Despite 40 years of feline imagery, despite the protestation of thousands of anguished fans, despite her very name — Hello Kitty, it turns out, is not a cat.
She is “a friend.”
A “little girl.”
A “perpetual third-grader” living outside of London with her twin sister and parents, eating apple pie and celebrating a Nov. 1 birthday.
But never — never — an actual cat.
American adults under age 30 hate cash so much that 51 percent of them will use plastic, even for purchases amounting to less than $5. That’s according to a survey released on Wednesday by CreditCards.com.
The older you are, the likelier you are to whip out cash, rather than a debit card or credit card, the study found. Seventy-seven percent of Americans 50 or older prefer cash for purchases of under $5.
Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to use cash for small purchases, and both parties’ followers are more favorably inclined toward cash than political independents. That may have less to do with political inclinations than the fact that independents tend to be younger.
How do you get young people to care about recycling?
Free burgers couldn’t hurt.DDB Stockholm and McDonald’s collaborated on a campaign in Sweden which allows customers to pay for hamburgers, cheeseburgers and even Big Macs with recycled cans. Billboards placed around Stockholm announce the campaign with a roll of plastic bags that can be used to collect cans for recycling. Each bag also explains the custom pricing for the promotion: 10 cans nets you a hamburger or cheeseburger, while 40 will get you a Big Mac. The billboards are mostly centered around parks or summer festival areas, where, as DDB Stockholm puts it, “you’ll find a lot of young people with empty drink cans and empty wallets.”
When I talk to folks at Dropbox, they’re eager to tell me about how different people are using its file-sharing service: the musician, the photographer, the professor, the startup founder. They like to talk about new features, like password-protected links and the remote wipe tool that lets you remove files from a lost computer.
But what they save for the end of our meeting, almost like an afterthought, are the two numbers that traditionally meant the most for a data storage service: how many gigabytes you can store, and at what price.
As it turns out, these numbers look at lot better than they used to. On Wednesday, the company slashed the price of a gigabyte by 90 percent on Dropbox Pro, the paid version of its signature consumer product. Up until now, users paid $9.99 per month to store up to 100 gigabytes of data. Now, for that same price, they can store one terabyte.
Burger King is going to have it Tim Hortons’ way, and Warren Buffett will be their server today – or at least their financier.
The Burger King deal seems to be one part tax inversion and one part market diversification, but critics have focused mostly on the former. With the combined company moving its headquarters to Ontario, Burger King is set to join the ranks of corporate expatriates.
Democrats are none too pleased. “Burger King’s decision to abandon the United States means consumers should turn to Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers or White Castle sliders,” declared Sen. Sherrod Brown. “Burger King has always said ‘Have it Your Way’; well my way is to support two Ohio companies that haven’t abandoned their country or customers.”
Dealing a blow to employers, the California Court of Appeal issued a new ruling on August 12, 2014 requiring companies to reimburse employees for work-related uses of personal cell phones. The decision applies to employees cell phone plans with both unlimited minutes and limited minutes, and requires companies to pay a “reasonable percentage” of the employees’ cell phone bills if the phones or mobile devices were required to make work-related calls.
The case in this instance, was brought by a class-action of approximately 1,500 service managers against Schwan’s Home Service, Inc. , a grocery-delivery service. In the case, the California Court of Appeal determined that when an employee makes work-related calls on a personal cell phone, they incur expenses that the California Labor Code requires the employer to reimburse. The court determined that employers may not pass on those expenses to employees, even if the employee uses an unlimited plan, or expensive/high cost plans.
According to earlier Court decisions involving employee reimbursements, Courts have permitted both actual and lump sum reimbursements, as long as the employer provides “some method or formula” to identify what payment is being issued to compensate the employee for the expense reimbursement.
The Court’s new ruling has meaningful ramifications for all kinds of wireless data, text, and other plans that employees use, including wireless services that have data caps or throttled services. The new ruling could potentially eventually spill over into homes wireless services, when work is performed off-site at the direction or convenience of the employer.
v.18 n. 34 – Released August 25, 2014
Since June, workers started facing disciplinary action if they used more than 60 minutes of bathroom time over 10 days, according to a government complaint. That’s an average of about six minutes a day. Workers are expected to use the bathroom during their lunch or other scheduled breaks during the day — a total of 1 hour in all.
On the other hand, if workers do not use the bathroom during working hours, they can earn $1 a day. CEO Steven Kersten said last month the company gave out 25 gift cards.Workers marched last Monday in Chicago carrying a toilet, a symbol of their struggle with WaterSaver Faucet Co.Union representative Nick Kreitman said the company tracks how often employees swipe in to use the bathrooms and has spreadsheets on every employee’s bathroom use.
He filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board in June claiming WaterSaver unfairly disciplined 19 workers for excessive bathroom visitation.
The economic recovery may be continuing, but small business owners aren’t ready to put the rose-colored glasses back on.
According to an exclusive CNNMoney-Manta survey released Tuesday, 28% of small business owners said the economy is the “biggest challenge” they’re currently facing, topping issues like sales, regulations and financing.
The survey polled over 1,500 small business owners across the country. Even those experiencing revenue growth are hesitant to test their luck. “We’ve done well as a small business, [and] banks are willing to lend us money,” said Victoria Aguilar, the founder of a small law and consulting firm. “But is it safe to bring on another employee?”
Anyone who has even breathed in the vicinity of a website redesign knows that there is no more perfect time for every single site user to say exactly what they think about the terrible, horrible changes that never should have been made in the first place. Now consider Facebook FB, with its 1.23 billion subscribers, most of whom feel quite proprietary about the site. Who wants to mess with a billion avid users?
Margaret Gould Stewart does. As Facebook’s director of product design, it’s her job to make sure the site’s latest layout changes don’t tilt the love-hate Facebook equation too far toward “hate.” The Silicon Valley veteran, who led user experience teams at YouTube and Google before joining Mark Zuckerberg’s crew, says that designing for the masses brings up particular challenges: Any pixel tweak could rankle half the population of the internet. Here’s how she does it
Dispatches From The Front 