REI CEO Says Closing On Black Friday Is A 'Radical Idea'

REI will be sacrificing one of its top business days when it closes its 143 retail stores on Black Friday to encourage customers to spend time outside.

CEO Jerry Stritzke told HuffPost Live on Wednesday that the decision to close up shop for the day wasn't "made lightly," and admits that "it's a bit of a startling idea from a retail perspective."

"[We] certainly had to think hard about it. This is new news. I haven't spoken to very many of my contemporaries about the issue, but I'm excited by the idea," Stritzke said. "I think it's intriguing that we can create this conversation [about] something so central to our brand and kind of who we are."

This is the first time REI will close on Black Friday, even though the day after Thanksgiving has historically been a "top 10 business day" for the company, according to Stritzke. However, the company's decision exemplifies some retailers' recent opposition to keeping stores open on what is traditionally a family holiday, and the day after.

Online shoppers will still be able to purchase items from REI on Black Friday, though they'll initially be directed to a blackout screen imploring them to explore the outdoors. Online sales aren't the initiative's priority, however.

"It's easier to leave [the website] on than turning it off," Stritzke explained.

Watch Jerry Stritzke's conversation with HuffPost Live in the clip above.

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This Video Game Could Change Business School Forever -- And It's Actually Fun

Imagine you are a new employee at a large airline. You walk into an airport one day and receive an email from your boss. He says the company needs a new strategy, and he wants you to come up with some options. You panic and scramble to find as much information as possible among passengers and employees at the airport before you board your flight.

This is the premise for a new video game called "One Day," developed for Hult International Business School to teach strategy to MBA students. The game is still in development and probably won't be ready for the classroom until next year, but early tests show promise. Not to mention, it's actually fun to play.

While it is now fairly common for video games to teach elementary concepts -- spelling, basic math, typing -- higher education has more or less resisted encroaching technology up to this point. Until recently, higher-level concepts have been harder to program because there may be more than one right answer. "One Day," which its creators say is the first game of its kind, poses some fairly new questions about learning in the digital age and the role of the professor in a modern classroom.

"I’ve been a business school professor for 30 years," said John Beck, whose educational consulting company, North Star Leadership Group, developed "One Day." He lamented that most MBA programs rely on teaching methods honed decades before the personal computing revolution. "For 30 years I’ve been thinking the system is so broken. The case studies model dates from the 1920s, and the lecture model from the 1850s."

In the new model Hult is evaluating -- teaching by video game simulation -- students actually interact with the material, rather than sitting in long lecture sessions or working through historical cases in class.

Hult recently conducted an experiment in London to see just how well the prototype game teaches. Students were given a test of their knowledge of strategy, then half were taught by a professor and the other half played the game, then they were tested again. The results showed "One Day" taught the students just as well, if not slightly better than the lecture professor did.

When North Star let me play the game for myself recently, I enjoyed it. The production quality and entertainment factor don't compare to, say, "Halo," but it's certainly more engaging than your average lecture. The graphics are fairly flat and almost look like they were drawn in MS Paint, but in a kind of pleasing way. It wouldn't be my go-to game on the weekend, but it was fun to spend a day exploring it.

The current version of "One Day," which, again, is just a prototype and only a fraction of what the full course-replacing game will look like, takes a couple of hours to complete. The player gets a task: figure out a new strategy for the fictional airline company by talking to customers and employees, who change every time the game is restarted. Players must also read through available information about the airline industry and company's performance. The player takes notes, and at the end makes a decision about the future of the company.

That said, it's hard. The game requires you to absorb new concepts while also sorting through which information is important and which is not. You don't really get any answers until you play it all the way through, so it's difficult to get right on the first try.

According to Adam Carstens, another of the game's developers, my experience was fairly typical. He told me people often don't do very well their first time playing, but do much better the second time through. 

The obvious question here is whether games are coming to automate professors' jobs. For now, it seems unlikely. 

This is an exciting new frontier in higher education, but Beck says he doesn't think this is the kind of automation that is going to put people out of work. On the contrary, it will free up professors from teaching low-level introductory classes to do more of the kind of work they enjoy, like research and teaching more specialized classed.

"It's a much more human role for teachers," noted Beck. "The rote learning, the basics, it’s pretty straightforward. Teaching to the test can be done by computers."

This Startup Offers Women An Amazing, Affordable and Thoughtful Perk

Not every company can afford to offer Netflix-level year-long maternity leaves. In fact, even Netflix doesn't offer that benefit to all of its workers. Still, there are creative ways to give perks to new moms. 

Domo, a 5-year-old startup based in Utah with a workforce of 600 employees, came up with something pretty innovative.

Every pregnant woman at the company gets $2,000 in gift cards to buy maternity clothes, according to an article by Claire Zillman in Fortune. 

If you've ever had to go to work in an office while pregnant, you will instantly understand why this is awesome.

For those of you who haven't, here's the deal: No one really wants to spend/waste money on maternity clothes -- you only need them for a very limited amount of time and they are expensive. Most of us just sort of muddle through, buying a few things, borrowing a lot of things and making do with stuff in our closet that is stretchy or big.

That's fine when you're home on the weekends, but it's a big bummer at the office, where you want to maintain a professional appearance and often wind up donning some pretty weird garments. Like, oh I don't know, a maternity shirt your cousin wore in the 1990s with a bow at the collar that seems like an OK idea in the morning but makes you feel like a sad, old Christmas present. (That may be something I know about firsthand.)

Domo's chief executive came up with the idea for the perk after his assistant became pregnant, Zillman told Fortune. 

The company, which helps other businesses manage their data, doesn't offer Cadillac-level maternity leave. You get one month at full pay and then six weeks at partial pay. Five or six people have used the clothing benefit so far, Fortune reports.

Would more paid leave probably be preferable to a new wardrobe? Yes, sure. Still, the gift cards are a nice idea and certainly signal to employees that they're valued at a time that can feel very uncertain to a lot of women. And small signals like that add up, making employees more loyal to companies, which are then less likely to have to train new workers because their current ones stick around. It's a win-win -- and nobody has to dress like a Christmas present.

 

Meet The Google Employee Living Out Of A Truck To Save On Rent

A Google software engineer in the San Francisco area who chose to save on rent by living out of a box truck says he's surprised by the amount of attention his story's received. 

Brandon, who prefers to not release his last name, parks his truck near Google's campus. The 23-year-old University of Massachusetts Amherst alum joined the company in 2014 as a summer intern. At the time, he moved into a fully furnished two-bedroom apartment with three roommates. He told The Huffington Post that he paid about $65 a night while living there -- that works out to a monthly rate of roughly $2,000.

"I realized I was paying an exorbitant amount of money for the apartment I was staying in — and I was almost never home," he told Business Insider in an interview earlier this week. 

So when Brandon accepted a full-time job with Google this year, he decided buying a truck would help him drastically cut down on the Bay Area's high living expenses. In May, he paid $10,000 to buy a 2006 Ford E350 with 157,000 miles on it, according to his personal blog, Thoughts From Inside the Box, where he's chronicled his living experience.

Insurance on the vehicle is $121 a month. He doesn't pay for electricity, and he can take care of showering, bathing and charging his gadgets in the Google buildings.  

"I do have a 24-hour key card access to any building on the campus that I work at," he wrote, adding, "I try not to eat or drink anything after about 7:30 p.m. and I wash up and go to the bathroom right before I head out to the truck at night."

Besides a few inconveniences with bug infestations and a hole in his truck, Brandon makes it work -- especially since he mostly spends his time out with friends or working on personal projects after work until about 8:30 or 9 p.m. 

 

"The whole point of this experience is that a bed was the only part of a house that I needed, so if I was in here all of the time, I'd be doing it wrong," he wrote on his blog. 

However, that has not stopped him from hosting a "truckwarming" party at a quiet park with friends. 

Brandon estimates that if he'd rented a studio apartment near where he works, he'd be paying about $2,180 a month to live there. He created a formula to figure out his net savings on rent since he moved into the truck. Per his calculations, he broke even on his spending and saving this week. As of Friday morning, he'd tallied more than $325 in net savings, with the number increasing by the hour.

Brandon says his blog was initially intended to document his experience for his family and friends, but he's received an enormous amount of attention, which he described as "intense." 

Many have applauded his frugality and his creative use of the resources available to him. However, people on Facebook and Twitter pointed out that Brandon's privileged position as an employee at one of the world's most profitable companies places him well outside the reality that many in the Bay Area face.

The region struggles with affordable housing and people experiencing homelessness -- a January report cites 7,539 sheltered and unsheltered people in San Francisco. The city is one of the most expensive place to rent in America, and the surrounding communities aren't exactly cheap. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city is $3,410, according to a January report by a real estate listing site Zumper. 

Brandon acknowledged his unique situation, writing on his blog that people who live in their car out of necessity don't usually find themselves in the spotlight.

"Real homelessness is a systemic issue that doesn't get exposure because it's a decidedly uncomfortable topic," he wrote. "People barely scraping by working minimum wage jobs and living out of their cars isn't a news story, or particularly glamorous."

He included links on his blog to the Salvation Army and Homeless Voice as an encouragement to his readers to get involved with organizations combating homelessness. 

"I felt it reasonable to dedicate a little section to addressing something far larger than the myopia surrounding my situation," he told HuffPost.  

Even The Most Elite Women Are Subject To The Gender Pay Gap

A business degree, even from one from a top school in the country, won't be enough to protect women from the gender gap in compensation.

A report Bloomberg Businessweek published Tuesday found that the difference in pay for men and women swells as time goes by. Both groups leave their MBA programs earning about the same -- men's $105,000 to women's $98,000 -- but the split becomes more exacerbated years later. By the time they're six to eight years out of school, median compensation for men is $175,000, and $140,000 for women. For the latter, that rounds out to about 80 percent of men's paychecks, proving unfortunately that the roughly 78 cents women make to a man's dollar still holds up.

The study counters arguments that the pay gap between men and women results from a discrepancy in education and skills, Businessweek reporter Natalie Kitroeff told HuffPost Live on Wednesday. "We're looking at them coming out of the same schools, in the same years," Kitroeff said. "It was surprising to find that there was such a persistent gap, and we found this across every single industry."

Men gain the most ground in year-end bonuses. When those are excluded, the pay gap shrinks. Women who graduated Columbia's business school between 2007 and 2009, for example, earned a median of $170,000 in 2014, while men raked in $270,000. The difference in base salaries, though, was just $30,000.

The study's findings also reject the notion that the gap stems from women choosing to go into fields that pay less. Generally, men do enter the more lucrative industries, including consulting, real estate and finance, at higher rates -- 43 percent of men versus 32 percent of women -- but "even when women went into the highest-paying industries, they were paid less," Kitroeff said.

And let's not forget that the gender pay gap starts way before higher degrees. At the most elite colleges in the U.S., male alumni far outearn their female classmates, with Harvard men earning an average of $53,600 more than women 10 years after they start their undergraduate studies.

Even The Most Elite Women Are Subject To The Gender Pay Gap

A business degree, even from one from a top school in the country, won't be enough to protect women from the gender gap in compensation.

A report Bloomberg Businessweek published Tuesday found that the difference in pay for men and women swells as time goes by. Both groups leave their MBA programs earning about the same -- men's $105,000 to women's $98,000 -- but the split becomes more exacerbated years later. By the time they're six to eight years out of school, median compensation for men is $175,000, and $140,000 for women. For the latter, that rounds out to about 80 percent of men's paychecks, proving unfortunately that the roughly 78 cents women make to a man's dollar still holds up.

The study counters arguments that the pay gap between men and women results from a discrepancy in education and skills, Businessweek reporter Natalie Kitroeff told HuffPost Live on Wednesday. "We're looking at them coming out of the same schools, in the same years," Kitroeff said. "It was surprising to find that there was such a persistent gap, and we found this across every single industry."

Men gain the most ground in year-end bonuses. When those are excluded, the pay gap shrinks. Women who graduated Columbia's business school between 2007 and 2009, for example, earned a median of $170,000 in 2014, while men raked in $270,000. The difference in base salaries, though, was just $30,000.

The study's findings also reject the notion that the gap stems from women choosing to go into fields that pay less. Generally, men do enter the more lucrative industries, including consulting, real estate and finance, at higher rates -- 43 percent of men versus 32 percent of women -- but "even when women went into the highest-paying industries, they were paid less," Kitroeff said.

And let's not forget that the gender pay gap starts way before higher degrees. At the most elite colleges in the U.S., male alumni far outearn their female classmates, with Harvard men earning an average of $53,600 more than women 10 years after they start their undergraduate studies.

There’s A Shortage Of Cooks In America. Here’s The Simple Solution.

Despite what some viral videos would have you believe, there are too few cooks in America.

High-end restaurants are having trouble finding cooks who are skilled enough to prepare their dishes, according to a New York Times report published Wednesday. Restaurants have spent years putting off raising the pay at the back of the house, and it's finally catching up with them.

There's a lot of handwringing from established chefs about how kids these days aren't willing to submit themselves to the tough conditions to which junior members of the kitchen staff are traditionally exposed.

"Many chefs blame television for presenting unrealistic versions of life in restaurant kitchens, and they are outraged that the skills they have mastered over decades are viewed as optional by the new generation," the Times' Julia Moskin writes.

It's possible, though, that there is something much simpler going on: Would-be cooks don't think the work is worth the pay. Below is a chart showing the median annual pay of cooks and head chefs since late 2001. The orange lines show where that pay would be if it had kept up with inflation. Not only is pay for the average chef quite low, especially for the first few years -- it's actually getting worse. 

That said, the Times story itself is not exactly concerned with the average hash-slinging job. The real work shortage, according to the Times, is in the high-end kitchens:

The demand is up for chefs who can produce elegant food and know their way around a pair of tweezers, but many young cooks reject entry-level kitchen jobs -- with their harsh conditions, low pay and long hours -- where those skills are taught ... To effect change, [restaurateurs] say, they will soon be forced to raise prices.

What's happening is that foodie culture and celebrity chefs have vastly expanded both the demand for complicated food and the aspirations of chefs looking to make their mark on the industry. But every new trendy restaurant needs several line cooks who can execute an ambitious menu for a relative pittance. Outside of the truly exceptional restaurants with multiple Michelin stars, those worker bees are getting harder to find. This is particularly true in large cities with soaring rents, and in small cities where there just aren't enough experienced cooks to go around. The sweet spots, where things seem to be going OK, are biggish-but-not-too-expensive cities like Seattle, Houston and Portland, Oregon, according to the Times.

It's pretty clear the solution here is to raise wages. Making life better in the kitchen might help a little, but nothing attracts people to jobs like cash. The problem is that restaurant margins are nearly always thin -- so there's not a lot of room to raise wages without raising prices. And that risks giving loyal diners sticker shock, particularly in an economy where customers' paychecks aren't exactly getting more robust. You can see why restaurateurs might want to put off this course of action as long as possible.

But it looks like change is finally on the way. A number of minimum wage laws are coming down the pike, particularly in New York and California, that are likely to force restaurants to change. And the industry is making some moves of its own. 

Last week, restaurateur Danny Meyer made a splash by announcing in Eater that he's eliminating tipping from all of his restaurants in New York, joining a select group of restaurants in the city that have already done away with the practice. Instead, Meyer said, he will compensate his staff fairly by raising prices across the menu. The real winners in this new system will be the cooks, who don't share waiters' tips under the traditional arrangement.

Eater's Ryan Sutton explains the way things work at a fancy New York restaurant: "Some of the city’s top servers easily clear $100,000 annually. But the problem isn’t what waiters make, it’s what cooks make. A mid-level line cook, even in a high-end kitchen, doesn’t have generous patrons padding her paycheck, and as such is, on average, unlikely to make much more than $35,000 a year."

Meyer explicitly says in that story that his concern is the dwindling supply of talent in the kitchen.