SEC rules require publicly traded companies to disclose their workers' median annual pay.
Here's the median wage for workers at 19 retail companies, from lowest to highest.
Retail workers' hourly wages have increased substantially in the last several years as major employers like Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe's, and more have plowed billions of dollars into pay increases in a bid to get people to join — and stay.
Ever since Amazon set its minimum wage at $15 in 2018, more retailers have followed suit by offering starting wages that are more than double the national minimum of $7.25. The Federal minimum was last set in 2009.
But hourly wages are just one part of the pay equation. An employee's earnings also depend greatly on how many hours they work. That can vary considerably, especially in seasonal segments.
So, to get a picture of what the typical worker makes in a year at various retail brands, Business Insider used AlphaSense to find the data in the most recent proxy filings that publicly traded companies must file with the US Securities Exchange Commission.
Rules following the financial crisis of 2008 require public companies to calculate their median worker's annual salary to compare it to the CEO's compensation.
"Median" refers to the middle-most value in an ordered list. In terms of compensation, that means about half of a company's workers earn more and half earn less than its "median employee."
Scroll through below to see where 19 of the largest companies rank, from lowest to highest annual pay.
19. Gap: $7,573
Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins/Business Insider
The 2023 calculation is up from $7,348 in 2021, and the company says its typical median employee would be a part-time sales associate in Canada who did not work the full year.
18. TJX: $13,884*
Gabbi Shaw/Business Insider
TJX Companies — which include TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and others — increased its median pay in 2022 from 2018's level of $11,243.
*2022 figure as 2023 Proxy Statement not yet filed.
17. Starbucks: $14,209
Starbucks customers can use their own cups for mobile orders
Starbucks
Starbucks says its median figure is calculated from its global workforce of baristas, which causes it to be lower than it might be for only its US employees. Still, the company considers its median employee a part-time barista in the United States.
16. Ulta: $14,998*
Ann Matica/Insider
Ulta identifies its median employee by ranking all 52,929 associates from high to low by total cash compensation and selecting the middlemost one. Its 2018 median was $27,235, but was calculated at that time including the value of employer-paid healthcare benefits.
*2022 figure as 2023 Proxy Statement not yet filed.
15. McDonald's: $15,802
Reuters
The burger giant's median is more than double the 2018 level of $7,017, and it says the 2023 median worker is a restaurant crew employee located in Poland.
13. Chipotle: $16,595
Chipotle worker at assembly line
Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
Chipotle's median worker is an hourly part-time employee who works roughly 24 hours per week at one of its restaurants in Florida.
13. Foot Locker: $20,168
Bethany Biron/Business Insider
The shoe retailer's pay is up from 2018's median of $8,554, and the company says its median worker in 2023 averaged 27 hours per week in a store in Madrid, Spain.
12. Advance Auto Parts: $23,923
Mark Stehle/AP
Advance Auto Parts includes all team members in their analysis of the median employee, including part-time, full-time, and seasonal team members. The 2023 level is up from $18,460 in 2018.
11. Target: $25,993*
A Target store employee
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Target annualizes the pay of all full- and part-time employees, but takes only the actual earnings of seasonal and temporary workers to find the median for the whole workforce. The company says its median team member is employed part-time.
*2022 figure as 2023 Proxy Statement not yet filed.
10. Walmart: $27,136*
Walmart store managers will see a pay increase starting in February.
Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images
Walmart is the largest private employer in the world with 2.1 million workers around the world, of which 1.6 million are based in the US. The company uses statistical sampling to identify a group of associates paid within a range of .5% of the company's median earnings amount, and then chooses the median compensated associate from that group. Its 2022 median was up more than 40% from $19,177 in 2018.
*2022 figure as 2023 Proxy Statement not yet filed.
9. Kroger: $28,644
Rogelio V. Solis/AP Images
Kroger owns 19 grocery brands; its median employee is a part-time associate in the US Southeast.
8. Albertson's: $31,781*
Geri Lavrov/Getty Images
Albertson's owns 15 grocery store companies and says its median worker is a full-time hourly employee.
*2022 figure as 2023 Proxy Statement not yet filed.
7. Best Buy: $32,197*
A sales associate processes the purchase of a hard drive at a Best Buy store after doors opened at 5 a.m. on Black Friday, Nov. 26, 2021, in Lone Tree, Colo.
David Zalubowski/AP
Best Buy employs roughly 95,000 workers, mostly in the US and Canada. The median employee was identified by annualizing the earnings of all part- and full-time workers except for the CEO.
*2022 figure as 2023 Proxy Statement not yet filed.
6. Lowe's: $32,626
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Lowe's includes full-time and part-time employees to determine the median employee and considers actual base salary, bonus or commission paid, and any overtime. Its 2023 rate is up roughly 36% from the 2018 level of $23,905.
5. Macy's: $34,438
Macy's.
Noam Galai/Getty Images
More than half of Macy's workforce consists of part-time or seasonal employees, and the company estimates its median based on all employees other than the CEO. The 2023 median is more than double 2018's median of $13,810.
4. Home Depot: $35,131
Jose Ulloa Jr. works in a Home Depot store on May 17, 2016 in Miami, Florida
Joe Raedle/Getty
Home Depot bases its data on its total workforce and says the median-paid associate was an hourly employee in the US. The 2023 median is up 66% from $21,095 in 2018.
3. Nordstrom: $35,636
Nordstrom released a collection of clothing and accessories from Something Navy in 2017.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Nordstrom includes full-time, part-time seasonal, and temporary employees to identify the median employee and says roughly half of its workforce is part-time or seasonal. The 2023 median is up 18% from $30,105 in 2018.
2. Amazon: $36,274
Sandy Huffaker/Reuters
When calculating its median compensation, Amazon considers all full-time, part-time, and temporary employees worldwide, excluding CEO Andy Jassy. When considering only US full-time employees, the median annual compensation was $45,613.
1. Costco: $50,202
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Costco employs roughly 300,00 workers worldwide, of which about 198,000 are based in the US. The company's calculations include full-time, part-time, seasonal, and temporary employees, and use a combination of salary, bonus, equity compensation, and other measurable benefits paid during the year.
Tesla started sending out severance packages to laid off employees on Wednesday.
Justin Sullivan
Advertising is out at Tesla, just months after it started.
Tesla has eliminated about 40 marketing and advertising staff, Bloomberg reported.
The move is part of ongoing job cuts announced by CEO Elon Musk last week.
Tesla appears to have pulled the plug on its short-lived marketing team.
The company cut its entire US "growth content" team in its recent round of layoffs, according to a report from Bloomberg. The team included a group of about 40 people, the publication said.
Tesla still has a small group of marketing employees based in Europe, a person with knowledge of the issue told Bloomberg.
Many impacted Tesla workers were notified within hours of Musk's internal email that their roles had been eliminated. The layoff notices continued late into the week. On Friday, several recruiters at the company were notified via a phone call that their roles had been cut, Business Insider previously reported.
For most of its history, the electric vehicle company has survived without any traditional advertising — instead relying on word-of-mouth and posts from Musk, who promotes his company's products to his 181.5 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter.
But that all changed last May when Musk announced at a shareholder event that, for the first time, he would "try out a little advertising and see how it goes."
Musk, who has said he hates advertising, agreed to the move after Tesla investors called for it, with one arguing that the company needs to be more like Apple. The company released what appeared to be its first-ever ad last year.
The growth team, led by senior manager Alex Ingram, first launched only about four months ago, Bloomberg reported.
Tesla's decision to cut its marketing team comes after Tesla sales slumped, and the company reported lower-than-expected delivery numbers earlier this month.
Israel last week responded to Iran's unprecedented attack earlier this month with a one-off strike.
Friday's strike raised questions about the limited nature of the attack and how it unfolded.
Israel's president told Axel Springer media outlets that it's "best" for people to remain "puzzled."
Israel's lone strike on an Iranian military base last week quickly raised questions about the scope of the damage and exactly how the attack was carried out, with competing narratives from Tehran. But Israeli President Isaac Herzog doesn't seem to mind the ambiguity.
"I think the best thing would be for everybody to stay puzzled," Herzog said during an interview with Axel Springer media outlets on Sunday.
"The only thing I can say," he added, "is that the last two weeks have exposed the real threat to world stability. It starts in Tehran and emanates throughout the region of the Middle East with proxies."
An Israeli aircraft reportedly used a long-range air-to-surface missile to strike an air-defense system at a military base near the central Iranian city of Isfahan early Friday morning local time. The area is also home to sites affiliated with Tehran's nuclear program, which the United Nations has since confirmed remain secure.
Motorists drive their vehicles past a billboard depicting Iranian missiles in Tehran on April 20, 2024, a day after Iran's state media reported explosions in the central province of Isfahan.
Photo by ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images
Israeli officials have not publicly claimed responsibility for the strike, while Tehran attempted to downplay the incident by denying the employment of a missile, but, per US officials cited in multiple reports, the strike was Israeli. Experts say the limited attack was likely Israel's way of sending a message that it could hit deep into Iran without further escalating an already risky situation.
The strike came several days after Iran launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, during which Tehran and its proxies fired more than 300 missiles and drones at the country. Nearly all the munitions were intercepted by Israeli and partner forces in the region, including the US military.
Israeli officials vowed to retaliate in response to the barrage, despite many of its Western partners urging the country to exercise restraint, warning that any further escalation could risk a broader military confrontation with Iran and plunge the Middle East into even more violence.
Herzog's comments on Sunday echoed similar remarks made by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday, who told reporters at a briefing that Iran and its proxies are the "single biggest threat" to the security of Israel, America, and most countries in the Middle East.
"The attack that was launched by Iran was like an attack of declaring war," Herzog said in the interview.
"However," the president continued, "we are responsible and we seek stability and peace. And I think part of the actions in world affairs — or in the chess game of world affairs — is also, in many times, to act in a responsible and restrained manner."
Military equipment displayed at the Army Day ceremony in front of the President of Iran and high-ranking military commanders on April 17, 2024 in Tehran, Iran.
Photo by Contributor/Getty Images
"That's what we have done throughout this crisis, without going into any further detail," he said.
Iran's April 13 attack was itself a retaliation for an Israeli airstrike on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Syria on April 1. The bold strike killed several high-ranking military officials, including two generals in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Tehran promised a harsh response.
The incidents of the past few weeks have dragged a decades-long shadow war between Israel and Iran into broad daylight. The two bitter foes had historically relied on covert assassinations, strikes in other countries, and proxy forces to trade blows instead of overt attacks on the enemy.
These tit-for-tat attacks have also left the Middle East on edge as it continuously braced for a response — first from Iran and then from Israel. However, Tehran has signaled that it won't retaliate over the Isfahan strike after appearing to dissociate itself from the attack.
The protests at Columbia University began on Wednesday.
Andrew Lichtenstein/Getty Images
Columbia University's president announced that all classes on Monday will be virtual.
The decision follows days of unrest on campus and protests over Israel's war in Gaza.
A rabbi has encouraged Jewish students to leave campus. Protesters say that they are peaceful.
Columbia University is holding all its classes virtually on Monday due to ongoing protests on campus, the school's president, Nemat "Minouche" Shafik, announced.
While students and faculty have been urged not to go onto campus, Shafik said that "a working group of Deans, university administrators, and faculty members will try to bring this crisis to a resolution."
A coalition of student groups — Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace — took part in setting up "Gaza Solidarity Encampments" in the center of campus.
One of the goals of the protest is to convince the university to divest all its "finances, including the endowment, from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine," according to Columbia University Apartheid Divest's website.
Police were called in
On Thursday, April 18, Shafik authorized the New York Police Department to clear the encampment. "Attempts to resolve the situation were rejected by the students involved. As a result, NYPD officers are now on campus and the process of clearing the encampment is underway," she said in a statement.
This resulted in the arrest of more than 100 people on suspicion of criminal trespass, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said in a news conference.
Protests have continued since then.
A rabbi advised Jewish students to stay home
Chabad at Columbia, a group that supports Jewish students, released a letter on social media that said Jewish students were targeted with offensive rhetoric during the protests.
President Joe Biden called out antisemitism on campus in his Passover statement on Sunday.
"Even in recent days, we've seen harassment and calls for violence against Jews. This blatant Antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous — and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country," Biden said.
And Rabbi Elie Buechler, who is affiliated with the university, sent a message to 300 Jewish students to "strongly recommend" they leave campus for their own safety, CNN reported on Sunday.
Meanwhile, the Columbia Barnard Hillel organization that promotes Jewish life said in a post on X that they don't believe Jewish students should leave campus but said that "the University and the City need to do more to ensure the safety of our students."
Columbia student organizations participating in the protest have insisted that their protests are peaceful.
One student group, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, said in a statement on X that they are frustrated by the attention paid to "inflammatory individuals who do not represent us."
"We firmly reject any form of hate or bigotry and stand against non-students attempting to disrupt our solidarity," the statement said.
While the conventional wisdom is that the US Senate will likely approve the bill this week, and President Joe Biden will sign it into law shortly after, TikTok won't go anywhere immediately.
At the very earliest, the ban wouldn't go into effect until nine months after Biden signs the bill — meaning 2025. But even that is unlikely to happen.
The language around the proposed ban has also been tweaked. Instead of requiring ByteDance to sell off its US operations in six months, the company now has nine months to get a deal done. And the bill also gives a US president the power to extend that new deadline by another three months if there's a deal in the works.
So you're saying ByteDance really has a year to sell TikTok to a different owner?
Yes. But also, no.
If Biden signs the bill, that nine months-to-one-year countdown starts. Except that ByteDance has already said it will challenge the law in court, and will presumably seek an injunction — putting the entire thing on pause. And a court battle could take a very long time.
OK. But what if the bill does pass, and does hold up in court? What happens then? Does TikTok disappear from my phone?
No.
If ByteDance can't or won't find a buyer for US TikTok, the bill requires Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores — something they have practice doing in other countries. But that wouldn't shut down TikTok in the US itself — it would just make it very difficult for the app to add more US-based users.
The bill would also prohibit US-based internet companies from helping TikTok maintain or update the service. So TikTok could continue to operate in the US, but its owner would have a harder time keeping it going and growing.
I remember hearing about people who wanted to buy TikTok to keep it going in the US. What's going on with that?
Good question. The first thing to resolve is whether China would actually allow ByteDance to sell one of the country's biggest internet successes at metaphorical gunpoint. Then there are plenty of technical questions about how a sale would work and how TikTok could function if cleaved off from its main owner.
On one Upper West Side side street, you can hear the quiet hum of electric vehicles almost all day and night.
Manhattan isn't known for its plentiful parking. But this street has something even rarer: two public spots reserved for EV charging. Often, vehicles linger for hours.
On a recent weekday, one licensed ride-hailing driver had been charging for more than 12 hours. Another EV sat for more than five hours at the neighboring plug. For the ride-hailing driver, that's 12 hours they didn't work. For other EV owners, it's one less charger to plug in to. A Tesla slowed as it drove by in hopes the spaces weren't occupied.
This snapshot in time comes as New York City aims to convert almost its entire ride-hailing industry to EVs by 2030, with the exception of wheelchair-accessible vehicles. Mayor Eric Adams' Green Rides Initiative affects the city's more than 84,000 Uber and Lyft drivers — among the largest markets in the world. It's an ambitious target, given that under 10% of rides were taken in an EV in March, according to city data.
The biggest hurdle is building enough public chargers, especially in such a densely packed city with an old power grid and lengthy bureaucratic delays. For Uber and Lyft drivers, time is money, so widely accessible charging is key to the EV switch. The majority live in NYC's outer boroughs, such as Queens, and park on the street, where chargers are sparse. A study by the US Department of Energy found that 1,000 fast chargers were needed for every 20,000 EV drivers on the road. Currently, there are fewer than 200 across NYC. Plus, building thousands of new chargers requires billions of dollars of investment.
City officials and ride-hailing companies told Business Insider that electrifying the sector could unlock a broader EV revolution because it could solve a crucial conundrum: Companies won't build charging stations if there aren't enough drivers, but drivers won't buy an EV if charging isn't widely accessible.
"This is the industry that's going to get this infrastructure off the ground because a ride-share driver is a great customer for a charging station," said Bobby Familiar, a spokesperson for Revel, an all-electric ride-hailing service that operates three public fast-charging stations in NYC. "They have to charge every single day that they do a shift. They want fast charging because every minute spent at the charger is time they could be on the road earning a fare."
Electrifying the ride-hailing industry also has big returns for the environment, Michael Replogle, a former deputy commissioner for policy at NYC's Department of Transportation, said.
"If you can electrify Ubers, Lyfts, and taxis that drive several hundred miles a day, it will really reduce the city's carbon footprint and clean up the air," he said.
Given the stakes, a lot has to go right in the coming years. The city has to strike a balance between the number of EV drivers and charging sites. Long wait times risk turning off drivers from making the switch, but if there isn't enough demand, the economics could fall apart for stations run by the government or private entities. Chargers also must be in neighborhoods with a history of underinvestment.
A mad dash for EV licenses
The transition is getting an early test this year now that thousands more ride-hailing drivers have licenses.
In October, the Taxi & Limousine Commission opened applications for this gig work for the first time in five years — but for EV drivers only. A cap had been in place since 2018 to stabilize drivers' wages and decrease traffic congestion.
The TLC approved about 8,400 EV licenses. That brought the total to more than 11,000, a huge jump compared with several years ago.
The program is on hold because of a lawsuit filed by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. It represents the yellow-cab industry, which isn't under the EV mandate but can voluntarily make the switch to certain models. The alliance argued that the market would become oversaturated.
TLC Commissioner David Do said many of those who applied were ride-hailing drivers already and the total number of drivers in NYC was still lower than pre-pandemic levels.
A lot of ride-hailing drivers are excited about the EV push because it's a pathway to owning their own car, rather than renting from fleet owners, according to Aeraj Qazi, the owner of Primetime Brokerage, which helps drivers through the TLC licensing process.
"Rentals are like handcuffs for drivers, so EVs provide an opportunity for drivers to own their own plates," Qazi said.
Weekly rental rates average between $450 and $600, several drivers told BI. That's more than a typical monthly car payment.
Qazi said he and other brokerages helped file thousands of EV applications before the court-ordered injunction took effect late last year.
"We didn't realize how crazy it would get. The charging infrastructure isn't there right now," Qazi said.
Guillermo Fondeur, an Uber driver who bought a Tesla in 2021, charges at home. He said the switch had saved him money on gas and maintenance, and he earns some perks from Uber, including an extra $1 on every ride.
But he's heard complaints from other EV owners about the lack of public charging infrastructure.
"It's very inconvenient to find chargers," Fondeur said. "There are one- to two-hour waits to plug in some places."
He added: "Drivers want to charge on the block where they live. The city could put chargers in the parking spaces. There's also a lot of parking lots."
NYC's most valuable asset
Today, there are nearly 200 fast chargers in NYC and more than 1,900 Level 2 chargers. The Adams administration wants to grow the network this decade to 6,000 fast chargers and 40,000 Level 2 plugs.
"We need every space we can find," Do said.
In general, EVs can get up to 30 miles of range for every hour they're plugged in to a Level 2 charger. That makes them ideal for overnight street parking, or for several hours during the day while drivers run errands or go to work. Fast chargers, such as those in Tesla's Supercharger network, can add up to 200 miles of range in just 15 minutes, helping ease range anxiety among road trippers and ride-hailing drivers who need a quick refill but don't want to lose too much time.
Making progress in NYC requires coordination across the government, power utilities, and private companies. Do is part of a charging task force that brings those parties together.
The TLC is sharing data on where drivers live and where and how often trips happen to help inform where chargers should be. The utility Con Edison is identifying where enough power is already available for new chargers and expanded a statewide program that subsidizes the cost of bringing electricity to chargers to $585 million. The Department of Transportation is investing in some curbside charging and fast chargers in municipal parking lots.
The department's efforts build on a curbside-charging pilot with Con Edison and a Canadian company, Flo. It created 100 Level 2 plug-ins across all five boroughs, a spokesperson for the department said, and there are plans for hundreds more.
But those efforts alone won't spur enough development, Replogle, the former DOT official, said.
"It took us 3 ½ years to stand up that pilot," he said. "We recognized we would not be getting thousands of on-street Level 2 chargers by scaling up that model. It's going to take some competitive procurement with the private sector to make this happen."
There are barriers, Replogle added. There isn't a clear path for private charging companies and real-estate owners to get regulatory approval for installing curbside plugs.
"Street space is one of the most valuable assets the city owns," Replogle said. "There are 3 million parking spaces, and less than 250,000 of them are priced. So there are a fair number of spaces that can produce the kind of economic return for electrification to happen."
A DOT spokesperson said the department last year sent out a request for information from EV-charging companies, which will inform future partnerships.
Beyond curbside, there are hurdles for companies such as Revel that are building larger fast-charging stations with dozens of plugs. These sites often need electrical-power upgrades to connect to the grid, a lengthy process with Con Edison.
"We're approaching every charging station like it's a new high-rise building," Familiar said. "But the timeline for getting a charging station up and running is a lot different than a building. If we have power, we can get a site done within months, not years. The power-upgrade timeline does not match that."
Charging stations should go to the front of the line, he added.
A spokesperson for Con Edison said the utility was evolving its grid-planning process to prepare for large EV loads.
"When upgrades are needed at the customer property, we are working to reduce interconnection timelines at every step in the process from early customer engagement and education through improved work coordination and collaborating closely with municipalities on permitting," the spokesperson said.
The charging pipeline
Despite the delays, Revel has a pipeline of 300 fast chargers over the next two years, Familiar said. That figure reflects active site leases in various phases of design and construction.
Revel owns a fleet of 500 vehicles and more than 50 plugs in NYC that are open to any model.
One of the new stations is set to be at LaGuardia Airport, one of the busiest areas for ride-hailing trips in the city. Installing 48 plugs would make it the largest fast-charging location at any airport nationwide. It's expected to open next year.
Revel in March also struck a deal with Uber that guaranteed its drivers would use at least 250 of Revel's plugs a certain amount of the time. If Uber doesn't meet the use threshold, it's financially liable. In exchange, Uber drivers will get up to a 25% discount when they charge.
The agreement could help Uber meet its own goal to have its drivers go fully electric this decade. So far, more than 6% of Uber's fleet in the US and Canada has zero emissions, and more than 17% of trips in NYC were in EVs last year. The company said it's spending $800 million by 2025 to encourage drivers to make the switch.
Josh Gold, Uber's senior director of public policy, said that after the TLC lifted its cap on EV licenses, he saw longer lines at Tesla's Superchargers. And for years, many of the platform's early EV adopters were going to Manhattan to charge, often in paywalled parking garages.
"That's not where our drivers live," he said. "So that's been a worry, but now we're seeing the charging infrastructure develop more."
Uber is sharing ride data with Revel so it can locate chargers in the most convenient places for drivers. Uber has a similar agreement with Tesla.
Lyft, for its part, said it's investing $80 million through 2025 on its EV push and working with charging companies including EVgo and Electrify America to offer discounts. Nearly 17% of NYC Lyft rides were in EVs last year.
The rising demand from the ride-hailing industry for EV charging could help buoy other startups. Itselectric is piloting some Level 2 curbside charging using excess power from buildings, which avoids the need for utility upgrades and therefore could speed up the build-out. In a parking garage in midtown Manhattan, Gravity in March opened what it says are the 24 fastest chargers in the country.
Almost everyone BI interviewed for this story acknowledged that the city's EV's ambitions were lofty.
There are some promising signs, however.
Do said that the Green Rides Initiative was two years ahead of schedule. By 2025, at least 15% of ride-hailing trips were supposed to be in zero-emissions or wheelchair-accessible vehicles. That threshold was crossed in January and ticked up even higher in March to 17%. That month, more than 2 million trips were taken in an EV — a fivefold increase compared with November.
Do said he wanted to boost the TLC's outreach to drivers so they could understand the perks of switching to an EV.
"There are so many more benefits to a green vehicle, not only for the future of our city but for kids who will breathe cleaner air, and it also might be a little cheaper," he said. "So we've laid the foundation, but now we need to convince many other drivers to convert."
Juliana Kaplan contributed to this article.
This article is part of "The Great Transition," a series covering the big changes across industries that are leading to a more sustainable future. For more climate-action news, visit Insider's One Planet hub.
Neom is hosting hundreds of prospective investors for on-the-ground tours, Bloomberg reports.
Neom developers also recently met with financiers in China.
Saudi Arabia's government has reportedly been worried about rising costs for the futuristic city.
For the first time, Saudi Arabia is inviting hundreds of private bankers this week to visit Neom, its futuristic — and cash-strapped — city in the desert, Bloomberg reported.
Neom CEO Nadhmi Al-Nasr will now show visitors the construction work on "The Line," the planned city between two mirrored skyscrapers.
The tours will mark the first time a large group of financiers will be able to see anything of the futuristic city with their own eyes, as opposed to virtual renderings.
The potential investors will also tour vacation spot Sindalah and industrial hub Oxagon before leaving on jets, Bloomberg reported.
Neom is a $500 billion project that's been in the works since 2017. The Saudis plan to build the city in a straight line and run it using renewable energy.
But the high-tech city has gotten off to a rough start, despite being a key part of the Saudi Vision 2030 plan to expand the country's economy beyond oil.
Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund hasn't approved Neom's budget for 2024 yet. The ballooning cost of the project has raised eyebrows in the Saudi government, Bloomberg reported
Neom recently scaled back estimates for occupancy at The Line — projecting 300,000 residents by 2030 as opposed to previous estimates of 1.5 million, according to Bloomberg.
Bloomberg previously reported that Neom is set to issue bonds for the first time that could raise up to $1.3 billion. According to AFP, developers also recently courted investors in China — though no deals have been announced — after having previously taken its road show to Korea, Japan, Singapore, the US, France, Germany, and the UK.
Neom did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
The US may already be in a recession, according to Danielle DiMartino Booth.
A steady rise in the unemployment rate above cycle lows signals a recession, she said.
Other forecasters have said the unemployment rate could reach 5% by year-end.
The US could see a rise in layoffs, and there's one indicator in the labor market that suggests a recession is already here, according to veteran market forecaster Danielle DiMartino Booth.
The Quill Intelligence Research chief strategist pointed to worrying signs in the labor market, despite headline job growth remaining strong. The economy added 303,000 workers in March — but the jobless rate has steadily ticked higher, rising from a low of 3.4% in April 2023 to around 3.8% last month.
As of February, the labor market has been pointing to a historical recession indicator that flashes when the unemployment rate rises 0.35% above its cycle low and holds above that level for at least three months. That was the case for the 2008 recession, Booth noted, with the National Bureau of Economic Research dating the recession back to the month the indicator was first triggered.
"So we're in a recession, as far as the unemployment rate is concerned," Booth said, speaking in an interview on The David Lin Report last week.
She estimated that layoffs for the year could rise to 370,000 by the end of April. That would be the highest number of layoffs recorded over the first four months of the year since 2009, in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, she said.
Booth has been warning for months of a coming wave of job losses. Top economist David Rosenberg has also predicted that the unemployment rate could rise to around 5% by the end of the year as a recession hits the economy.
Nikhil Teja Kolli is the cofounder and chief executive of MokSa.ai.
Arthur King/DetPics
Nikhil Teja Kolli's startup MokSa.ai uses AI-enabled security cameras to curb theft and fraud.
Since its launch a year ago, MokSa.ai has garnered over 70 customers and $240,000 in ARR.
MokSa.ai has secured $1.5 million in pre-seed funding and aims to expand its operations.
When he was a college student in Kansas, Nikhil Teja Kolli worked a night shift at a convenience store on the edge of the Ozarks. One night, a man lingered inside the store until the other customers cleared out, then approached the counter with a gun stretched in Kolli's direction. The gunman swiped the cash in the drawer and left Kolli frozen. He felt helpless to stop it.
Eight months later, he would be held at gunpoint again.
He couldn't have known it then, but Kolli would go on to start a business focused on mitigating theft.
His startup MokSa.ai, which aims to help businesses curb theft and employee fraud using artificial intelligence-enabled security cameras, launched from stealth less than a year ago. But it already has a raft of paying customers, which is rare among startups of its size. According to Kolli, its real-time monitoring system is in use at over 70 gas stations, liquor stores, and bodegas nationwide and is generating $20,000 a month in recurring revenue.
Now, this potent cocktail of machine learning and profits has persuaded investors to provide it with pre-seed funding. MokSa.ai tells Business Insider it closed $1.5 million in a March round led by Array Ventures, with participation from Jay Farner, the former chief executive of Quicken Loans, and The Fund Midwest.
The company uses computer vision to automate away some parts of surveillance still done by humans. It makes software for off-the-shelf security cameras that detect suspicious activity — think, a person stuffs a six-pack of beer in their pants or a cashier gives away merchandise to a friend — and sends a real-time notification to the customer dashboard. The alert includes a clip of the incident, which saves the business owner time they might spend playing back hours of camera footage.
MokSa.ai uses general-use models and customizes them to detect suspicious activity at store locations.
MokSa.ai
Kolli said the company initially tried to use open-source, pre-trained artificial intelligence models but found that some of these models showed biases representative of the datasets they were trained on. It then tried fine-tuning those models, but Kolli said their performance fell apart. Eventually, it landed on using general-use models that continuously learn as new footage comes in.
The company also pays college interns in India to watch footage for suspicious activity and annotate it — a process called data labeling.
"As we sit and speak, there is new data coming in and these models are getting better," Kolli said.
According to Shruti Gandhi, the founder and sole general partner at Array Ventures, part of MokSa.ai's magic is its customized models for this use case.
"The data sets they have gathered in the last two years of being a services company allowed them to deploy trained models in customers from their first week of onboarding," she said. "That is not possible today with a lot of business intelligence companies because most think they're going to get better once they have customer data. So the reason some companies will win over others in the same category is their access to unique, differentiated data."
Given that MokSa.ai's software works with a range of internet-connected security cameras, it's positioned itself as the Android of the surveillance market. The company will also provide a business with the cameras it needs in exchange for signing a multiyear contract. It charges a monthly subscription that scales based on the number of cameras in use.
Customers can pay extra to have an operator call them when the system detects an event, and that's as far as MokSa.ai's responsibility goes, Kolli said. It won't contact the police.
"We are offering surveillance audit platform," he said. "So it's up to the customer to understand what they want to do with that information we provide."
The dashboard shows reports of suspicious activity at a glance.
MokSa.ai
The Android of the surveillance market
Before MokSa.ai, Kolli worked as a quality manager at a company producing parts for high-speed rails. He got the itch to build this company after speaking to a friend who owned the gas station and liquor store where he worked in college. The friend had found out an employee had stolen thousands of dollars worth of merchandise and cash and he asked Kolli how technology might be able to catch bad actors. The idea planted the seed for what would become MokSa.ai.
Later, Kolli enrolled in the startup accelerator Techstars Detroit, where one of his mentors introduced him to his future investor.
Kolli told Gandhi the MokSa.ai story over the phone. He didn't have a pitch deck to show her or any other investor pledges to move her to act. But, the Array Ventures founder bought into the round before the call ended. The next day, Kolli had a term sheet.
The investment was a "no-brainer," Gandhi said.
The company is now gearing up for growth. MokSa.ai just signed a contract with Royal Ozarks, a large commercial real-estate developer in the South, to deploy its system across 150 store locations. Kolli said the partnership will bring its $240,000 annual recurring revenue to over $1 million this year.
The new funding will allow the company to grow its sales and customer support teams as part of this expansion. It's also working to release a mobile app that will allow business owners to view their notifications on the go.
In its bid to create a smarter surveillance system, MokSa.ai faces competition from startups like Verkada, a maker of building security tools that's raised over $360 million in funding, and Rhombus, a newer entrant that just announced $26 million in capital. While these two tout their abilities to detect suspicious activity and send alerts, they both require customers to use their cameras and sensors.
That could be the wedge that gives MokSa.ai a chance despite being much younger than its competitors.
Gandhi summed it up, "What they're saying is keep your camera, we will figure out the best way to use this camera."
Beginning in 2026, 1,250 megawatts of electricity could speed along 339 miles of underground cable to provide a million New York City homes with hydropower generated in Canada.
The $6 billion Champlain Hudson Power Express transmission line is under construction to help New York state meet its clean-energy goals.
It's also part of a larger nationwide push to create more transmission lines to bring renewable energy to the country's aging electrical grid.
When CHPE (pronounced "chippy") broke ground in 2022, it became one of New York's first Tier 4 projects, the state's program aimed at sourcing 70 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.
"We're looking forward to the day when we are going to be turning on the switch and bringing that clean energy into New York City," Donald Jessome, the founder and former CEO of Transmission Developers, the company behind CHPE, told Business Insider.
The state has been making up for the loss with three natural-gas plants that came online between 2018 and 2020. According to EPA data, carbon emissions in the New York City area rose by about 20% between 2019 and 2022.
Nearly half of New York City's power comes from plants within the city, including the Ravenswood Generating Station in Astoria.
Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
"Because of bottlenecks in the grid south of Albany, there's a limit to the extent to which that generation can be used to satisfy demand in the New York City area," Ryan Calder, an assistant professor in environmental health and policy at Virginia Tech, told Business Insider.
CHPE will bypass Albany, Poughkeepsie, and other cities north of New York City. The transmission line will tap into Hydro-Québec's existing generation and send a fraction of it to New York, avoiding upstate bottlenecks that can tax the grid during peak-demand times.
Bringing renewable energy to New York City
Much of the US is struggling to connect renewable-energy projects to the electrical grid. About 930 gigawatts of solar, wind, nuclear, and other electricity sources are waiting for grid access, according to the Department of Energy. That's more than three times as much wind and solar power as the US generated in 2022 and enough to power roughly 171 million homes.
The map shows where the 339 miles of cable will run from the Canadian border to Queens, New York.
CHPE
Transmission lines are like highways for electrons, Calder said. They connect sources of energy generation to areas of demand.
"A lot of renewable sources of electricity, wind, and hydroelectric power in Canada are far from densely populated urban areas," he said.
Once CHPE is up and running, it will reduce carbon emissions by 37 million metric tons, New York state officials said in a statement.
Since hydropower doesn't emit CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide like fossil-fuel plants, a recent study from Calder and his coauthors estimated the project will save an additional $13.2 billion in social costs by 2050. That includes potentially preventing over 300 premature deaths.
Gas-fired power plants contribute to poor air quality, which can lead to health problems like asthma. The asthma rate for children in New York City, especially in poorer neighborhoods, is one of the highest in the country. Switching to a cleaner energy source could improve health outcomes for kids and adults.
Environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, have objected to the project and the route. They've raised concerns over Atlantic sturgeon habitats and Hydro-Québec's history with First Nation communities in Canada.
The company's past projects flooded Indigenous lands, a process that created methylmercury, a neurotoxin, in waterways, Grist reported. Methylmercury accumulates in fish and can make its way to humans. Ingesting mercury can have serious health effects.
Jessome said TDI worked with local communities to address their concerns about construction.
CHPE will use high-voltage direct current (HVDC) cable to connect New York City with Canada.
CHPE
Since the CHPE construction won't involve creating new dams, Calder said he didn't factor the impact of flooding into his study. Other environmental concerns, such as how the project could affect fish habitats, were outside the scope of the study.
New York has six years to achieve its goal of powering 70 percent of its grid with renewable energy. The state's officials are banking CHPE providing a chunk of that energy.
"We'll be in that community for the next 60, 70, 80 years," Jessome said. "This project's here for the long term. It's going to have benefits well into the future."
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