Category: Business Insider

• Hunterbrook Media is a hedge fund that also does journalism. Or maybe a journalism startup that also runs a hedge fund.
• Will that work? A new story in The New Yorker wonders whether you can combine those things.
• One thing the story makes clear: Having well-connected parents is useful for startup founders.

Can a hedge fund also be an investigative-journalism outfit?

That's a provocative question, generated by the existence of Hunterbrook Media, the combination hedge fund/investigative-journalism outfit that launched this spring.

The idea in a nutshell: Hunterbrook's small team of investigative journalists look for stories about companies that could be attractive targets for a hedge fund to invest in or — more likely — bet against. Then the journalists tell Hunterbrook's hedge-fund arm about the stories they will publish about a company so the fund can short the company (or invest in it).

You can read more about that via The New Yorker's Clare Malone's excellent look at Hunterbrook, though it's way too soon to assess how any of this will work.

Read The New Yorker's story on Hunterbrook

Hunterbrook's first big published investigation was into the mortgage underwriter United Wholesale Mortgage. Before publication, Hunterbrook's fund went short on UWM and long on its rival Rocket Mortgage; a month later, UWM shares are up and Rocket is down slightly. ("We're just getting started, but early signs are that it's working," the company told my colleague Bradley Saacks last month.)

But Malone's piece also raises a different question: What kind of background do you need to raise $10 million for a media startup — and $100 million for a hedge fund — these days?

And that one does have an answer: It helps if you are very, very connected.

Malone never uses the epithet "nepo baby" to describe the Hunterbrook cofounders Sam Koppelman and Nathaniel Horwitz. But they are indeed people who have successful and well-connected parents: Koppelman's father is the screenwriter and TV showrunner Brian Koppelman; Horwitz's mother, Geraldine Brooks, is a much-lauded journalist and author, so was his father, Tony Horwitz, who died in 2019.

That family history, of course, doesn't automatically persuade people to give a couple of 20-something Harvard grads millions of dollars for their first foray into journalism. But it certainly helps them meet people that will eventually do that.

And Malone spells that part out quite clearly:

"Nathaniel and Sam have a pretty ridiculous network," Matthew Termine, one of the Hunterbrook reporters on the U.W.M. investigation, told me. E-mails that Koppelman wrote to the chair of Sony Entertainment about his application to Harvard appeared in the 2014 Sony Pictures leak, as did a note to the school on his behalf from Matt Damon. (Koppelman's father co-wrote "Rounders" and "Ocean's Thirteen.") For a time, he dated the "Euphoria" star Maude Apatow. Horwitz, for his part, once wrote about a series of conversations he had with the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes as her life and company crumbled.

Hunterbrook's advisers include Paul Steiger, the founder of ProPublica, and Daniel Okrent, the first public editor of the Times. Former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Matt Murray and the financial journalist Bethany McLean gave notes on the U.W.M. investigation before publication. Hunterbrook's hedge fund has raised a hundred million dollars, and the company received seed funding from, among others, the venture arm of Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective and the hedge-fund billionaire Marc Lasry, who, Brian Koppelman once told the Financial Times, helped the "Billions" showrunner develop an "understanding of the billionaire psyche."

So, again: None of Horwitz's or Koppelman's family histories and networks will make their company succeed. But it certainly didn't hurt them getting out of the gate.

Correction: May 6, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated Nathaniel Horwitz's experience in finance; he previously worked at RA Capital.

• Longtime Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has some thoughts on Starbucks' poor sales.
• He said the chain needs to listen to baristas, fix its app, and focus on the customer experience.
• Starbucks posted a drop in same-store sales in North America and China, its two biggest markets.

Howard Schultz says Starbucks needs to fix its stores and mobile app to reverse its "fall from grace."

The coffee chain must focus on the customer experience in its outlets, the longtime former CEO wrote in a LinkedIn post on Sunday in the wake of last week's weak results.

"The company's fix needs to begin at home: US operations are the primary reason for the company's fall from grace," Schultz wrote. "The stores require a maniacal focus on the customer experience, through the eyes of a merchant. The answer does not lie in data, but in the stores."

Schultz knows what he's talking about — he's had multiple stints leading Starbucks, spending more than two decades as CEO.

Although he didn't found the chain, instead buying it from its previous owners, Schultz shaped the company's growth and turned it into a global giant.

He most recently returned as interim CEO for nearly a year after Kevin Johnson retired in April 2022.

"Senior leaders — including board members — need to spend more time with those who wear the green apron," Schultz wrote on LinkedIn, referring to its baristas. He said that Starbucks needed to "overhaul" its strategy and reinforce its "premium position."

"Through it all, focus on being experiential, not transactional," Schultz wrote. Starbucks has long positioned itself as a "third place," where people can spend time outside their home or workplace, although this model is under threat as the chain increasingly embraces drive-thru and delivery sales.

Schultz added that one of leadership's first actions should be to "reinvent" its mobile app to make it an "uplifting experience" again, without elaborating. App orders made up 31% of all US transactions in the quarter.

CEO Laxman Narasimhan told investors last week that a "mid-teens percent" of potential mobile orders weren't being completed, with customers putting items into their carts but then not finalizing orders. Baristas have complained that the app can leave stores inundated with too many orders, and that customers sometimes use it to order drinks with excessive modifications.

Recovery 'certain'

Starbucks posted a 1.8% fall in quarterly net revenues to $8.56 billion, with fewer visits from what Narasimhan described as "occasional" customers.

In North America, comparable sales fell 3%, driven by a 7% drop in the number of transactions. That's where almost half Starbucks' stores are located, and the region accounts for almost three-quarters of its revenues.

The decline was far worse in China, Starbucks' second-biggest market behind the US, where comparable sales plunged 11%. The number of orders was down 4%, with an 8% decline in ticket size. Total revenues in China fell 8% to $705.8 million.

William Blair analyst Sharon Zackfia said in a note to clients that the chain had posted a "stunning across-the-board miss on all key metrics."

The stock is down 22% this year, and by almost a third over the past 12 months, leaving Starbucks worth about $82 billion.

It's not the first time Schultz has offered some advice to management. Earlier this year he said Starbucks should go on a soul-searching journey and reinvent itself in a two-page letter posted on LinkedIn.

However, the "chairman emeritus" hasn't lost faith in the business.

"Starbucks will recover — of that, I am certain," Schultz wrote on Sunday. "I am confident the China business will return to health and become the company's largest market. The brand is incredibly resilient, but it's clearly not business as usual."

Do you work at Starbucks? Got a story? Email this reporter at gdean@businessinsider.com

• Tech titans like Elon Musk and Tim Cook run some of the world's biggest companies.
• In so doing, they've employed some outright strange management practices.
• From banning PowerPoints to having 50 direct reports, here are tech leaders' most unconventional management habits.

They're some of the best-known CEOs in the world. But while we may know more about their flashy real estate buys and jet-setting habits, we don't have as good a glimpse into how they run their companies behind closed doors.

Here are some of the most notable management quirks from tech's biggest names:

Jeff Bezos

When he was still CEO of Amazon, Bezos employed the "two-pizza rule" to limit teams to only as many people as could be fed with two pizzas.

He also famously banned PowerPoints, instead telling employees to write six-page memos for meetings, which began with attendees silently reading the document.

Elon Musk

Musk, the CEO of companies including Tesla and X, formerly Twitter, has described himself as a "nanomanager." Consistent with that style, Musk doesn't like delegating and last year told Tesla staff he wanted to personally approve all new hires.

Musk also encourages people to leave meetings rather than stay in some cases. In a 2018 email to Tesla staff, he said there should generally be fewer, shorter meetings and wrote, "Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value."

He's also said employees can feel free to buck the chain of command to get things done.

"Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company," he wrote in an email to Tesla staff a few years back. "You can talk to your manager's manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else's permission."

Mark Zuckerberg

Meta's chief executive also doesn't like to delegate, saying leaders should "make as many decisions and get involved in as many things as you can."

Zuckerberg has also tried to cut back on bloat and made the company flatter during his famous "Year of Efficiency," saying he doesn't like a structure of "managers managing managers."

Zuckerberg also famously likes to wear the same outfit every day to save brainpower for more important decisions.

Jensen Huang

Huang believes CEOs should have the most direct reports of anyone, and it shows.

The Nvidia CEO has a lot of direct reports — 50 to be exact.

And as Nvidia enjoys a boom time as its share price soars amid the AI era, Business Insider first reported that its CEO also awarded employees with a "Jensen special grant" that boosted their stock awards by 25% this year.

Tim Cook

Cook grills employees in meetings to make sure they know their stuff.

As a former Apple employee told Cult of Mac editor Leander Kahney for his 2019 book on Cook, "He'll ask you ten questions. If you answer them right, he'll ask you ten more. If you do this for a year, he'll start asking you nine questions. Get one wrong, and he'll ask you 20 and then 30."

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Google's cofounders implemented the "20% time" policy encouraging employees "to spend 20 percent of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google," like a side project besides their usual work, they wrote in 2004.

Page and Brin, in fact, credit the rule with the creation of AdSense and Google News.

• Wages for retail workers have been going up in recent years.
• 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

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. Ulta: $13,193

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.

17. Starbucks: $14,209

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. TJX: $14,857

TJX Companies — which include TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and others — increased its median pay in 2023 by 32% from 2018's level of $11,243.

15. McDonald's: $15,802

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. About 95% of McDonald's restaurants are operated by franchisees whose workers aren't included in this report.

13. Chipotle: $16,595

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

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

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: $26,696

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.

10. Walmart: $27,642

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 2023 median was up more than 40% from $19,177 in 2018.

9. Kroger: $28,644*

Kroger owns 19 grocery brands; its median employee is a part-time associate in the US Southeast.

*2022 figure as 2023 Proxy Statement not yet filed.

8. Albertsons: $31,781*

Albertsons 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. Lowe's: $32,626

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.

6. Best Buy: $32,656

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.

5. Macy's: $34,438

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

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 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

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

Costco'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.

• Three men were found dead in a well in Baja California, Mexico, after being shot on a surfing trip.
• Officials believe the tourists were attacked by three people who attempted to steal their truck.
• The incident has sparked protests in Ensenada, demanding safety for tourists and locals alike.

Three men in their early 30s have been found dead in a well after being shot in the head while on a surfing trip in Baja California, Mexico.

Two Australian brothers, Callum and Jake Robinson, and their American friend, Jack Carter Rhoad, were near the popular coastal town of Ensenada when they went missing last week.

Their bodies were found in the 15-foot-deep well on Saturday after a dayslong search, and have since been identified by family members, Reuters reported.

Jake, 30, had flown to the US to visit Callum, 33, who was pursuing his dream of being a professional lacrosse player. The week after his trip, Jake was due to start a new job as a doctor in Victoria, Australia. Carter Rhoad, 30, was working as an apparel designer in San Diego, the New York Post reported.

They were last seen on 27 April and, when they didn't show up to an Airbnb booking a couple of days later, were reported missing and an investigation was launched by local authorities and the FBI.

It's thought that the tourists were attacked after they defended themselves from three people who were trying to steal their truck.

Baja California state prosecutor Maria Andrade suggested that the attackers wanted the truck for its tires and shot the three men in their heads when they resisted, Reuters reported.

A burnt-out vehicle suspected to be the surfers' truck was also found in the area, alongside abandoned tents, and a phone linked to them.

Three Mexican nationals, two men and a woman, have been arrested as suspects.

A fourth body was also found in the well, but it's believed to be older and from an earlier incident, the Guardian reported.

Turf wars between drug gangs are common in Baja California, which is one of Mexico's most dangerous and violent states. However, Ensenada is generally considered to be safe — about 75 miles south of California, it is a popular spot for US tourists.

The surfers' loved ones have paid tribute

Friends and family of the Robinsons and Carter Rhoad have been sharing tributes to the young men.

"Callum and Jake are beautiful human beings. We love them so much and this breaks our heart," the brothers' parents said in a statement, the BBC reported.

Callum's teammates from Stevenson University Lacrosse Club said in a statement on social media: "With his beautiful long hair and charming smile, he truly embodied the nickname 'big koala' — warm, friendly, and always there to lend a helping hand."

His girlfriend, Emily Horwath, said in an Instagram story that her heart was "shattered into a million pieces."

"I don't have the words right now… I will love you forever," she wrote.

Protesters and mourners took to the streets of Ensenada on Sunday to share their sadness and anger.

They marched with messages on surfboards, such as "They only wanted to surf — we demand safe beaches."

Surfers also held a "paddle out" ocean vigil in memory of the Robinsons and Carter Rhoad.

• Elon Musk has given J.K. Rowling some advice about her focus on transgender issues in her X posts.
• The billionaire suggested the author could post "interesting and positive content" about other matters.
• Both Musk and Rowling have faced criticism for their comments on transgender issues.

Elon Musk thinks J.K. Rowling should stop focusing on transgender issues.

In the comments of a lengthy X post by Rowling, the billionaire suggested the "Harry Potter" author could write more "interesting and positive content."

Musk wrote: "While I heartily agree with your points regarding sex/gender, may I suggest also posting interesting and positive content on other matters?"

Rowling's post was from April 6, and it's not clear why Musk took almost a month to comment on it.

The author appeared to address Musk's comment in a later X post.

Sharing an article about her writing process on Sunday, the author said: "Just realised that I missed being advised to share more positive content yesterday … sharing this about my writing life, which happens to have been published today in The Sunday Times, should in no way be interpreted as me doing as I'm told."

"I need to be reminded of this myself from time to time," Musk quipped in response to the post.

The X owner has also made controversial comments on transgender issues, vowing last year to start "actively lobbying to criminalize making severe, irreversible changes to children below the age of consent."

Musk has a teenage daughter who is trans. Last year, she successfully petitioned a court to change her family name, telling a judge that she no longer wished to be related to her father "in any way, shape or form."

Rowling has come under fire many times in recent years for her comments on transgender issues.

Actors who appeared in the "Harry Potter"films, including Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Eddie Redmayne, have spoken out about Rowling's comments and supported transgender people. 

Representatives for Musk and Rowling did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

• One of Jeff Ross' jokes during Tom Brady's Netflix roast didn't land well with the NFL champion.
• The joke referenced a 2019 prostitution scandal involving New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
• Brady could be seen whispering to Ross on stage: "Don't say that shit again."

Tom Brady fielded jokes spanning his ex-wife Gisele Bündchen to his failed crypto venture during his Netflix roast on Sunday.

The NFL Hall-of-Famer was mostly a good sport — except for with one joke.

Comedian Jeff Ross, dubbed the "Roastmaster General," was one of the first to take to the stage during "The Greatest Roast of All Time: Tom Brady."

Referring to the New England Patriot's owner, he told the audience: "Tom became a Patriot and moved up to New England, and on the first day of training camp, that scrawny rookie famously walked into the owner Robert Kraft's office and said, 'I'm the best decision your organization has ever made. Would you like a massage?'"

He then blew a kiss towards Kraft, pointed at him, and said, "I love Robert Kraft."

Seconds later, Brady stood up from his seat, walked up to Ross, and murmured in his ear, "Don't say that shit again."

Ross, who is Jewish, replied, "OK, OK. He's having fun, look at him. I love what you do for the Jews, Robert Kraft. You're incredible."

The joke referenced a 2019 scandal when Kraft was charged with two counts of soliciting prostitution during a human trafficking and prostitution investigation involving several day spas in Florida.

The sports executive was accused of engaging in sex acts with one of the spa's employees, along with 24 other men and four women. Kraft pleaded not guilty, and the charges were later dropped due to a lack of evidence.

With the charges hanging over his head, Kraft, 82, appeared to conduct business as usual: in the summer after he was accused, he attended an institutional dinner alongside President Donald Trump in Qatar, and was later spotted partying with Jon Bon Jovi and Jamie Foxx in the Hamptons.

While the charges were eventually dropped against the men involved in the scandal, the women still had to agree to a plea deal and pay hefty fines amounting to thousands of dollars.

"The Greatest Roast of All Time: Tom Brady" aired as part of the Netflix Is A Joke, the streamer's 12-day-long live comedy festival taking place in LA.

Hosted by Kevin Hart, Brady wasn't only roasted by Jeff Ross, but also Bert Kreischer, Tom Segura, Nikki Glaser, Andrew Schulz, Tony Hinchcliffe, and Sam Jay.

• Jack Dorsey has gone from loving to hating to loving Elon Musk again.
• The Twitter cofounder said on Saturday that he was no longer on the board of X rival, Bluesky.
• Dorsey also praised the Musk-owned platform, calling it a form of "freedom technology."

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey might have once been a critic of Elon Musk's changes to his creation.

But all that seems to be water under the bridge now for Dorsey, who's now seemingly in his "I Love Elon" era.

For starters, Dorsey unfollowed over 2,000 accounts on X over the weekend, leaving just three accounts — Elon Musk, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and Stella Assange, the wife of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Then on Saturday, Dorsey revealed that he was no longer on the board of Bluesky, a social media platform he helped to build and back.

Hours later, he would go on to laud the benefits of the Musk-owned platform, calling it a form of "freedom technology."

Representatives for Musk and X didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

It is unclear what prompted Dorsey to purge his following list, but it is notable that Musk is one of the "survivors."

After all, Dorsey didn't seem to be a fan of Musk's management of the social media platform. During an interview with the YouTube channel "Breaking Points" in June, Dorsey slammed Musk's leadership of Twitter.

Musk's changes, which ranged from scrapping the platform's legacy verified program and laying off thousands of employees, "weren't fully thought out," Dorsey said.

"It all looked fairly reckless," Dorsey said of Musk's decisions.

The criticism in the summer of 2023 marked a sharp turn for Dorsey, who'd once hailed Musk as the "singular solution I trust" to take Twitter private.

"Elon's goal of creating a platform that is 'maximally trusted and broadly inclusive' is the right one," Dorsey said in an X post on April 2022. "This is the right path…I believe it with all my heart."

Now, judging by what happened over the weekend, it seems Dorsey has rekindled his faith in Musk once again. And the fact that Dorsey has so publicly parted ways with X rival Bluesky suggests that he's fully on board with Musk's vision now.

The feelings may be mutual too. Back in March 2020, Musk voiced his support for Dorsey after an activist hedge fund, Elliot Management, tried to oust Dorsey as Twitter's CEO.

"Just want to say that I support Jack as Twitter CEO. He has a good heart," Musk wrote on X on March 2, 2020.

Dorsey's support for Musk is probably much welcomed by the latter, considering the amount of animosity Musk has accumulated amongst his tech world contemporaries.

Besides feuding with Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Musk has also found time to clash with fellow OpenAI cofounder, Sam Altman.

In February, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, where he accused the company of violating its nonprofit mission when it partnered with Microsoft.

"OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it 'Open' AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft," Musk said in an X post on February 17.

If you've hunted for a job in the past decade or so, you've likely encountered the following obstacle course. Applying to a desired role online, you're greeted with a login prompt. The employer is asking you to create a profile to apply? Annoying, but you go ahead.

You're given a long form to fill out with the information that's already on your résumé. In a world where we can all attach PDFs, this seems unnecessary, but — ah, phew — the form promises to autofill the entries if you simply drag your résumé over, and — oh, crap. It loads all wrong. Your work experience is scattered across the lines that want your name and address. Your address, truncated, is where your college degree should be. It's a mess. You find it's easier to delete it all and manually type in each entry. How obnoxious.

Soon after, applying to a different job at a different company, you click through and see the same form. You recognize the logo at the top of the page: a blue W with a yellow arch cresting above it. Is the arch a … frown? Geez. But you'd set up a user ID to apply to the previous job, so this should be — huh? It wants an entirely new ID. New company, new profile, new form. Oof. Surely it saved your application entries from the other job, right? Nope. Does the autofill work this time? Of course it doesn't. Another half-hour of formatting and you're done with the application — and so done with whichever confounding organization decided to execute these tasks this way.

Then you find another job opening and — no. No! So the logo is a frown.

The company devising this torture that is the modern job application is called Workday. Since 2006, Workday, which provides software for payroll, talent management, and expense processing, has been making a mint creating misery where painless processes could be. More than half of the Fortune 500 companies use Workday to pay, hire, onboard, and administer benefits to their employees. Clients range from Netflix to Goodwill, Spotify to The Washington Post, Chick-fil-A to Ohio State University. Trillions of dollars in revenue and tens of millions of employees are at the mercy of Workday's back-end people-management software. The company is worth some $70 billion, a market cap greater than that of FedEx, Nintendo, or Honda.

LinkedIn, Reddit, and Blind abound with enraged job applicants and employees sharing tales of how difficult it is to book leave, how Kafkaesque it is to file an expense.

Few seem happy about this. LinkedIn, Reddit, and Blind abound with enraged job applicants and employees sharing tales of how difficult it is to book paid leave, how Kafkaesque it is to file an expense, how nerve-racking it is to close out a project. "I simply hate Workday. Fuck them and those who insist on using it for recruitment," one Reddit user wrote. "Everything is non-intuitive, so even the simplest tasks leave me scratching my head," wrote another. "Keeping notes on index cards would be more effective." Every HR professional and hiring manager I spoke with — whose lives are supposedly made easier by Workday — described Workday with a sense of cosmic exasperation. "It's like constantly being botsmacked by bureaucracy incarnate," said a copy director at an AI startup in San Francisco who had the misfortune of having to hire contractors through Workday. He went on: "Getting someone onboarded using Workday is like trying to get water from your sink to your stove using a colander." The X account Work Day Failing tracks memes and news articles describing workers and companies suffering within various circles of Workday hell, from Amazon's failed migration to Workday in 2021 (after which Workday's stock dropped by 7%) to an ongoing class-action lawsuit that alleges Workday uses AI to discriminate against candidates based on race, age, and disability. ("We believe this lawsuit is without merit and deny the allegations," said a Workday spokesperson. "Workday does not have oversight or control of our customers' job application processes.")

If candidates hate Workday, if employees hate Workday, if HR people and managers processing and assessing those candidates and employees through Workday hate Workday — if Workday is the most annoying part of so many workers' workdays — how is Workday everywhere? How did a software provider so widely loathed become a mainstay of the modern workplace?

The answer, to use a term that any client of Workday could surely use, is POSIWID. This is a saying in systems thinking: The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID), not what it fails to do. And the reality is that what Workday — and its many despised competitors — does for organizations is far more important than the anguish it causes everyone else.

Of the 160 million Americans with jobs, about 130 million of us aren't self-employed or don't own a business and so receive wages and health-insurance plans through our employers. Serving these 130 million people are roughly 1 million human-resources professionals. That's an impossible shit ton of hirings, firings, withheld taxes, expenses, paid leaves, orientation trainings, and professional-growth reviews to keep track of. It's a world of paperwork that software is eager to eat.

In the late 20th century, companies moved more and more of that recordkeeping from filing cabinets to mainframe computers and then to servers. In 1988, PeopleSoft, backed by IBM, built the first fully fledged Human Resources Information System. In 2004, Oracle acquired PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion. One of its founders, David Duffield, then started a new company that upgraded PeopleSoft's model to near limitless cloud-based storage — giving birth to Workday, the intractable nepo baby of HR software.

Unlike its predecessors, Workday stores our applications and profiles as objects that relate to each other, linked with metadata. How this works is less important than the fact that it means Workday could conceivably build its own encrypted database of our information, across our different jobs and applications. When you leave Spotify to go work at Netflix, your profile could follow you, allowing you to more easily apply to the job. The multiplying powers of tech could scale to free us of our busy work, as promised.

But Workday's servers belong with its clients, and so it can't (or won't) do this. Does Workday want to carry the liability of a data breach that could damage half of the Fortune 500? Probably not. A Workday spokesperson said that Workday's clients "configure the application process for each job to fit their unique hiring processes and needs." She added, "Our customers retain control over their own data."

This raises another point: Workday is indifferent to our suffering in a job hunt, because we aren't Workday's clients, companies are. And these companies — from AT&T to Bank of America to Teladoc — have little incentive to care about your application experience, because if you didn't get the job, you're not their responsibility. For a company hiring and onboarding on a global scale, it is simply easier to screen fewer candidates if the result is still a single hire.

Also, because Workday is a jack of all trades program (recruiting and finance and company-wide planning etc. etc.), the supposed convenience of an all-in-one platform often come at the cost of creating frustrating new problems for clients. At one major university last year, migrating its IT — including 11,000 outstanding invoices — to Workday became a full-blown fiasco. A search on a job board can return hundreds of listings for in-house Workday consultants: IT and engineering professionals hired to fix the software promising to fix processes.

Bureaucratic hell is always about one person's ease coming at the cost of someone else's frustration, time wasted, and busy work.

For recruiters, Workday also lacks basic user-interface flexibility. When you promise ease-of-use and simplicity, you must deliver on the most basic user interactions. And yet: Sometimes searching for a candidate, or locating a candidate's status feels impossible. This happens outside of recruiting, too, where locating or attaching a boss's email to approve an expense sheet is complicated by the process, not streamlined. Bureaucratic hell is always about one person's ease coming at the cost of someone else's frustration, time wasted, and busy work. Workday makes no exceptions.

Workday touts its ability to track employee performance by collecting data and marking results, but it is employees who must spend time inputting this data. A creative director at a Fortune 500 company told me how in less than two years his company went "from annual reviews to twice-annual reviews to quarterly reviews to quarterly reviews plus separate twice-annual reviews." At each interval higher-ups pressed HR for more data, because they wanted what they'd paid for with Workday: more work product. With a press of a button, HR could provide that, but the entire company suffered thousands more hours of busy work. Automation made it too easy to do too much. (Workday's "customers choose the frequency at which they conduct reviews, not Workday," said the spokesperson.)

Of course, Workday has innumerable competitors, their names as ridiculous as their sheer volume. We have Dayforce, Zenefits, and Sage. We must not confuse Paycom with Paycor, or Kudos with Kudoboard. How dare you mistake Namely or Cornerstone for Rippling. Beyond standard HR Information Systems, legions of niche operators offer add-ons to boost employee engagement, from Bonusly (really) to BucketList (sad but true), to Motivosity (yes).

Are any of these better, or are they all maligned? As easily as you can find a founder who hates UKG Pro but loves Rippling you can find a similar rant from another founder ripping Rippling a new one. HR and payroll and recruiting are unenviable tasks, and not easy even before scale. At the scale of a large company, this is simply too much work to expect a few people to do and far too user-specific to expect automation to handle well. It's why Workday can be the worst while still allowing that Paychex is the worst, Paycom is the worst, Paycor is the worst, and Dayforce is the worst. "HR software sucking" is a big tent.

The writer and tech critic Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe how internet platforms inevitably decay. First, platforms are good to their users, creating value (Facebook, where people can connect and share their lives with one another). Then they abuse their users to make money for their actual customers, advertisers or businesses (Facebook, where we sell your data to inundate you with ads). Then they abuse those business customers to try to recoup revenue for themselves (Facebook, pivoting to video). Then platforms die.

Workday finds itself between enshittification steps two and three. The platform once made things faster, simpler for workers. But today it abuses workers by cutting corners on job-application and reimbursement procedures. In the process, it provides the value of a one-stop HR shop to its paying customers. It seems it's only a matter of time before Workday and its competitors try to split the difference and cut those same corners with the accounts that pay their bills.

Workday reveals what's important to the people who run Fortune 500 companies: easily and conveniently distributing busy work across large workforces. This is done with the arbitrary and perfunctory performance of work tasks (like excessive reviews) and with the throttling of momentum by making finance and HR tasks difficult. If your expenses and reimbursements are difficult to file, that's OK, because the people above you don't actually care if you get reimbursed. If it takes applicants 128% longer to apply, the people who implemented Workday don't really care. Throttling applicants is perhaps not intentional, but it's good for the company.

Customer service is Workday's goal. It's just that the customer isn't you.

I once worked at a cocktail lounge with a creaky board behind the bar, and the owner refused to fix it. We all complained nonstop about the board, but never about him. He'd seemed to realize the same net benefit that Workday and all of its love-to-hate-them competitors provide us in the modern workplace: Nothing brings people together like a common enemy.

Matt Alston's writing has appeared in Wired, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Believer. He trained as a civil engineer, and now works as a copywriter in tech. He lives in Maine with his wife and daughter.

• Diners are "price weary" and eating out less often, restaurant executives told investors last week.
• One analyst said Starbucks posted its "weakest" performance outside the pandemic or Great Recession.
• A number of chains said they'd be more careful with price hikes this year.

Many consumers are thinking carefully about how they spend every dollar, with some cutting back on visits to quick-service restaurants, executives told investors on a series of earnings calls last week. To win penny-pinching customers back, some say they're planning smaller price increases for the rest of the year.

Many fast-food chains described a gloomy outlook. Wendy's CFO Gunther Plosch told investors on Thursday that consumers are "still under pressure" — especially those with household incomes under $75,000. "They are reducing frequency, so visitation is down."

Chains raised prices drastically during the pandemic to offset rising labor and food costs, and it's coming back to bite them. Some diners are cutting back, saying that fast food is just too expensive and no longer represents good value.

McDonald's CFO Ian Borden told investors that consumers were "price weary" and "certainly" dining out less often. Joshua Kobza, the CEO of RBI, which owns brands including Burger King and Popeyes, told analysts that diners had become "a bit more sensitive to price."

Chains including McDonald's, Burger King, Shake Shack, and Wendy's posted sluggish US comparable sales, with a poor growth rate compared to what they posted in the first quarter last year, driven by a decrease in the number of orders.

For some restaurant chains, comparable sales even fell. Starbucks posted a 3% drop in North America comparable sales, which it attributed to a 7% fall in the number of transactions. William Blair analyst Sharon Zackfia said in a note to clients that it was the "weakest traffic performance at Starbucks outside the pandemic or the Great Recession."

Global comparable sales also fell in the first three months of the year for both KFC (down 2%) and Pizza Hut (a 7% decline), compared with the same period in 2023.

Some chains, though, including Popeyes, Domino's, and Wingstop, posted a growth in same-restaurant sales.

Pricing caution

Before the pandemic, limited-service restaurants in the US put their prices up by less than 3% a year on average, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows. That all changed during the pandemic, and while it's now cooling, price inflation is still well above pre-2020 levels.

Some chains last week vowed to keep price increases low this year, though many noted that California's new $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast-food workers had pushed up prices there.

"We're going to stay careful on pricing," Plosch, the Wendy's CFO, said. "We are expecting low-single digit pricing that the system is going to execute this year. I don't think we're going to get too greedy."

McDonald's would "certainly" be "prudent and thoughtful" about any further price increases in the rest of 2024, Borden said.

Shake Shack went one step further. CFO Katie Fogertey told investors on Thursday that the chain, which has raised prices by in the mid-single digits this year, had no further increases planned for 2024.

Is fast food now too expensive? Contact this reporter at gdean@businessinsider.com