Tag: 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

• Amazon has more than doubled its warehouse robot fleet in the past three years.
• The robots, with varying functions, are designed to boost efficiency and reduce strain on employees.
• It's gone from having 350,000 robots in 2021 to 750,000 in 2023, company blog posts show.

Amazon has ramped up its fleet of robots in recent years to boost its warehouse operations.

It's more than doubled the number of robots deployed in its fulfillment centers and warehouses in the last three years, from 350,000 in 2021 to 750,000 by last June, data from its blog posts show. The company also claims to be the world's largest manufacturer of industrial robots.

Amazon has a whole bunch of robots with unusual names that it uses in its operations. Robotic arms Robin and Sparrow were designed and manufactured at its Robotics Innovation Hub near Boston and help sort customer orders.

Then there are robots Proteus and Hercules, which move and look like the robot vacuum Roomba and shift items such as containers. Its robotic system called Sequoia lifts and sorts containers and eases the strain on employees to bend and stretch, Amazon Robotics' chief technologist Tye Brady told NBC's "Today."

The company also started testing Agility Robotics' humanoid robot called Digit in warehouses last year.

The expansion shows Amazon is bullish on robots, and it's a bet that seems to be paying off.

The company says Sequoia helps identify and store inventory 75% faster and reduces the time needed to process orders by up to a quarter. At its Robotics sites, recorded incident rates and lost-time incident rates (how often injuries occur at work and the rate it's resulted in time away from work) were down 15% and 18%, respectively, in 2022 compared with non-Robotics sites.

Robots have been talked up by robotics firms as a solution to help ease labor shortages and perform "the dull, the dirty, and the dangerous" tasks, as Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas previously told Business Insider.

Amazon's robot army is still significantly smaller than its employee total, which stood at 1.525 million full-time and part-time workers at the end of last year, per its annual report. However, the company has been cutting jobs in its cloud division, Amazon Web Services, this year.

Agility Robotics president Damion Shelton previously told BI that its robots are intended to complement and elevate the productivity of workers.

Stefano La Rovere, director of global robotics, mechatronics, and sustainable packaging at Amazon, told CNBC that "robots and technology help our employees … by reducing walking distance between assignments, by taking away repetitive motions, or helping them to lift heavy weights."

And despite fears that robots and technology could replace workers, the opposite has been true, La Rovere told the outlet: "Over the last years, more than 700 new categories of jobs have been created by the use of technology."

Amazon didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Official NBER recession data says US recessions have become less common over time. 
• But some economists have argued that flawed historical economic data puts this claim in question.  
• A variety of factors should be making the US economy more recession-proof than it used to be. 

One of the biggest questions of today's economy is when the US will enter a recession. And most Americans are crossing their fingers it won't happen anytime soon.

During recessions, many people lose their jobs — and those who don't are left worrying about whether they'll be next on the chopping block. Recessions often cause businesses to close and stock portfolios to plummet, and they can have a lingering impact on workers' employment and wages, even years after a downturn has officially ended.

So, over the last few years, when experts predicted that the US would soon enter a recession, many Americans worried about their financial security. While a downturn hasn't come yet — and some economic indicators remain strong — recession fears haven't gone away.

While it's unclear if the US will experience a recession in the near future, data from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) — the private, nonprofit research group that's responsible for tracking the start and end dates of US recessions — shows a promising trend: Recessions have become less common in the US.

Between 1990 and 2023, the US economy spent 36 months in a recession, with the most recent US recession in 2020 lasting two months. The NBER defines a recession as the period between a peak of economic activity and its lowest point — the period typically must include a "significant decline in economic activity" that lasts more than a few months.

Between 1960 and 1989, the economy spent 59 months in a recession. The further back you go — the NBER data goes to about 1850 — the more common recessions were.

But here's where things get a bit complicated.

The NBER's recession data between roughly 1850 and 1950 is somewhere between flawed and unusable, George Selgin, an economist and a senior fellow at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, told Business Insider. He said the NBER's pre-1914 recession data, in particular, is "very poor," and that only economic data collected after World War II is of good quality.

For example, while some efforts were made to track unemployment as early as the 1870s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn't officially do so until 1929.

This raises a series of questions: Are US recessions, in fact, much less common than they used to be? If so, who or what is responsible for this improvement?

And if not, what's gone wrong? After all, economists told BI that the US's diversifying economy and improving economic data should have made the US more resistant to recessions than perhaps ever before.

Recessions might not be less common

It's possible that NBER worked with subpar data but generally was able to identify when the US entered a recession.

However, Selgin said alternative analyses of historical economic data have found that the US hasn't seen much of a decline in recession frequency over time. Selgin pointed to a research paper published in 2005 by Joseph H. Davis, now the global chief economist at Vanguard, as the "most reliable" source of recession data he's seen.

Davis's research put more emphasis on economic output and employment and less on prices, which can tell a misleading story, Selgin said. For example, while prices fell during the late 1800s, this didn't mean there was necessarily a recession.

"What Davis and other economic historians have shown is that much of the deflation, not all of it during those times, was driven by productivity gains."

Ultimately, Davis's research concluded that US recessions might not be as common historically as previously thought — casting doubt on the premise that recessions have become much less common over time.

While Davis's recession data only dates back to around 2000, Selgin said incorporating more recent data points, like the Great Recession, would only reinforce the paper's findings.

The US economy is more resilient because it has diversified

In some ways, the US economy is arguably more stable than it was 100 years ago. Agriculture's declining share of the economy is among the primary reasons. In 1935, there were about 6.8 million farms in the US, per the US Department of Agriculture. In 2023, there were 1.9 million.

"A bad harvest for one or two crops or a drought season, that could give you a big downturn," Selgin said. "That doesn't happen in a diversified manufacturing economy, of course, where much of the GDP has nothing to do with the weather."

The ongoing transition from a manufacturing economy to a services-oriented one could be making the US even more resilient, Satyam Panday, Chief US Economist, S&P Global Ratings, told Business Insider.

"The most volatile is agriculture, then manufacturing, and services is the most stable," he said of economies with a particular industry focus. "So the growing share of services also means you're going to have more stable economic growth."

Additionally, Selgin said that growing US government spending relative to GDP over the past century could also be making the economy more stable. In part, that's because government spending doesn't tend to plummet during difficult economic periods.

Becoming more energy-independent may have helped as well. Before 2018, when the US exported more oil than it imported for the first time in 75 years, a huge spike in oil prices outside the US could seriously impact the economy, Panday said. Today, the US should be more insulated from such a price shock.

But if recessions aren't much less common than they used to be, and the aforementioned developments should be making the economy more stable, where would the instability be coming from?

Selgin isn't sure what the explanation is, but he thinks it's possible that the Federal Reserve, which was founded in 1913, could be partly responsible.

"The Fed tends to overdo things sometimes, and others, it underdoes things, even though, in general, it's getting the directions right," he said of the central bank's interest rate policies. "There's plenty of reason to not be complacent about the Fed's performance, to wonder whether it has really done what it set out to do when it was established."

The Fed is tasked with helping the economy maintain maximum employment and stable prices. Since 2022, the Fed has raised interest rates in an effort to bring down inflation, and it's pursuing the desired "soft landing" of lower prices and a healthy labor market. Its policies may have helped the US avoid a recession.

Panday said he believes that better economic data and the ability to "learn from the mistakes of the past" have helped the Fed make better decisions.

Avoiding recessions isn't the only indicator of a healthy economy

The longer the US economy grows without a recession, the better it is for employment and Americans' standard of living, Panday said. But when it comes to measuring the stability of the US economy, measuring the frequency of recessions might not be the best approach.

Even when a recession technically comes to an end, and the US economy begins to grow again, that doesn't mean everything is fine and dandy. For example, the US exited a recession in 2009, but employment didn't return to pre-recession levels until 2014.

It's why economists should focus not only on the frequency of recessions but on the pace of the economic recoveries in the aftermath, Selgin said.

Panday said he thinks policymakers' response to the pandemic recession — which included trillions in federal COVID-19 spending — shows that they may have learned the lesson from the sluggish recovery after the Great Recession.

To be sure, while a stable economy has its benefits, it's not the only indicator of a healthy economy. For example, Americans' standard of living has improved considerably over the past century thanks in part to a growing economy and technological progress, even though they've dealt with the occasional recession.

In the years and decades ahead, any number of factors could plunge the US into a downturn.

A long economic expansion could raise the risk of the economy "running too hot," Panday said — which could ultimately lay the groundwork for a recession if policymakers don't respond correctly. He added that the growth of the financial sector relative to the rest of the economy could pose risks if it's not properly regulated. And of course, unexpected global shocks to supply and demand — the pandemic being the most recent example — could wreak havoc.

To some Americans, the next recession might feel inevitable. But Panday said that isn't necessarily true.

"Economic expansions don't die of old age just because of time," he said. "Even if it's been going on for a long time, it doesn't mean that you're going to get a recession."

Have you changed your spending or savings strategies over the past few years because you feared a recession was on the horizon? If so, reach out to this reporter at jzinkula@businessinsider.com.

• Cheryl Simmons, a parking lot attendant, lives in her car but makes too much for affordable housing.
• Despite earning $42,000 annually, Simmons cannot afford rent and barely has savings left over.
• Many 'peak boomers' are not financially ready for retirement, with 52.5% having under $250,000 in assets.

Cheryl Simmons, 62, thinks she'll have to "work until I drop."

Simmons, who works as a parking lot attendant in San Diego, has struggled with homelessness on and off for years, even though she's maintained jobs throughout much of that time. She lives in her car, even though she makes about $42,000 a year. She and her son previously lived in an efficiency apartment since it was all they could afford.

She makes slightly too much for a single-room occupancy unit in affordable housing and exceeds the income limit for food stamps and other government assistance. She believes she's fallen through the cracks and thinks she'll never be able to retire or live comfortably.

"I don't have somewhere for my grandchildren to come and visit, and I always have to go and visit them. But maybe that's the way it's supposed to be," Simmons said.

Simmons is one of the 30 million "peak boomers" entering retirement age in the next few years, but most are not financially prepared to retire. These boomers, born between 1959 and 1964, are facing economic challenges some have called the boomer retirement bomb.

A new report from the Alliance for Lifetime Income's Retirement Income Institute found that 52.5% of peak boomers have below $250,000 in assets. Many of these boomers will have to drain their savings or heavily rely on Social Security income after retiring — with many having to continue working into their 70s, at least in part-time roles.

Simmons also exemplifies the 29% of the country who fall into the category of ALICE — or Americans who are asset-limited, income-constrained, and employed. ALICE Americans make enough income to be above the Federal Poverty Level but too much to afford essential costs. Most earn too much to qualify for government assistance, falling through the cracks of the nation's safety net. The share of ALICEs has risen over the last decade nationwide.

Navigating homelessness

Simmons was born and raised in Albuquerque and had her first child at 22. She was a single mother with no college education and worked in entry-level office and fast-food roles. She later enrolled in community college courses in accounting.

She got married to her first husband, and they had two children together. She ultimately left the marriage, although she experienced homelessness after their divorce.

Because her son wanted to move to San Diego, she followed him 13 years ago with little money or belongings. She got into a shelter while her son looked for work. After both eventually found jobs, they moved into a studio apartment for $1,300 a month that she said was smaller than a hotel room. She also bought a car, which she's still paying off.

Her current job as a parking lot attendant pays her about $1,200 every other week after taxes. Much of that goes toward her car, insurance payments, and gas, which averages $5.39 a gallon in California.

Her son lost his job, and the two were forced to give up their apartment. Her son lives in the car with his cat, while she rents an SUV from a former coworker and sleeps in the back.

She said her company has offered to pay $1,000 toward a security deposit and other expenses on an apartment, though she said she can't cover monthly rent.

"I am OK sleeping in the car, and I don't need a whole lot. But it would be nice to have a bathroom in the middle of the night and a refrigerator," Simmons said.

Worried about retirement

She said she has no savings, as her earnings have mostly gone toward expenses and housing during more stable periods. Her car payment is $274 a month, while her insurance is $111. Her son's car is about $600 a month, though he pays the insurance. She estimates gas is $80 a week between the two cars, while her phone bill runs her $150 a month. Since she can't cook food, she spends about $30 a day on food. Other expenses include $84 a month for storage, as well as some other debts.

"We can't be happy if we don't know sadness, so I just accept this little bit of sadness and go on with happiness," Simmons said.

She tries to save some of her paycheck each month to get a camper van to drive to Texas to visit her grandson.

"At this point in my life, my expectations are very low," Simmons said. "I found out that it was hard to start over in your 40s."

Even with all these expenses, she said she's been denied local and federal assistance. She makes slightly over the $3,288 gross monthly income threshold for a two-person household to qualify for CalFresh, California's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as Food Stamps.

"I haven't really looked at the Food Stamp requirements for California recently since I just figured they're going to look at me and be like, you make $20 an hour and don't pay rent, so why do you need food stamps?" Simmons said.

Even when it was lower last year, her income disqualified her from most affordable housing, as she makes well above the monthly rental assistance threshold in San Diego for an SRO or a one- or two-bedroom apartment.

She said she's not alone among her coworkers and friends — one of her coworkers devotes half of his income to rent.

She's nowhere near alone in her fears about retirement, either. She has no retirement fund, and she thinks her best-case scenario is ending up at a nursing home.

She said that she has no choice but to continue working, as she said her expected Social Security payments in a few years would not be enough. She wants to remain active and have purpose at work, especially as she's been discussing a promotion to an office position.

She said she's in relatively good health, and given that her mother died when she was in her late 40s, she views life at the moment as "bonus time."

"I just know that things are not necessarily always going to be this way because I have seen changes in my life before," Simmons said. "I'm just pushing through and staying positive, though it's not always easy."

Are you a peak boomer or ALICE? Are you worried about retirement? Reach out to this reporter at nsheidlower@businessinsider.com.