Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged Costco

Rss Feed Group items tagged

maddieireland334

What Costco's New Wages Say About the Health of the American Economy - 0 views

  •  
    The company's pay hike might be a sign that employers will start paying their workers more in order to hold onto them. Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > Bourree Lam is an associate editor at The Atlantic.
Javier E

No masks allowed: stores turn customers away in US culture war | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • On Thursday, Vice reported on a Kentucky convenience store that put up a sign reading: “NO Face Masks allowed in store. Lower your mask or go somewhere else. Stop listening to [Kentucky governor Andy] Beshear, he’s a dumbass.”
  • Another sign was posted by a Californian construction store earlier this month encouraging hugs but not masks. In Illinois, a gas station employee who put up a similar sign has since defended herself, arguing that mask-wearing made it hard to differentiate between adults and children when selling booze and cigarettes.
  • “I work for Costco and I am asking this customer to put on a mask because that is company policy,” says a Costco employee in one video. “And I’m not doing it because I woke up in a free country,” replies the man filming him.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “A warped freedom obsession is killing us,” said the writer Anand Giridharadas, in reference to those coughing in the faces of others in the name of freedom
  • It is, of course, a minority of people willfully misinterpreting what freedom means – freedom to choose, until the choice is one that they do not like
  • In Franklin D Roosevelt’s famous 1941 Four Freedoms speech, he detailed that, yes, Americans are owed a right to freedom of speech and expression and to worship whom they please – but he also mentioned the freedom from fear
Javier E

Quinoa should be taking over the world. This is why it isn't. - 0 views

  • Demand started to ramp up in 2007, when Customs data show that the U.S. imported 7.3 million pounds of quinoa. Costco, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods began carrying the seed soon after, and the U.S. bought 57.6 million pounds in 2012, with 2013 imports projected at 68 million pounds
  • And yet, prices are skyrocketing; they tripled between 2006 and 2011, and now hover between $4.50 and $8 per pound on the shelf.
  • Part of it is that Peru itself, already the world’s biggest consumer of quinoa, patriotically started including the stuff in school lunch subsidies and maternal welfare programs.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The Andean smallholders are trying to keep up with the demand. They’ve put more and more land into quinoa in recent years; Bolivia had 400 square miles under cultivation last year, up from 240 in 2009. The arid, cool land that quinoa needs was plentiful, since little else could grow there. And thus far, that trait has made it difficult to grow elsewhere.
  • U.S. industry has shown little interest in developing the ancient grain. Kellogg uses quinoa in one granola bar, and PepsiCo’s Quaker Oats owns a quinoa brand, but the biggest grain processors–Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland–say they’ve got no plans to start sourcing it. Monsanto, the world’s largest seed producer, has nothing either.
  • Instead, their research and development dollars are focused entirely on developing newer, more pest-resistant forms of corn, soybeans, wheat, sugar, and other staples. All of those crops have their own corporate lobbying associations, government subsidy programs, and academic departments devoted to maintaining production and consumption. Against that, a few researchers and independent farmers trying to increase quinoa supply don’t have much of a chance.
  • it’s hard for any new crop to make the transition from niche to mainstream.
  • For that reason, quinoa prices are likely to remain volatile for a long while yet. Brigham Young’s Rick Jellen says the lack of research funding for quinoa–relative to the other large crop programs–means that even if they come up with a more versatile strain, it won’t have the resilience to survive an infestation
millerco

Reality is catching up with Trump - everywhere - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • President Trump, in his State of the Union address last week, boasted to the nation about stock market gains: “The stock market has smashed one record after another, gaining $8 trillion and more in value in just this short period of time.”
  • He has boasted about the booming market in tweets no fewer than 54 times since taking office.
  • The Dow Jones industrial average plunged 1,175 points Monday, its biggest one-day point drop in history, following Friday’s beastly 666-point slide. The S&P 500 has lost more than $1 trillion in market value in just three trading days, and the Dow’s 8 percent drop in six trading days wiped out the year’s gains.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Stocks rise and fall, but the recent sell-off shows the ultimate folly of the president’s fact-free existence. For a year, he took credit for stock market gains that were the continuation of a nine-year bull market
  • Now, the market is, arguably, beginning to react to Trump’s actual policies — a tax cut that added fuel to an already strong economy, raising fears it will overheat, causing inflation, higher interest rates and recession.
  • In ways large and small, reality is catching up with Trump.
  • In the same State of the Union address, Trump boasted that “African American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded.” (Never mind that this continued an eight-year trend.) Barely 60 hours later, Trump’s Labor Department reported that this boast was no longer true: Black unemployment swelled to 7.7 percent in January from 6.8 percent in December.
  • Republicans had mocked Nancy Pelosi for saying the cut amounted to “crumbs” for ordinary workers. But on Saturday, House Speaker Paul Ryan tweeted out a message pulled from an Associated Press story: “A secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, PA, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week . . . she said [that] will more than cover her Costco membership for the year.” Amid the social media ridicule that followed — Rep. Joe Kennedy noted that the wealthiest Americans get an extra $3,000 per week — Ryan took down the truth-telling tweet.
Javier E

How the Coronavirus Will Change Young People's Lives - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Generation C includes more than just babies. Kids, college students, and those in their first post-graduation jobs are also uniquely vulnerable to short-term catastrophe. Recent history tells us that the people in this group could see their careers derailed, finances shattered, and social lives upended.
  • With many local businesses closed or viewed as potential vectors of disease, pandemic conditions have already funneled more money to Amazon and its large-scale competitors, including Walmart and Costco.
  • “Epidemics are really bad for economies,”
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • “We’re going to see a whole bunch of college graduates and people finishing graduate programs this summer who are going to really struggle to find work.”
  • People just starting out now, and those who will begin their adult lives in the years following the pandemic, will be asked to walk a financial tightrope with no practice and, for most, no safety net. Fewer of them will be able to turn to their parents or other family members for significant help
  • To gauge what’s in store for job-seekers, it might be most useful to look to a different, more recent kind of disaster: the 2008 financial collapse. More than a decade later, its effects are widely understood to have been catastrophic to the financial futures of those who were in their teens and 20s when it hit.
  • Not only did jobs dry up, but federal relief dollars mostly went to large employers such as banks and insurance companies instead of to workers themselves.
  • investors picked off dirt-cheap foreclosures to flip them for wealthier buyers or turn them into rentals, which has helped rising housing prices far outpace American wage growth.
  • Millennials, many of whom spent years twisting in the wind when, under better circumstances, they would have been setting down the professional and social foundations for stable lives, now have less money in savings than previous generations did at the same age. Relatively few of them have bought homes, married, or had children.
  • Just as the nation’s housing stock moved into the hands of fewer people during the Great Recession, small and medium-size businesses might suffer a similar fate after the pandemic, which could be a nightmare for the country’s labor force.
  • Schoolwork, it turns out, is hard to focus on during a slow-rolling global disaster.
  • American restaurants, which employ millions, have been devastated by quarantine restrictions, but national chains such as Papa John’s and Little Caesars are running television ads touting the virus-murdering temperatures of their commercial ovens,
  • The private-equity behemoth Bain Capital is making plans to gobble up desirable companies weakened by the pandemic. The effect could be a quick consolidation of capital, and the fewer companies that control the economy, the worse the economy generally is for workers and consumers.
  • Less competition means lower wages, higher prices, and conglomerates with enough political influence to stave off regulation that might force them to improve wages, worker safety, or job security.
  • as with virtually all problems, grad school is not the answer to whatever the coronavirus might do to your future.
  • there will be “definitely an increase” in people seeking education post-quarantine, taking advantage of loan availability to acquire expertise that might better position them to build a stable life.
  • those decisions have since worsened their economic strain, while not significantly improving professional outcomes.
  • Private universities may suddenly be too expensive, and frequent plane rides to faraway colleges might seem much riskier. Mass delays will affect things like school budgets and admissions for years, but in ways that are difficult to predict.
  • there is no precedent for a life-interrupting disaster of this scale in America’s current educational and professional structures.
  • What will become of Generation C?
  • Many types of classes don’t work particularly well via videochat, such as chemistry and ecology, which in normal times often ask students to participate in lab work or go out into the natural world.
  • “People with a resource base and finances and so forth, they’re going to get through this a whole lot easier than the families who don’t even have a computer for their children to attend school,”
  • Disasters, he told me, tend to illuminate and magnify existing disadvantages that are more easily ignored by those outside the affected communities during the course of everyday life.
  • Disasters also make clear when disadvantages—polluted neighborhoods, scarce local supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables, risky jobs—have accumulated over a lifetime, leaving some people far more vulnerable to catastrophe than others
  • Children in those communities already have a harder time accessing quality education and getting into college. Their future prospects look dimmer, now that they’re faced with technical and social obstacles and the trauma of watching family members and friends suffer and die during a pandemic.
  • in moments of great despair, people’s understanding of what’s possible shifts.
  • For that to translate to real change, though, it’s crucial that the reactions to the new world we live in be codified into policy. Clues to post-pandemic policy shifts lie in the kinds of political agitation that were already happening before the virus. “Things that already had some support are more likely to take seed,
  • This is where young people might finally be poised to take some control. The 2008 financial crisis appears to have pushed many Millennials leftward
  • When housing prices soared, wages stagnated, and access to basic health care became more scarce, many young people looked around at the richest nation in the world and wondered who was enjoying all the riches. Policies such as Medicare for All, debt cancellation, environmental protections, wealth taxes, criminal-justice reform, jobs programs, and other broad expansions of the social safety net have become rallying cries for young people who experience American life as a rigged game
  • the pandemic’s quick, brutal explication of the ways employment-based health care and loose labor laws have long hurt working people might make for a formative disaster all its own.
  • “There’s a possibility, particularly with who you’re calling Generation C, that their experience of the pandemic against a backdrop of profoundly fragmented politics could lead to some very necessary revolutionary change,”
  • The seeds of that change might have already been planted in the 2018 midterm elections, when young voters turned up in particularly high numbers and helped elect a group of younger, more progressive candidates both locally and nationally.
  • Younger people “aren’t saddled with Cold War imagery and rhetoric. It doesn’t have the same power over our imaginations,”
  • a subset of young voters believes that some American conservatives have cried wolf, deriding everything from public libraries to free doctor visits as creeping socialism until the word lost much of its power to scare.
  • the one-two punch of the Great Recession and the coronavirus pandemic—if handled poorly by those in power—might be enough to create a future America with free health care, a reformed justice system, and better labor protections for working people.
  • But winds of change rarely kick up debris of just one type. The Great Recession opened the minds of wide swaths of young Americans to left-leaning social programs, but its effects are also at least partially responsible for the Tea Party and the Trump presidency. The chaos of a pandemic opens the door for a stronger social safety net, but also for expanded authoritarianism.
  • Beyond politics and policy, the structures that young people have built on their own to endure the pandemic might change life after it, too. Young Americans have responded to the disaster with a wave of volunteerism, including Arora’s internship-information clearinghouse and mutual-aid groups across the country that deliver groceries to those in need.
  • As strong as people’s reactions are in the middle of a crisis, though, people tend to leave behind the traumatic lessons of a disaster as quickly as they can. “Amnesia sets in until the next crisis,” Schoch-Spana said. “Maybe this is different; maybe it’s big enough and disruptive enough that it changes what we imagine it takes to be safe in the world, so I don’t know
anonymous

Why Coronavirus Vaccine Distribution is Taking Longer Than Expected - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Health officials and hospitals are struggling with a lack of resources. Holiday staffing and saving doses for nursing homes are also contributing to delays.
  • In Florida, less than one-quarter of delivered coronavirus vaccines have been used, even as older people sat in lawn chairs all night waiting for their shots. In Puerto Rico, last week’s vaccine shipments did not arrive until the workers who would have administered them had left for the Christmas holiday. In California, doctors are worried about whether there will be enough hospital staff members to both administer vaccines and tend to the swelling number of Covid-19 patients.
  • Compounding the challenges, federal officials say they do not fully understand the cause of the delays. But state health officials and hospital leaders throughout the country pointed to several factors. States have held back doses to be given out to their nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities, an effort that is just gearing up and expected to take several months. Across the country, just 8 percent of the doses distributed for use in these facilities have been administered, with two million yet to be given.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • We’ve taken the people with the least amount of resources and capacity and asked them to do the hardest part of the vaccination — which is actually getting the vaccines administered into people’s arms,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health.Coronavirus Briefing: An informed guide to the global outbreak, with the latest developments and expert advice.Sign UpFederal and state officials have denied they are to blame for the slow rollout. Officials behind Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to fast-track vaccines, have said that their job was to ensure that vaccines are made available and get shipped out to the states. President Trump said in a tweet on Tuesday that it was “up to the States to distribute the vaccines once brought to the designated areas by the Federal Government.”“Ultimately, the buck seems to stop with no one,” Dr. Jha said.These problems are especially worrisome now that a new, more contagious variant, first spotted in Britain and overwhelming hospitals there, has arrived in the United States. Officials in two states, Colorado and California, say they have discovered cases of the new variant, and none of the patients had recently traveled, suggesting the variant is already spreading in American communities.The $900 billion relief package that Mr. Trump signed into law on Sunday will bring some relief to struggling state and local health departments. The bill sets aside more than $8 billion for vaccine distribution, on top of the $340 million that the C.D.C. sent out to the states in installments in September and earlier in December.
  • Over all, Maryland has given nearly 17 percent of its vaccine doses. In a Wednesday appearance on CBS, Gov. Larry Hogan attributed the slow process to challenges across the board — from the federal government not sending as many doses as initially predicted, to the lack of logistical and financial support for local health departments.
  • In a news conference on Wednesday, Operation Warp Speed officials said they expected the pace of the rollout to accelerate significantly once pharmacies begin offering vaccines in their stores. The federal government has reached agreements with a number of pharmacy chains — including Costco, Walmart and CVS — to administer vaccines once they become more widely available. So far, 40,000 pharmacy locations have enrolled in that program.
  • But public health officials warned that reaching these initial groups, who are largely being vaccinated where they live or work, is a relatively easy task. “This is the part where we’re supposed to know where people are,” said Dr. Saad B. Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.
anonymous

U.S. Officials Say Covid-19 Vaccination Effort Has Lagged - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “We know that it should be better, and we’re working hard to make it better,” said Moncef Slaoui, a leader of the federal effort to accelerate vaccine development and distribution.
  • As of Wednesday, more than 14 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines had been sent out across the United States, up from 11.4 million doses on Monday morning. But just 2.1 million people had received their first dose as of Monday morning, according to a dashboard maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • When he takes office on Jan. 20, Mr. Biden said, he will use a law called the Defense Production Act to “order private industry to accelerate the making of the materials needed for the vaccines as well as protective gear.” The Trump administration has already used that law to speed manufacturing, however, and Mr. Biden has given few details about how his plan will be any different. He has promised to administer 100 million shots — or enough for about 50 million people if using the two-dose vaccines — in the first 100 days of his term.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The federal government has reached agreements with a number of pharmacy chains — including Costco, Walmart and CVS — to administer vaccines in their stores and other locations once vaccines become more widely available. So far, 40,000 pharmacy locations have enrolled in that program, General Perna said.“What we should be looking at is the rate of acceleration over the coming weeks,” Dr. Slaoui said, “and I hope it will be in the right direction.”
aleija

The alarming reason people aren't going to drug stores as often - CNN - 0 views

  • People have been filling fewer prescriptions in stores during the pandemic with some doctor's offices closed, many elective procedures on hold and more shoppers switching to mail order. This has also choked off impulse purchases and unplanned items that customers grab when they visit stores to pick up their prescriptions.
  • Visits to drug stores fell around 12.8% from the prior year for the four weeks ending on October 4, according to market research firm IRI.
  • Additionally, some people have been visiting doctors offices and health clinics less often than usual in the pandemic for annual and routine checkups, say experts.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • This has meant fewer people are being diagnosed or treated for health conditions and thus do not need to renew their medications or fill new ones.
  • For someone with high blood pressure or diabetes, "if you miss those medications and your blood pressure gets too high, it could lead to a heart attack or a stroke,"
  • efore the coronavirus hit, Americans shopped an average of 4.4 stores each week, according to consulting firm McKinsey. By late May, that number had dropped to 2.8.
  • For the 31 weeks ending on October 3, sales at drug stores have inched up 2.5% from the same stretch last year, while they have increased 19.9% at grocery stores, according to Nielsen.
  • CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid are trying to fight back by offering home delivery and curbside pickup and improving their food selection.
woodlu

Biden to Announce Expansion of Port of Los Angeles's Hours - The New York Times - 0 views

  • President Biden will announce on Wednesday that the Port of Los Angeles will begin operating around the clock as his administration struggles to relieve growing backlogs in the global supply chains that deliver critical goods to the United States.
  • Mr. Biden is set to give a speech on Wednesday addressing the problems in ports, factories and shipping lanes that have helped produce shortages, long delivery times and rapid price increases for food, televisions, automobiles and much more.
  • The resulting inflation has chilled consumer confidence and weighed on Mr. Biden’s approval ratings. The Labor Department is set to release a new reading of monthly inflation on Wednesday morning.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • brokered a deal to move the Port of Los Angeles toward 24/7 operations, joining Long Beach, which is already operating around the clock, and that they are encouraging states to accelerate the licensing of more truck drivers.
  • On Wednesday, the White House will host leaders from the Port of Los Angeles, the Port of Long Beach, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to discuss the difficulties at ports, as well as hold a round table with executives from Walmart, UPS and Home Depot.
  • Imports for the fourth quarter are on pace to be 4.7 percent higher than in the same period last year, which was also a record-breaking holiday season,
  • Companies are exacerbating the situation by rushing to obtain products and bidding up their own prices.
  • Administration officials acknowledged on Tuesday in a call with reporters that the $1.9 trillion economic aid package Mr. Biden signed into law in March had contributed to supply chain issues by boosting demand for goods, but said the law was the reason the U.S. recovery has outpaced those of other nations this year.
  • Consumer demand for exercise bikes, laptops, toys, patio furniture and other goods is booming, fueled by big savings amassed over the course of the pandemic.
  • The blockages stretch up and down supply chains, from foreign harbors to American rail yards and warehouses.
  • Home Depot, Costco and Walmart have taken to chartering their own ships to move products across the Pacific Ocean.
  • the average anchorage time had stretched to more than 11 days.
  • Companies that had been trying to avoid passing on higher costs to customers may find that they need to as higher costs become longer lived.
  • worsening supplier delivery times and conditions at ports suggested that product shortages would persist into mid- to late next year.
  • governments around the world could help to smooth some shortages and dampen some price increases, for example by encouraging workers to move into industries with labor shortages, like trucking
  • “But to some extent, they need to let markets do their work,” she said.
  • a Transportation Department official gathering information on what the administration could do to address the supply chain shortages had contacted his company. Flexport offered the administration suggestions on changing certain regulations and procedures to ease the blockages, but warned that the problem was a series of choke points “stacked one on top of the other.”
  • from the whole big picture, the supply capacity is really hard to change in a noteworthy way.”
  • The shortages have come as a shock for many American shoppers, who are used to buying a wide range of global goods with a single click, and seeing that same product on their doorstep within hours or days.
  • The political risk for the administration is that shortfalls, mostly a nuisance so far, turn into something more existential. Diapers are already in short supply. As aluminum shortages develop, packaging pharmaceuticals could become a problem,
  • slow deliveries could make for slim pickings this Christmas and Hanukkah.
  • Consumer price inflation probably climbed by 5.3 percent in the year through September, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is expected to show on Wednesday.
  • They often point out that much of the surge has been spurred by a jump in car prices, caused by a lack of computer chips that delayed vehicle production.
  • the pandemic has shut down factories and slowed production around the world. Port closures, shortages of shipping containers and truck drivers, and pileups in rail and ship yards have led to long transit times and unpredictable deliveries for a wide range of products
  • Tesla, for instance, had been hoping to reduce the cost of its electric vehicles and has struggled to do that amid the bottlenecks.
  • the concern is that today’s climbing prices could prompt consumers to expect rapid inflation to last. If people believe that their lifestyles will cost more, they may demand higher wages — and as employers lift pay, they may charge more to cover the cost.
  • If demand slumps as households spend away government stimulus checks and other savings they stockpiled during the pandemic downturn, that could leave purveyors of couches and lawn furniture with fewer production backlogs and less pricing power down the road.
  • If buying stays strong, and shipping remains problematic, inflation could become more entrenched.
  • To get their own orders fulfilled, companies have placed bigger orders and offered to pay higher prices.
1 - 9 of 9
Showing 20 items per page