What I Wrote Last Week
Dick’s Sporting Goods Announced ScoreCard+. Its Loyalty Program Is Now Unnecessarily Complex
Business
He Earns $33 an Hour as a Costco Cashier. Now He’s a Millionaire. Costco is a great example of how companies create a winning culture and deliver outstanding customer experience by first treating its employees right.
Walmart beats Costco at its own game. Once Walmart figures out how to package and sell a membership, its sheer size and breadth of merchandise will be hard to beat. Excluding Sam’s Club, which functions similarly to Costco, Walmart gets 1/3 of its operating income from membership fees. The article made a good point in that if you need anything right away, often time Amazon can’t help, but your local Walmart store can. To a lot of middle-class and high-income households, having a Walmart membership is complementary to Amazon Prime. Costco is great, but it doesn’t do delivery well and it doesn’t have the footprint that Walmart has.
Airport Lounge Crowds and Confusion Infuriate High-Spending Flyers. The lounge operators are between a rock and a hard place. They can’t expand footprint forever because airports have limited space. They want to keep signing up as many credit card users as possible, but at the same time do not want to dilute the experience. There are only so many people that can afford to pay first-class tickets to enter the ultra-premium lougnes such as United Polaris or Delta One. Will we see lounges that can function as a security checkpoint and are located outside of the airports?
Kaiser nurses say AI, workplace surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse. One of the union reps said it best in the article: they are not just call centers, they are also nurses. I get that Kaiser wants to improve efficiency, but it’s ridiculous to reprimand nurses for talking to patients who really need someone to talk to, for more than 15 minutes. This is about delivering care and keeping patients safe. The priority of cost cutting over quality of care not only will get patients hurt, but also will harm nurses mentally. “Nurses also said they get little time between calls even if that call involves speaking with a patient who is suicidal, experiencing a mental health episode, or near death. In years past, nurses got around 10 minutes to finish writing notes in a patient’s chart or collect themselves after a particularly tough call. Today they say they typically get 30 seconds or less when lines are busy, although more at slow times, like late at night, or if they get a manager’s permission after a particularly challenging call. The overall pace they say, can lead to mistakes like missing important cues into a patient’s wellbeing.“
Airlines and Hyperscalers Clamor for Turbines. Only a Few Companies Make the Parts. “Airlines and the hyperscalers have one thing in common: They are desperate for turbines to power their jets and data centers. At the heart of this surging demand are a few companies that manufacture the highly specialized parts. Historically, the industry has been vulnerable to cyclical demand. Aircraft production, for instance, plunged at the onset of the pandemic in 2020, when airlines delayed or canceled aircraft orders. Expanding revenue from the power sector and the less-cyclical defense industry should create some buffers. Demand is currently surging for these blades and vanes. After two years of revenue declines in 2020 and 2021, Howmet’s sales have grown by a double-digit percentage in each of the past four years. In the first quarter, sales to the commercial-aerospace industry rose 20% from a year earlier, while revenue from gas turbines—the types used by data centers—increased 39%. Howmet, which has said its market share of the gas-turbine market is over 50% globally, expects revenue from that segment to double in the next three to five years. ”
Other Stuff That I Find Interesting And So May You
Priced Out: Why Young Locals Can’t Afford To Buy A Home In Vietnam | Insight. An average home in Vietnam costs $300,000. With that amount, you can get a decent house in many cities in the US. However, the average annual income in Vietnam is only $4,000 BEFORE any expenses. A house is simply out of reach for many Vietnamese.
Inside Harvard’s Campaign to Slash Its Own Bureaucracy. It is ironic that the world’s most famous university which is also the factory of world-class economists and business leaders doesn’t know how to hire staff efficiently and how to balance budgets.
First look inside the new Chase Sapphire Lounge at DFW — complete with network’s first whiskey lounge. The lounge war is not ending anytime soon. The bar for any issuer that wants to enter the premium space keeps going up. We’re not talking about one lounge. We’re talking about an ecosystem of lounges across the US. Such an investment is not for every financial institution.
Kansas City, the Smallest World Cup Host, Has the World at Its Feet. “Kansas City offered the national teams not only a welcoming and devoted fan base, but also state-of-the-art practice facilities used by the city’s Major League Soccer team, Sporting Kansas City and its National Women’s Soccer League team, the Kansas City Current. The seed for this moment was planted more than six decades ago when Lamar Hunt, one of Kansas City’s most influential businessmen, became smitten with soccer after watching a match in Dublin. Mr. Hunt, who owned the Kansas City Chiefs, became enthralled by the pageantry and passion of the fans, especially during World Cup tournaments. In 1994, he was instrumental in luring the World Cup to the United States for the first time, but was disappointed that he couldn’t persuade FIFA, the sport’s global governing body, to bring the tournament to Arrowhead Stadium, where the Chiefs play. “Even 20 years after my dad passed away, there was an understanding of how important he was to the development of soccer in the United States, and there was a real feeling that they wanted to bring the games to Lamar Hunt’s favorite stadium,” his son said.”
Stats
Stripe bid $53 billion to buy PayPal.
Minh Quang Duong 
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