Business

The resale business is booming, thanks, in part, to consumers increasingly interested in sustainability and securing hard-to-find luxury items.
Matthew Kaness, CEO of the recently launched GoodwillFinds.com, said shoppers are coming to the site for designer handbags, vintage sneakers, art and collectibles.

Whether consumers are looking to save or are hunting for a buried treasure, the resale business is booming.
During the Covid pandemic, secondhand stores such as eBay, the RealReal and ThredUp thrived online.

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So-called recommerce grew nearly 15% in 2021 — twice as fast as the broader retail market and notching the highest rate of growth in history for the industry, according to a 2022 report by OfferUp. Over the next five years it is projected to grow by another 80% and hit $289 billion.
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“We were missing out,” said Matthew Kaness, CEO of GoodwillFinds.com, Goodwill’s recently launched online marketplace.  
“Goodwill is the ‘OG’ of thrifting,” he said. “This is such an obvious opportunity.”
Although Goodwill is known for secondhand clothing and housewares, more shoppers are coming to the site for one-of-a-kind finds, including art, designer handbags, jewelry and vintage sneakers, Kaness said — similar to what’s happening in the industry overall.

Shoppers hunt for bargains and elusive luxury finds

Arrows pointing outwards

Tete De Femme Stylisee by Picasso
Source: GoodwillFinds.com

Most resale consumers are driven by value. Thrift-store shoppers save nearly $150 a month, or $1,760 a year, on average, by buying secondhand items, according to a report by CouponFollow.
Saving money, however, is not the only motivator, CouponFollow found. Shoppers have increasingly turned to resale as a means to secure hard-to-find luxury items.
In fact, sometimes buying secondhand is the only way to score a limited-edition pair of Air Jordans or other highly coveted and exclusive items — not to mention tickets to Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour.
Recently, an unauthenticated signed print by Picasso titled “Tete De Femme Stylisee” sold for $2,500 at the site.

This is such an obvious opportunity.

Matthew Kaness
CEO of GoodwillFinds.com

Part of the momentum fueling resale is the desire to gain access to that unique item, said Wells Fargo managing director Adam Davis, who works with recommerce retail businesses, whether that’s “a Chanel handbag or Nike sneakers” — even if you end up paying more than the original retail price.  
Because recommerce is also considered eco-friendly, it’s become more socially acceptable, said Brett Heffes, CEO of Winmark, the franchisor of stores such as Plato’s Closet, Once Upon a Child and Play It Again Sports.
“When I started in this business, there was a stigma around purchasing previously owned items, and that stigma is gone.”

“Affluent consumers are leading the recommerce revolution,” said Chris Richter, CEO of recommerce site FloorFound.
Largely driven by value and a desire to shop in more sustainable ways, “shoppers are looking to purchase resale instead of new,” he said.
High-income consumers are even more likely to shop secondhand, according to a poll of more than 1,000 adults by FloorFound: Nearly 9 in 10 shoppers making more than $175,000 a year have previously bought a resale item — 14 percentage points higher than the survey average.
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Disney shares jumped in premarket trading Monday following news that Bob Iger replaced Bob Chapek as CEO.
Disney is a Dow 30 component.

Disney World celebrated its 50th anniversary in April 2022.
Aaronp/bauer-griffin | Gc Images | Getty Images

Shares of Disney popped in premarket trade Monday, the morning after the company announced it had replaced CEO Bob Chapek with Bob Iger.
Disney stock rose about 9% on Monday morning. As of Friday’s close, the company’s shares had fallen about 40% so far this year.

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Chapek, who succeeded Iger as CEO in early 2020, had come under increasing criticism and scrutiny over the company’s performance in recent months. Its most recently quarterly earnings report, which hit earlier this month, arrived with a thud, sending the company’s shares down dramatically. Three days after that report, Chapek told his lieutenants in a memo that Disney would seek to cut costs through hiring freezes, layoffs and other means.
Still, the decision to replace Chapek with Iger stunned the business world. Iger, who worked for 15 years as Disney’s chief, had said previously that he would not return to the job, while the company renewed Chapek’s contract earlier this year as he pressed his reorganization vision for Disney.
Chapek took over just before the Covid pandemic severely cramped Disney’s business, shutting its theme parks and keeping its movies out of theaters for months. As Chapek helped the company weather that storm, with Iger still serving as chairman through December of last year, the company’s stock climbed to just above $200 at one point in 2021.
Since then, Disney’s shares have tumbled. They closed below $100 on Friday.

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AS BIG tech companies face a brutal slow-down the hunt is on for new areas of expansion. Amazon, which is now America’s second-biggest business by revenue, is a case in point. In the final quarter of 2022 its sales are expected to expand by just 6.7% year on year. Last week, on November 17th, Andy Jassy, the firm’s chief executive, confirmed that it had begun laying off employees and would continue to do so next year. Mr Jassy said it was the most difficult decision he had made since becoming boss. But he also noted that “big opportunities” lay ahead. One that he highlighted is the largest, most lucrative and hellishly difficult businesses in America: health care.Many tech firms have health care ambitions. Apple tracks wellbeing through the iPhone; Microsoft offers cloud-computing services to health firms and Alphabet sells wearable devices and is pumping money into biotech research. But Amazon is now busy creating the most ambitious offering of them all. Two days before Mr Jassy’s statement, on November 15th, it launched “Amazon Clinic”, an online service operating in 32 states that offers virtual health care for over 20 conditions from acne to allergies. Amazon describes the new service as a virtual storefront that connects users with third-party health providers.The Amazon Clinic launch follows the $3.9bn takeover, announced in July, of One Medical, a primary care provider that offers telehealth services online and runs bricks-and-mortar clinics (the deal has yet to close). It has 790,000 members. The deal was led by Neil Linsday, formerly responsible for Prime, Amazon’s subscription service, who has said health care “is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention”.These latest moves complement existing assets that Amazon has. Its Halo band is a wearable device that monitors the user’s health status, and which went on sale in 2020. In 2018 it bought PillPack, a digital pharmacy that is now part of Amazon Pharmacy, for $753m. Amazon Web Services launched specific cloud services for health care and life science companies in 2021.The move into primary care, jargon for the role of the traditional family doctor, is a big step but has an obvious logic. Walgreens, a pharmacy chain, reckons the industry is worth $1trn a year. Around half of Generation Z and millennial Americans do not have a primary-care doctor and One Medical’s membership has almost doubled since 2019. Amazon Clinic will accept cash for its services, rather than relying on America’s nightmare insurance system to recoup costs.The company is betting that primary care will become more digital. And it is likely that it will seek to integrate these services with other parts of Amazon’s health care offering. Amazon Clinic’s new users can buy drugs from Amazon Pharmacy. Over time the firm could add features to the Halo band that give people reminders to take medicine or set up clinics in branches of Whole Foods, the supermarket chain it acquired in 2017. And it may wrap health care into Prime which now has some 200m members worldwide. “The low-hanging fruit is offering discounts on membership to Prime members”, says Daniel Grosslight of Citigroup, a bank.Amazon’s health push comes with several risks. One is that its own record is far from flawless. It is closing Amazon Care, which it launched to provide health services for its own employees and which expanded to offer some services to outside customers. Haven, a collaboration with Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet’s investment firm, and JPMorgan Chase, a bank, to procure lower cost health care for employees was set up in 2018 but died less than three years later.Another danger is competition. cvs, an American retail pharmacy, reportedly outbid Amazon for Signify Health, a large primary-care provider in September. In October, Walgreens increased its stake in Villagemd with a $5.2bn investment. JPMorgan recently opened primary-care centres of its own. Amazon’s new venture will also be competing with the likes of Ro and Hims & Hers, both tech startups that are dedicated to providing virtual health care.Finally Amazon will have to grapple with regulators. The Federal Trade Commission, a trust-busting agency, is examining the One Medical deal. The takeover and the launch of Amazon clinic will raise questions about who should be allowed to hold sensitive health care data. Amazon has said “we remain focused on the important mission of protecting customers’ health information”. The firm may need to set up hefty firewalls to separate customer information held by clinics from that gathered through other products and services. But satisfying data-privacy concerns could wipe out many of the data-sharing opportunities that Amazon deftly deploys across the rest of its business.Amazon’s attempts at disrupting health care will be subject to intense scrutiny. Nonetheless it should have a positive effect on health care in America. Its experience at keeping customers happy while generating razor-thin margins could improve primary care and force other providers to up their game. It may also prompt other tech giants to do more to disrupt health care themselves. All this may be just the medicine that America’s heath-care system—and Mr Jassy’s tenure as Amazon’s boss—badly need.■ More

ESG Impact Events

Designing a business to donate all profits to charity is not new: Since 1982, Hollywood icon Paul Newman’s Newman’s Own brand has given 100% of profits to charity, now totaling half a billion dollars in contributions. 
The model created by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard and his family to convert the outdoors retail company to a structure that allows profits to flow through to climate change philanthropy is a more sophisticated version of sustainable capitalism.
Family-run businesses are often in a better position than publicly traded companies to align competitive market targets with a social mission.

A Patagonia store signage is seen on Greene Street on September 14, 2022 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Many brands are aligning profits with purpose, but Patagonia’s decision in September to convert its for-profit business to one under which all the profits flow through to fighting climate change is the most complex move yet by a U.S.-based company in the realm of sustainable capitalism. Is it a model for other companies to pursue in the future?
For the family founded firm, it’s in some ways a natural evolution. Patagonia has long been on the vanguard of responsible business practices. As far back as 1985, Patagonia deployed portions of its profits to the environment, via an “Earth tax.”

It’s far from the only well-known U.S. brand to be structured in a way that allows profits to be donated to charitable causes. Newman’s Own, the food brand founded by Hollywood icon Paul Newman, is perhaps the most familiar. Since 1982, Newman’s Own has given 100% of profits to charity, now totaling half a billion dollars in contributions. But that business, with a pure non-profit structure, was more of a “first generation” model for sustainable business, says Tensie Whelan, founding director of the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business. “The Patagonia model is a little more sophisticated.” 
A business model already in Europe
Yet while Patagonia made headlines in the U.S. for being a novel marriage of capitalism and charity, similar corporate structures are already in use with several large family-controlled European companies, from Carlsberg to Ikea and Novo Nordisk. “Nothing new in this model,” said Morten Bennedsen, professor of family enterprise at INSEAD and the academic director of the Wendel International Centre for Family Enterprise.
Even in the U.S., one of the most iconic retail brands, has long had a No. 1 shareholder devoted to charitable causes and designed by the family founder: Hershey’s.
“It is a model that is attractive for family firms that do not want to continue as classical family firms and want the long term stability and the increased professionalization that comes with enterprise foundations,” Bennedsen said. It often is very attractive from a corporate tax perspective, too, which has been noted of both the Ikea and Patagonia business models. “That is another driver of this,” he said.
One hundred percent of Patagonia profits are now committed to its new non-profit Holdfast Collective — which owns all of the company’s non-voting stock (98% of the total stock). A Patagonia spokeswoman said the move makes clear that it is possible to “do good for people and planet and still be a successful business.”

‘Unapologetically a for-profit’
Patagonia’s CEO went further in a September interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” dismissing any idea that this change will lead it to focus less on beating the competition. “What people fail to understand about Patagonia, both the past and the future, is that we are unapologetically a for-profit business, and we are extremely competitive,” Ryan Gellert said. “We compete with every other company in our space aggressively. I don’t think we’ve lost that instinct,” he said. “This whole thing fails if we do not continue to run a competitive business.”
“How we build our products, how we sell them, and then the goal of releasing value to help the environment … the alignment of these goals gets lost if the story fails to recognize that Patagonia is a for-profit business with its profits being released to help the environment,” the spokeswoman said. “That’s an essential distinction.” 

There are less extreme options for values-driven founders than the paths chosen by Yvon Chouinard and Paul Newman. “Most founders like to maintain control and have for-profit (less altruistic) sensibilities,” Whelan said. 
B-Corp status, employee-ownership, and mutual organizations and cooperatives are all models that allow more focus on creating stakeholder value, in addition to shareholder value.
“We are seeing significant growth in these alternative models,” Whelan said.
Indeed, since 2011 the number of B-corps has steadily been on the rise, with the total number recently topping five thousand. 
For its part, Patagonia as a business will remain unchanged in terms of its day-to-day operations, but all of its profits (after reinvesting in the company, paying employees, etc.) will be handed over to the Holdfast Collective to fight climate change, an annual profit stream estimated at around $100 million per year.
“This was a process unlike any I’ve ever been a part of before,” said Greg Curtis, executive director of the Holdfast Collective. “It really started with what’s going to happen long term with the company, so that the purpose doesn’t change going forward. We want to recognize natural life spans … What does this actually mean for capitalism? What really motivates people – is it profit, is it purpose?” 

Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard poses in his store in a November 21, 1993 photograph. He founded the company in 1973 and wrote in a letter announcing the plan to give the company away: “If we have any hope of a thriving planet—much less a business—it is going to take all of us doing what we can with the resources we have. This is what we can do.”
Jean-marc Giboux | Hulton Archive | Getty Images

Jennifer Pendergast, executive director of the John L. Ward Center for Family Enterprises at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, said the Patagonia decision may serve as a role model for other family businesses, just like the Giving Pledge, created by Warren Buffet, and Bill and Melinda Gates, caused many billionaires to rethink how they donate their wealth. “That said, it isn’t so much the specific form that is used that is unusual. It is more their level of generosity,” Pendergast said. “It isn’t that hard to set up a non-profit to accept shares. It is hard to get a family to agree to disavow future wealth for the benefit of a worthy cause.”
Long-term friction between purpose and capitalism
The new structure does leave open some long-term questions about the integration of profits and purpose. Rather than having a for-profit company deciding on a yearly basis how much and how a portion of its profits will be committed to charitable practices, the structure of the Patagonian Purpose Trust and the Holdfast Collective codifies the commitment. “In our model, the entity that is receiving the economic value doesn’t have a vote, and the entity that has the vote gets very little economic value. There’s no incentive for Patagonia to ever make a decision that isn’t aligned with ensuring the purpose of the company going forward,” Curtis said.
But when the founder and his family are no longer in control of Patagonia, there will be the issue of how the board of directors of the for-profit business is selected and run. “That will evolve, the board, and right now it is the family and its closest advisors,” Gellert said. But he added that no better option surfaced during a multi-year process to choose the best option for the future of the business. The company looked at a public offering, or selling stakes to investors, “but we would have lost control,” he said. “We had very little confidence in meetings with quite a few investors that the integrity would be protected.”
While this structure can be an option for both family and non-family controlled firms, Bennedsen said it works particularly well for family entrepreneurs who do not want to transition the firms within the family, and do not want to go public or sell the legacy firm.   
But expect the push and pull between profits and purpose to persist in any corporate undertaking.
“The tension between growth and environmental impact is one we know well,” Curtis said. “We would be ignoring our commitment to responsible growth if we just maxed out sales for the purpose of giving away more money.  Further, it is important to resist the assumption that our value comes from the money we give away. We don’t think about it like that,” he said. “Our value comes from being a for-profit business and a Benefit Corporation.”
“The challenge for his [Chouinard’s] family will be in later generations,” Pendergast said. “They will need to determine who will be the trustees of the shares held by the non-profit that will determine how that non-profit uses the proceeds they get from Patagonia. It is easy now because it appears he and his family are aligned in their goals. Further down the road, that could be more difficult.”
“At times there are some tensions,” Gellert said in his CNBC interview. “But the default for Patagonia is purpose. Patagonia needs capacity and profit, to take care of its people, to expand, to keep the supply chain moving, and that is all an important layer, but we want it to be better, and to continue to be innovative.”
Retail companies and their wares are replete with tales of the enthusiastic farmers who picked the beans for the expensive cappuccino and the sustainability of a particular bag, all of which helps the consumer to feel less like a mere consumer and more like a conscious buyer whose choices are making a difference. But there is reasonable cynicism and altruism fatigue in response to corporate sustainability branding. Nevertheless, “much of the Patagonia model is repeatable,” Whelan said.
The company is already a B Corp, has been a leader in sustainability practices across issues including its workforce and environmental footprint, and built a successful brand while upholding these values. “The fact that it was able to become and sustain a $3 billion business is a proof point of the business value of sustainability and the potential of stakeholder capitalism to be financially viable,” Whelan said. “The ‘giving away’ of the company may be an anomaly, but the sustainable and responsible business model is one that we are already seeing replicated.”
“The idea of committing to ESG goals and at the same time making profit is not a paradox anymore,” Bennedsen said. More

Inflation is hitting the entire restaurant industry, but chains and independent eateries have different advantages when it comes to tackling higher costs.
Restaurant chains like McDonald’s and Starbucks can use their size and buying power to negotiate better ingredient prices, but they can be slow to react.
Independents lack the chains’ cash and resources, but consumers are willing to spend more to support a smaller business that they view as more authentic.

Customers at a McDonald’s restaurant
Scott Mlyn | CNBC

As the restaurant industry battles inflation, the large size of chains and their access to cash gives them the upper hand, but independents have advantages of their own when managing higher costs.
Feeling the pressure on their budgets, consumers have been cutting back on their restaurant visits in recent months. Monthly same-store restaurant traffic has been shrinking compared with the year-earlier period for eight consecutive months, according to industry tracker Black Box Intelligence. In response to that drop-off, both chains and independents are working to address the cost factor without alienating diners.

Prices for food consumed away from home have risen 8.6% over the last 12 months, as of October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as restaurants raise menu prices to address the soaring costs for ingredients, labor and even energy.
Aaron Allen, founder and CEO of restaurant consultancy Aaron Allen & Associates, compared restaurant chains to oil tankers and independents to speedboats. Chains have bigger budgets, broader scale and other tools like advanced technology. But they’re also often slow to act and mired in bureaucracy.
A mom and pop restaurant, on the other hand, doesn’t have the same access to cash or the benefits of size but can move more quickly to make changes.

Scale matters

When it comes to inflation, restaurant giants like McDonald’s and Starbucks have some obvious advantages over independent burger joints and coffee shops. Their massive size helps chains lock in prices early when buying ingredients from suppliers, and they can often apply pressure to receive more favorable contracts.
“If you’re a chain, you’ve got the power of bargaining strength and leverage with suppliers, which is what’s happening,” Allen said. “Independents don’t have a lot of wiggle room to switch suppliers, except for non-core things.”

Of the more than 843,000 restaurants, food trucks and ghost kitchens in the United States, roughly 37% are part of chains with more than nine locations, according to food analytics firm Datassential.
Noodles & Company, which has more than 450 locations, recently signed a deal for its 2023 chicken supply. The company expects the contract will help it save about 2% relative to its third-quarter margin for cost of goods sold.
“As you look through all of the disruption in the supply chain environment, vendors want some level of certainty in terms of purchase quantities, not just price,” Noodles CEO Dave Boennighausen said.
Because chains are placing larger orders, suppliers typically prioritize their orders over those for independent restaurants. Adam Rosenblum, chef and owner of Causwells and Red Window in San Francisco, said uncertainty securing ingredients has caused him to buy two or three times what he normally would when they’re available. And carrying that higher inventory puts more pressure on his razor-thin profit margins.
“I don’t have the buying power, I don’t get to set my prices annually, and I’m just not going through enough product to matter to some of the bigger companies,” Rosenblum said.
In the United Kingdom and other European markets, which have seen even higher inflation than in the U.S., large franchisors have said that they’re providing financial assistance to operators who are struggling to cope with higher costs. For example, McDonald’s executives said in late October that the fast-food giant may offer “targeted and temporary support” to European franchisees who need it.
Independent operators don’t have the same luxury. Kate Bruce, owner of The Buttery Bar in Brooklyn, said she’s been facing higher costs for everything from labor to cooking oil to energy.
“It’s expensive to run a restaurant these days, and ours is small. So these costs matter, and everything is very tight,” she said.

Nimbler and more flexible

On the other hand, independent restaurants have the advantage of speed. If a mom and pop notices much higher prices for a key ingredient in an entree, the restaurant can quickly change prices, slim down the portion size or even remove the item from the menu.
For example, Bruce said that if she raises the price on one item, she likes to add something else to the menu that’s cheaper.
“Yes, we have Wagyu beef, but [we] also have some salads that are a little more affordable and chicken entrees that aren’t going to scare somebody away from coming in,” she said.
Portillo’s restaurant chain CEO Michael Osanloo said independents do have greater flexibility when it comes to changing prices. Fast-food customers expect the same prices at every location, but menu prices can vary based on where the location is and if a franchisee or the company owns that restaurant. “There’s a little bit of price shock,” Osanloo said.
Consumers care more about prices when they’re visiting a chain restaurant, according to findings from a survey of roughly 2,400 U.S. consumers conducted by PYMNTS. More than a third of respondents said everyday prices mattered when picking a chain restaurant, while just 22.5% said it factored into their decision making when selecting an independent eatery.
And while beloved chains have brand recognition and the pricing power that comes from that, independents also earn goodwill from some consumers by virtue of being a small business.
“There’s this perception of authenticity, like a family Italian restaurant versus a big chain like Olive Garden,” Allen said. “That sentiment has started to hurt chains.”

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The latest NFIB monthly small business confidence and jobs reports show that Main Street is still looking to hire even as economic sentiment continues to decline.
But the vast majority of open positions (90%) are seeing few to no qualified applicants apply even as layoffs mount throughout the economy.
Higher wages get harder for business owners to offer as inflation increases as a margin pressure amid a lower sales outlook, but there are other work benefits and perks that can be used to attract talent.

A “Now hiring” sign is displayed on the window of an IN-N-OUT fast food restaurant in Encinitas, California, May 9, 2022.
Mike Blake | Reuters

When it comes to salary, small business owners generally don’t play in the same league as larger companies.
It’s even trickier now in a tight labor market with rising wages and with more states and municipalities posting salary ranges, which stand to make small businesses look even less appealing from a salary perspective.

The stakes are especially high given that small businesses are still in hiring mode even with the economy slowing, and it isn’t getting any easier to find workers. Eighty-six percent of small business owners have expressed plans to hire one or more workers in the next year or two, according to an October survey from employee scheduling company Homebase. Meanwhile, the National Federation of Independent Business, the main small business trade group, reported last week the tenth-consecutive month of a confidence decline on Main Street, though little change in the need to hire more workers.
“Owners continue to show a dismal view about future sales growth and business conditions, but are still looking to hire new workers,” said NFIB Chief Economist Bill Dunkelberg in a release with its latest monthly survey. “Inflation, supply chain disruptions, and labor shortages continue to limit the ability of many small businesses to meet the demand for their products and services.”
The NFIB’s separate jobs report showed that among owners hiring, 90% reported few or no qualified applicants for the positions.
Here are five ways small businesses can level the playing field to attract top talent.
Highlight more than wages in the window
Jim Marx, director of the retirement plans division at Edelman Financial Services, recently drove by a convenience store that advertised “competitive benefits” in the window, highlighting perks such as the company’s retirement plan, medical benefits and student loan assistance offering. “It floored me to see that. They obviously want to get good talent in the door and that’s what they were highlighting,” he said.

The point: Small businesses need to make sure candidates know the benefits of onboarding with them beyond a starting wage that has already likely gone higher.

Benefits should be emphasized in job descriptions and discussed in every single interview, during onboarding and in training, said Kayla Lebovits, chief executive and founder of Bundle Benefits, a fully remote company that focuses on wellbeing, professional development and team building. “If it’s just mentioned in the job description, but not promoted throughout the job interviews, [a candidate] will think it’s not real.” 
Involve current staff in the hiring process
Lebovits finds it effective to invite employees who actively use the company’s various benefits to participate in the interview process. This way, candidates get a real-life sense of how benefits such as the company’s home equipment stipend and co-working membership subsidy work.
“These aren’t big price-tag items, but employees take advantage of them,” Lebovits said. 
Having an upfront dialogue about benefits and finding out what’s important to candidates is critical because it sets the tone for the future. “It conveys that the candidate is important to the organization,” said Victoria Hodgkins, chief executive of PeopleKeep, a benefits administration software company. “In this work environment, candidates want to know that, and it gives them a chance to ask questions and become more informed.”
Study worker usage patterns, lean into popular perks
Small businesses generally can’t afford to offer the full suite of benefits that large companies can, but they can offer an array of highly desirable benefits that employees regularly use. “Determine what people are actually using and those are the ones you should be promoting because clearly those are the ones people value the most,” Lebovits said.
Notably, benefits related to retirement, health and welfare can go a long way in improving workers’ financial wherewithal. While most workers believe these benefits are important, there’s a significant gap between the percentage of those who cite their importance and the percentage whose employers offer them, according to an October study from the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies. “This represents an opportunity for employers to increase the competitiveness of their compensation and benefits packages, while helping their employees achieve greater long-term financial security,” the study found. 
Generally speaking, wellness benefits are also in high demand. A notable majority of employees, 68%, said that they are more likely to stay longer at their current job if their employer offers financial wellness benefits, according to a recent survey from TalentLMS, a learning management system backed by Epignosis, and financial wellness companies Tapcheck and Enrich. The survey also shows that 61% of employees are more likely to stay at their current job if financial wellness training and resources are offered. 
Parental leave is another important benefit worth considering. A recent survey from disability insurance provider Breeze found that most employees would prefer their employer offer paid parental leave instead of vision insurance, employer-paid fitness or mental health benefits, employer-paid social events, or a student loan repayment benefit. The survey looked at 1,000 actively employed adults between the ages of 22 and 40.
Avoid an all-benefits-are-equal approach
It’s important to offer an array of benefits that can appeal to different people.
For example, don’t just offer yoga or meditation apps or gym benefits; offer multiple ways employees can recharge, Lebovits said. “People take care of themselves very differently.” 
And while the Breeze study found parental leave to be more popular than vision insurance among workers 40 and under, that might change once they hit “reading glasses” age.
There can be significant differences in the types of benefits that appeal to employees based on genders, age and types of work environments.
A May survey of more than 900 small business employees by PeopleKeep found that 70% of women value mental health benefits as “very or extremely” important, compared with 49% of men. Women also value flexible work schedules (84% to 70%), paid family leave (73% to 61%), and professional development (64% to 57%) more than men, while men place more value on internet and phone bill reimbursement than women (40% to 32%), according to the survey.
Turn existing employees into referral sources
If your existing employees are happy, they’ll be more likely to recommend an open position at the company to others. This means making sure existing employees are excited about the benefits you offer — and to achieve this outcome, you have to make sure employees feel engaged.
Sixty-two percent of respondents to a recent survey from Edelman Financial said they “don’t always feel represented” in their company’s messaging about benefits. The sentiment stands out even more among women, with 68% saying they did not always feel included – considerably higher than their male counterparts (58%). 
An overwhelming 93% of employees who don’t always feel represented said they’d be more likely to take advantage of financial wellness support if it was personalized to their specific background and family circumstances, the survey found.
Finally, small businesses need to understand what attracts job-seekers in the first place and play up these advantages in all of their communications with candidates. Seventy percent of small businesses cited a sense of community, followed by workplace flexibility (69%), close relationships with co-workers (66%) and closer relationships with managers (53%), according to Homebase. More

ESG Impact Events

Exxon’s carbon capture and sequestration deal with CF Industries and Enlink Midstream in Louisiana could be significant for the future of Big Oil’s low-carbon business.
One key: tax incentives included in the Inflation Reduction Act passed in August.
Environmental critics say the new law just subsidizes an expensive technology, but Exxon says deal will be the first of many from a large backlog that is “starting to move quickly” and that the Biden climate plan has helped to catalyze.

Could it be that Big Oil’s next big thing got a big assist from Joe Biden?
Maybe, if carbon capture and storage is indeed as big a deal as ExxonMobil’s first-of-its-kind deal to extract, transport and store carbon from other companies’ factories implies.

The deal, announced last month, calls for ExxonMobil to capture carbon emitted by CF Industries’ ammonia factory in Donaldsonville, La., and transport it to underground storage using pipelines owned by Enlink Midstream. Set to start up in 2025, the deal is meant to herald a new stage in dealing with carbon produced by manufacturers, and is the latest step in ExxonMobil’s often-tense dialogue with investors who want oil companies to slash emissions.
The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August, may determine whether deals like Exxon’s become a trend. The law expands tax credits for capturing carbon from industrial uses in a bid to offset the high up-front costs of plans to capture carbon from places like CF’s plant, as other tax credits in the law lower costs of renewable power and electric cars. 
The Inflation Reduction Act and Big Oil
The law may help oil companies like ExxonMobil build profitable businesses to replace some of the revenue and profit they’ll lose as EVs proliferate. Though the company isn’t sharing financial projections, it has committed to investing $15 billion in CCS by 2027 and ExxonMobil Low-Carbon Solutions president Dan Ammann says it may invest more.
“We see a big business opportunity here,” Ammann told CNBC’s David Faber. “We’re seeing interest from companies across a whole range of industries, a whole range of sectors, a whole range of geographies.”
The deal calls for ExxonMobil to capture and remove 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide yearly from CF’s factory, equivalent to replacing 700,000 gasoline-powered vehicles with electric versions. 

Each company involved is pursuing its own version of the low-carbon industrial economy. CF wants to produce more carbon-free blue ammonia, a process that often involves extracting ammonia’s components from carbon-laden fossil fuels. Enlink hopes to become a kind of railroad for captured CO2 emissions, calling itself the would-be “CO2 transportation provider of choice” for an industrial corridor laden with refineries and chemical plants. 

An industrial facility on the Houston Ship Channel where Exxon Mobil is proposing a carbon capture and sequestration network. Between this industry-wide plan and its first deal for another company’s CCS needs, ExxonMobil is hoping that its low-carbon business quickly scales to a legitimate source of revenue and profit.

Exxon itself wants to develop carbon capture as a new business, Amman said, pointing to a “very big backlog of similar projects,” part of the company’s pledge to remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as Exxon itself emits by 2050.  
“We want oil companies to be active participants in carbon reduction,” said Julio Friedmann, a deputy assistant energy secretary under President Obama and chief scientist at Carbon Direct in New York. “It’s my expectation that this can become a flagship project.”
The key to the sudden flurry of activity is the Inflation Reduction Act.
“It’s a really good example of the intersection of good policy coming together with business and the innovation that can happen on the business side to tackle the big problem of emissions and the big problem of climate change,” Ammann said. “The interest we are seeing, the backlog, are all confirming this is starting to move and starting to move quickly.”
The law increased an existing tax credit for carbon capture to $85 a ton from $45, Goldman said, which will save the Exxon/CF/Enlink project as much as $80 million a year. Credits for captured carbon used underground to enhance production of more fossil fuels are lower, at $60 per ton.
“Carbon capture is a big boys’ game,” said Peter McNally, global sector lead for industrial, materials and energy research at consulting firm Third Bridge. “These are billion-dollar projects. It’s big companies capturing large amounts of carbon. And big oil and gas companies are where the expertise is.” 
Goldman Sachs, and environmentalists, are skeptical
A Goldman Sachs team led by analyst Brian Singer called the law “transformative” for climate reduction technologies including battery storage and clean hydrogen. But its analysis is less bullish when it comes to the impact on carbon capture projects like Exxon’s, with Singer expecting more modest gains as the law accelerates development in longer-term projects. To speed up investment more, companies must build CCS systems at greater scale and invent more efficient carbon-extraction chemistry, the Goldman team said.
Industrial uses are the third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., according to the EPA. That’s narrowly behind both electricity production and transportation. Emissions reduction in industrial uses is considered more expensive and difficult than in either power generation or car and truck transport. Industry is the focus for CCS because utilities and vehicle makers are looking first to other technologies to cut emissions.
Almost 20 percent of U.S. electricity last year came from renewable sources that replace coal and natural gas and another 19 percent came from carbon-free nuclear power, according to government data. Renewables’ share is rising rapidly in 2022, according to interim Energy Department reports, and the IRA also expands tax credits for wind and solar power. Most airlines plan to reduce their carbon footprint by switching to biofuels over the next decade.
More oil and chemical companies seem likely to get on the carbon capture bandwagon first. In May, British oil giant BP and petrochemical maker Linde announced a plan to capture 15 million tons of carbon annually at Linde’s plants in Greater Houston. Linde wants to expand its sales of low-carbon hydrogen, which is usually made by mixing natural gas with steam and a chemical catalyst. In March, Oxy announced a deal with a unit of timber producer Weyerhauser. Oxy won the rights to store carbon underneath 30,000 acres of Weyerhauser’s forest land, even as it continues to grow trees on the surface, with both companies prepared to expand to other sites over time.
Still, environmentalists remain skeptical of CCS.
Tax credits may cut the cost of CCS to companies, but taxpayers still foot the bill for what remains a “boondoggle,” said Carroll Muffett, CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law in Washington. The biggest part of industrial emissions comes from the electricity that factories use, and factory owners should reduce that part of their carbon footprint with renewable power as a top priority, he said.
“It makes no economic sense at the highest levels, and the IRA doesn’t change that,” Muffett said. “It just changes who takes the risk.” 
Friedman countered by saying economies of scale and technical innovations will trim costs, and that CCS can reduce carbon emissions by as much as 10 percent over time.
“It’s a rather robust number,” Friedmann said. “And it’s about things you can’t easily address any other way.”  More

Taylor Swift’s response comes a day after Live Nation’s Ticketmaster said tickets for her “Eras” tour will no longer be put on sale for the general public.
Swift fans flocked to the ticketing website earlier this week for the first round of presale tickets.
“It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post.

Taylor Swift performs onstage during iHeartRadio’s Z100 Jingle Ball 2019 Presented By Capital One on December 13, 2019 in New York City.
Kevin Mazur | Getty Images

Taylor Swift responded to her fans Friday after Live Nation’s Ticketmaster said a general public sale of tickets to the superstar’s “Eras” tour would be canceled because there weren’t enough tickets to meet high demand.
“It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse,” Swift wrote in a message posted on Instagram. She did not mention Live Nation or Ticketmaster in her statement.

“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them,” she wrote.

Separately, The New York Times reported Friday that Justice Department has opened an antitrust investigation into parent company Live Nation’s practices. The probe predates the Swift ticket sale this week, according to the report. The Justice Department declined to comment.
Live Nation, Ticketmaster and the company’s largest shareholder, Liberty Media, also didn’t immediately comment about Swift’s Friday statement or the Times’ report on a Justice Department investigation.
Ticketmaster announced the cancellation hours after Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei defended Ticketmaster on Thursday. Maffei blamed a surge of demand from 14 million users, including bots, for site disruptions and slow queues for presales earlier this week.
“It’s a function of Taylor Swift. The site was supposed to open up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans,” Maffei told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots, which are not supposed to be there.”

Maffei said Ticketmaster sold more than 2 million tickets on Tuesday and demand for Swift “could have filled 900 stadiums.”
The “Eras” tour is set to kick off in March 17 in Glendale, Arizona.
Read Swift’s full statement:

Well. It goes without saying that l’m extremely protective of my fans. We’ve been doing this for decades together and over the years, l’ve brought so many elements of my career in house. I’ve done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do. It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.
There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.
And to those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs.
Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means.

-CNBC’s Sarah Whitten contributed to this article.

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