Along with serving as a hub for the tech industry, San Francisco is also home to some of the country’s best restaurants. Unfortunately, the city’s success has led to skyrocketing rent costs that are pricing out the low-income residents who staff these eating establishments. So with a high demand for fine dining but a small pool of potential employees, local restaurateurs have begun to search for ways to save on service without compromising quality.
The result is that more and Continue reading
The e-commerce site Etsy is almost entirely powered by millions of independent sellers who offer everything from vintage clothes to freshly made slime. A good number of these entrepreneurs make their living by selling stuff on the site, which explains the anger that many of them felt towards a recent policy change at the company. Instead of collecting a transaction fee of 3.5 percent of sales, Etsy now plans to take a 5 percent cut of both sales and Continue reading
In recent years, millions of consumers have grown accustomed to the convenience of online shopping. Along with enjoying wide selections and free home delivery, e-commerce customers often don’t pay sales tax for items purchased online. However, that last fact could soon change thanks to a new Supreme Court ruling.
The decision reverses a previous ruling that prevented companies from collecting sales tax in states where they had no physical presence. Given that online retailers aren’t constrained by borders, though, a Continue reading
Although founded in the 1950s as the International House of Pancakes, for more than 40 years consumers have known the breakfast chain better as IHOP. For most companies, gaining this kind of brand recognition with a simple acronym would be a dream come true. Last week, however, IHOP announced that its “P” was changing into a “b,” lowercase and all. And yesterday the chain revealed the meaning behind the switch: it turns out the “b” stands for “burgers.”
The announcement Continue reading
Late last year, Snapchat unveiled a number of changes to the design of its immensely popular photo and video sharing platform. The idea behind the switch was to separate content produced by a user’s friends from content made by media companies and celebrities. In practice, however, this amounted to Snapchat splitting their users’ feeds in two.
The social media reaction to the redesign started out negative and only got worse as time passed. Along with the more than 1.25 million Continue reading
From picking up apples to distressing jeans, automation is spreading to almost every business you can imagine. And if you happen to live in the Boston area, you could swing by the new restaurant Spyce today and have your lunch prepared by robots. This automated eatery is the result of a partnership between a group of young engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and renowned chef Daniel Boulud. Together these intrepid entrepreneurs claim they have created “the world’s Continue reading
The average person spends 2 hours and 25 minutes per day on their smartphone. Put another way, that amounts to about 2,617 daily interactions with their device in the form of taps, clicks and swipes. What’s more, a significant amount of the time people spend on their smartphone occurs when they’re at work. While these statistics might surprise some, they come as no shock to Jason Brown, an advertising CEO who has declared war on using these distracting gadgets in Continue reading