Drive-thrus were developed in the 1950s to make fast-food even faster. Drive-thrus have been surging in popularity—nearly 40% of consumers reported they’re using the drive-thru more often. To stay competitive, providing solid drive-thru service can be make or break for a restaurant.
Traditionally, India’s best and brightest tech talent has emigrated to the United States for lucrative job opportunities. But now they’re putting their entrepreneurial spirit and engineering skills to use at home. VICE correspondent Krishna Andavolu heads to the city of Bangalore to explore what may indeed be the world’s next Silicon Valley.
Imagine Nike without the swoosh, McDonald’s with no golden arches, or Apple without the apple. Trademarks and patents can make or break a company. In the U.S. alone, intellectual property-intensive industries contribute trillions of dollars to the economy every year, and IP has become a key battleground between the world’s biggest economic powers, the U.S. and China.
The yield curve was once just a wonky graph for academics and policymakers. But in recent years it has become a way to forecast looming recessions. The curve has helped predict every recession over the past 50 years. That means the curve accurately predicted even largely unforeseen downturns like the dot-com bubble of 2001 and the Great Recession in 2007. As a result, news of yield curve inversions can now send markets tumbling. Policymakers keep a close eye on even small changes in the curve’s composition. So how did this simple graph showing U.S. Treasury bond interest rates grow into one of the most reliable recession indicators we have? And what does a yield curve inversion really mean?
If 2019 was the unofficial summer of hard seltzer, no brand made a bigger splash than White Claw. Sales of the brand were up 250% since it was introduced in 2016 and White Claw is the #1 brand fronting a $1 billion industry. White Claw isn’t just seltzer with a spirit like vodka added to it. It’s actually brewed like beer. It’s made with a mixture of gluten-free grains and sugars. That mixture is fermented into alcohol, which is then purified to remove odors, colors and tastes. It then mixes that base with water and other flavors, which keeps the alcohol percentage lower than that of a spirit or wine drink. But White Claw is just one of many brands enjoying the recent growth in demand for hard seltzer. Part of the reason for their popularity is simple: hard seltzers are comparable to beer in terms of alcohol percentage but tend to have fewer calories and carbs. This proves to be a strong selling point, with hard seltzer brands becoming very good at pushing that message to the masses. Hard seltzer holds 3.4% of the total share of the beer, flavored malt beverages and cider market, but the dramatic increase in popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed. Big beer has entered the playing field. Anheuser-Busch (AB INBEV), the big beer giant behind Bud Light and Natural Light, acquired what’s now known as Bon + Viv from Nick Shields, the so-called founding father of spiked seltzer, in 2016. In August 2019 they introduced Natural Light Seltzer to their portfolio and sold about 480,000 12-packs in three months. White Claw’s biggest competitor is Boston Beer Company’s Truly, which grew sales 177% in 2019. The company says Truly is now larger than established beer brands like Stella Artois and Blue Moon. But what does the added competition mean for White Claw?
When the most powerful executives in the world have a problem they just can't crack, many of them turn to McKinsey - a prestigious and secretive consulting firm that has been influencing business and government decisions for decades. But now, as consumers require more transparency, the company has been thrust into the spotlight.
The next Industrial Revolution is upon us, and scientists, entrepreneurs, and policymakers are warning of an imminent paradigm shift in the future of work. In partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations, VICE talks to industry leaders and laborers to learn how radical developments in automation and artificial intelligence are set to change the world of work as we know it.
Chick-fil-A has long dominated the chicken sandwich category in fast food. After Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen launched its own version of the chicken sandwich, other fast food chains like Wendy's and Shake Shack got into the battle. McDonalds is testing a new chicken sandwich in Houston and Knoxville, and analysts have predicted the fast food chain will launch its chicken sandwich sometime in 2020. Who's winning the chicken sandwich wars and what will 2020 hold?
The global economy is in crisis. The exponential exhaustion of natural resources, declining productivity, slow growth, rising unemployment, and steep inequality, forces us to rethink our economic models. Where do we go from here? In this feature-length documentary, social and economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin lays out a road map to usher in a new economic system. A Third Industrial Revolution is unfolding with the convergence of three pivotal technologies: an ultra-fast 5G communication internet, a renewable energy internet, and a driverless mobility internet, all connected to the Internet of Things embedded across society and the environment. This 21st century smart digital infrastructure is giving rise to a radical new sharing economy that is transforming the way we manage, power and move economic life. But with climate change now ravaging the planet, it needs to happen fast. Change of this magnitude requires political will and a profound ideological shift.
When Amazon pursued the rights to a “Lord of the Rings” series in 2017, the company knew it would have to overcome some major obstacles to lure the J.R.R. Tolkien estate to its video-streaming platform. Amazon was a relative newcomer in video, with no track record of shepherding a blockbuster series. HBO, meanwhile, could tout its long history of hits, most notably “Game of Thrones,” a similarly epic series based on fantasy novels with a rabid fan base. Netflix, with more than 100 million subscribers, pioneered the on-demand model with hits such as “House of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black.” And not to be ignored, Apple was also in on the negotiations to acquire the rights for the upcoming TV show, according to people familiar with the matter. Amazon didn’t have much by way of Hollywood cred. What it had was the richest person on the planet in CEO Jeff Bezos, a big “Lord of the Rings” fan, who was promising the Amazon Studios team a huge budget to nab the series, a prequel to Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring.” But money alone wasn’t going to separate Amazon from the pack — Amazon’s $250 million offer wasn’t even the highest bid for the show’s rights, according to a person familiar with the matter. The ultimate selling point, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations, related to Amazon’s original business from over two decades ago: books. The Tolkien estate was convinced that in promoting the series, Amazon could sell truckloads of Tolkien’s fantasy novels, including “The Hobbit” and “The Silmarillion” as well as “The Lord of the Rings.” During meetings with the Tolkien estate and publisher HarperCollins, Amazon’s Sharon Tal Yguado, who was hired from Fox in 2017, demonstrated a near encyclopedic knowledge of Tolkien’s characters, stories and geography, said the people, who asked not to be named because the talks were private. Amazon’s ability to connect content to commerce won over the Tolkien estate. But just in case, to seal the deal, Amazon sent representatives of the Tolkien estate and its law firm, Greenberg Glusker, several crates of brand-new Amazon Echo speakers. Tolkien’s people were flattered, though they also joked that Amazon delivered the home assistants to eavesdrop on the negotiations, two of the people said. The “Lord of the Rings” series will start production in the next two years. The huge investment in a TV series has made Hollywood wonder just how much Bezos will spend on content. So far, Amazon has dabbled across the TV spectrum, with original content such as “Lord of the Rings,” a growing back catalog of movies and shows, as well as live sports from the National Football League and the Premier League. Just last month, Bezos was spotted chatting with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell at the Super Bowl, a reminder that Amazon has several opportunities in the coming years to make a big splash in America’s most lucrative sport. Meanwhile, The New York Post reported Thursday that Amazon is nearing a $3.5 billion deal to acquire the YES network, the regional sports network in New York that carries Yankees games.
Since its 1984 launch in Michael Dell's dorm , Dell has evolved from a PC maker to a $90 billion in revenue and services in storage, servers, cloud infrastructure and data security. Since then, CEO, Michael Dell has taken his company public, private and then public again as it tried to keep up with changing consumer and business customer needs. Dell's first IPO happened in 1988 when “Dell Computer Corp.” went public at $8.50 a share with a market capitalization of $85 million. In 1992, Michael Dell became the youngest Fortune 500 CEO at 27. By 2001, Dell had overtaken Compaq as the world’s largest PC maker. But by 2013, demand for PCs stalled as tablets and smartphones became more popular. Later that year, Michael Dell took the company private. In 2015, Dell purchased data storage company EMC, a deal that still stands as the largest technology acquisition of all time. In 2018, Dell returned to the public markets as Dell Technologies.
Sweetgreen is now the restaurant world's first "unicorn," valued at over $1 billion. Started by three college friends out of their dorm room at Georgetown University, the salad company has 91 locations with more in the works and is vying to become the digital food platform of the future. Introducing The Upstarts, a new series about the companies you love that came out of nowhere and are now everywhere. Sweetgreen is the first-ever unicorn salad start-up, luring lunchtime lines across the country with its millenial- and Gen Z-friendly $12 salads. Now, the brand that brought the farm-to-table trend to fast-casual dining wants to be "the Starbucks of salads." "If I had told you 25 years ago, when Starbucks only had a few locations, that someday it would be a global phenomenon … nobody would have believed that. ... But, that's what happened," Sweetgreen investor and billionaire Steve Case told CNBC. Today, Starbucks has a market value of nearly $90 billion. "And so that's what we feel with Sweetgreen." Like Starbucks, Sweetgreen started with a single store. The brand was founded in 2007 after then-Georgetown students Jonathan Neman, Nicolas Jammet, and Nathaniel Ru (who met in an entrepreneurship class) got tired of the unhealthy and uninspiring food options around campus and decided to do something about it. "The most delicious food, the coolest food … was all the least healthy," Jammet tells CNBC Make It. "None of them made us feel that good, and we wanted to solve that problem." Neman, Jammet and Ru, all now 33, settled on the concept for Sweetgreen — fast but healthy meals that taste good and feature ingredients from local farmers — before they'd even finished taking their finals, and they hosted taste tests of future menu items with other students in Jammet's dorm room. "We even had these little anonymous surveys people could fill out," Jammet tells CNBC Make It. (An early iteration of the chain's Guacamole Greens salad was the most popular dish then, he says, and it remains one of the store's biggest fan favorites.) The friends raised over $300,000 from 50 investors — mainly family and friends — and three months after graduating, opened the first Sweetgreen in a 560-square-foot shack near the Georgetown University campus. The bathroom was bigger than the kitchen, Ru and Jammet remember. "We really had no idea what we were doing," Jammet says.
VICE on HBO looks at factors that led to the 2008 financial crisis and the efforts made by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Bank of New York President Timothy Geithner, and Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke to save the United States from an economic collapse. The feature-length documentary explores the challenges these men faced, as well as the consequences of their decisions.
Dec.19 -- Hank Paulson, chairman and founder of the Paulson Institute, former U.S. Treasury secretary, and former chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., talks about how the Watergate scandal impacted his career, fighting climate change, expanding the business for Goldman Sachs in China, and trying to save Lehman Brothers during the financial crisis. He appears on "The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations." The interview was recorded Oct. 2 in Washington.
Blue Bottle Coffee offers drip coffee that costs roughly $5 per cup at more than 75 cafe locations around the world. The company touts its high-quality single-origin, freshly roasted artisanal beans. Based on Nestle's 2017 purchase of a majority stake in Blue Bottle the latter has a valuation of more than $700 million. Before he founded Blue Bottle, James Freeman was a struggling classical musician roasting his own fresh beans as a hobby. Since he was obsessed with drinking the freshest cup of coffee he could find he purchased raw, green coffee beans before heating them himself. Freeman felt that most retail coffee chains over-roasted their beans.
In less than one year, WeWork went from having a $47 billion valuation and being the darling of the venture capital world to needing an $8 billion infusion to avoid running out of money. This is the story of Adam Neumann, Softbank's risky investment, a failed IPO and how we got here.
Motorola Mobility has not wowed customers or reviewers since the Motorola Droid in 2009. Since then, the company has low on the smartphone market share charts. But the announcement of a new folding Razr smartphone has breathed new excitement into the company. It has left onlookers wondering if this phone could pull Motorola Mobility out of obscurity.
Mary Cain’s male coaches were convinced she had to get “thinner, and thinner, and thinner.” Then her body started breaking down. At 17, Mary Cain was already a record-breaking phenom: the fastest girl in a generation, and the youngest American runner to turn professional. In 2013, she was signed by the best track team in the world, Nike’s Oregon Project, run by its star coach Alberto Salazar. Then everything collapsed. Her fall was just as spectacular as her rise, and she shares that story for the first time in the Video Op-Ed above. Instead of becoming a symbol of girls’ unlimited potential in sports, Cain became yet another standout young athlete who got beaten down by a win-at-all-costs culture. Girls like Cain become damaged goods and fade away. We rarely hear what happened to them. We move on. The problem is so widespread it affected the only other female athlete featured in the last Nike video ad Cain appeared in, the figure skater Gracie Gold. When the ad came out in 2014, like Cain, Gold was a prodigy considered talented enough to win a gold medal at the next Olympics. And, like Cain, Gold got caught in a system where she was compelled to become thinner and thinner. She developed disordered eating to the point of imagining her own death. “America loves a good child prodigy story, and business is ready and waiting to exploit that story, especially when it comes to girls,” said Lauren Fleshman, who ran for Nike until 2012. “When you have these kinds of good girls, girls who are good at following directions to the point of excelling, you’ll find a system that’s happy to take them. And it’s rife with abuse.” We don’t typically hear from the casualties of these systems — the girls who tried to make their way in this system until their bodies broke down and they left the sport. It’s easy to focus on bright new stars, while forgetting about those who disappeared. We fetishize these athletes, but we don’t protect them. If they fail to pull off what we expect them to, we abandon them. But Mary Cain’s story isn’t over. By speaking out, she’s making sure of that.
The Mandalorian is the most popular show on Disney+ — and also the biggest television series overall right now. A big part of that is Baby Yoda. He’s cute, charming, and makes us want to watch week-after-week. He’s also a way for Disney to sell merchandise and capitalize on a character that immediately makes us go, “I want it.”
Open-source software powers nearly all the world’s major companies. This software is freely available, and is developed collaboratively, maintained by a broad network that includes everyone from unpaid volunteers to employees at competing tech companies. Here’s how giving away software for free has proven to be a viable business model.