of mid-2020, the company wasn’t yet in retail stores or sold in any fast-food outlets. Pasternak began brainstorming about how he could get Nuggs into people’s hands, beyond the company’s direct-to-consumer online sales. One idea was to have pop-up food trucks near college campuses, but he quickly realized that would be very tough to scale. “We were just thinking about the customer experience, and the A-plus experience would be to order Nuggs, it arrives 15 minutes later, you can spend $10, and it gets there with french fries and other sides, a drink, and some ketchup,” says chief operating officer Sam Terris. “So we worked backwards from there.” That’s when they landed on ghost kitchens. Euromonitor has estimated that ghost kitchens could be a $1 trillion industry by 2030. The concept has not only been used by established restaurant brands like McDonald’s and Chick-Fil-A experimenting with delivery and food prep efficiency, but it’s also launched a new wave of delivery-only restaurant brands in cities around the country. In Canada, Walmart is testing in-store ghost kitchens that offer restaurant meals from established brands like Quiznos, as well as items from well-known CPG brands like Beyond Meat and Ben & Jerry’s. [Photo: Simulate] Nuggs, however, doesn’t fit into any of those categories. It’s not a new or established restaurant, nor a well-known CPG brand. But the company launched its own ghost kitchen operation in San Francisco last September and has since seen explosive growth. Not only is Nuggs now among UberEats users’ 10 favorite delivery spots in that region, but its delivery orders have increased by more than four times. That’s consistent with everything we’ve been reading about ghost kitchens over the last year, particularly with a pandemic-fueled boost in app-based food delivery, but traffic to the company’s site is also up more than 300%. The company, which is now known as Simulate and whose mission is to develop “advanced nutrition technology,” has its products in retail stores around the country, most notably Whole Foods. Pasternak says the progression from DTC to ghost kitchens to retail gives the brand an advantage over brands trying to just launch in a single sales channel. “We got so much traction over the past year, now launching into retail, it seems that companies that don’t have their own platform first find it very difficult to find traction,” says Pasternak. “Whereas for us, with DTC and cloud kitchens, we have this existing user base, and retail is just another way for them to get the product they’re already familiar with.” Nuggs has now expanded its ghost kitchen options to Los Angeles (with New York coming soon), and both Pasternak and Terris say perhaps the biggest lesson so far has been how the ghost kitchen has emerged as a product-research platform and brand-awareness tool. “With retail and food service, the necessary evil is having these large distributors that aren’t agile at all, which doesn’t allow you to iterate quickly within their systems,” says Pasternak. Read More …

Why Amazon workers in Alabama are trying to unionize

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This article was produced by Capital & Main, an award-winning journalism nonprofit. It is co-published here with permission. The union organizing drive at the mammoth Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama located 20 miles south of Birmingham, Alabama, has the feel of both a social and religious movement. There are five days until the mail-in ballots will be counted to determine whether the company’s 5,800 employees will gain union representation. Last week, organizers and workers gathered at the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union’s scruffy office to go over their final push and to talk to reporters from around the world who have descended upon Birmingham. Jennifer Bates, an African American “learning ambassador” at the Amazon facility—she trains new workers—believes that her courage to fight the corporate giant comes from a spiritual source, “the Almighty, the creator of all things.” She also traces her personal strength to the civil rights movement that rocked Birmingham in the early 1960s. “I really believe that in this organizing drive we are following the foot soldiers who came before us,” she says. Josh Brewer, the union’s lead organizer, is an ordained minister from Michigan who found his way into the labor union movement while trying to ensure his life had purpose, and he was immediately given some of the toughest organizing challenges. Brewer sees the Amazon campaign as a “David vs. Goliath” battle, his biggest career challenge so far. On this day Brewer has one eye on the office television to see if a tornado sweeping through Mississippi and Alabama is going to require moving into the basement, as he reflects on the five-month and 24/7 commitment that he has made to the unionization effort Read More …

The clothes we wear are about to undergo a wild digital revolution

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Imagine an article of clothing that could tell your washing machine how to keep its colors from fading. Imagine a piece of clothing that could warm your body in the winter and cool it down in the summer. Imagine wearing clothes that weren’t designed last year, or last season, but yesterday, in response to that day’s buying patterns. Imagine being able to fully customize every article of clothing in your wardrobe for the same cost as mass-produced items. And imagine a clothing industry that could do all of this while significantly reducing emissions and retaining most of its workforce. Thanks to new advancements in manufacturing, you won’t have to imagine forever. While the clothing we wear today is largely designed, manufactured, and sold in the same way it was 100 years ago, what we wear is expected to change dramatically in the not-so-distant future, thanks to advancements in manufacturing technology. Read More …

Employee surveillance software is here to stay, even when we go back to the office

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For many people, switching to work remote was a hopeful chance to escape the prying eyes of upper management. No longer would they feel pressure to act busy when bosses walked past, or feel guilty about logging into Twitter (even if it is for work purposes). But despite the physical distance, businesses are keeping closer tabs on employees than ever before. The use of performance monitoring tools has jumped significantly over the past year, as managers try to improve team visibility and track output. Even before the crisis, 62% of organizations were using monitoring tools to collect data on employees’ behavior during work hours.  After a year of remote work, those tools have become securely integrated into companies’ day-to-day. Although a return to offices is approaching, managers are unlikely to roll back software that’s provided insight, especially as many businesses will continue to offer work from home as an option. But there’s a fine line between surveillance and management, and there’s an even finer line between legitimate reasons to monitor staff and an illegal intrusion on people’s privacy Read More …