Amazon’s Wage Bump, Saving Cottage Cheese, and the War on Social Media Algorithms
Should Small Businesses Step Up to Meet Amazon’s Minimum Wage?
Late in 2018 Amazon bumped their minimum wage to $15 an hour. Still unimpressed with other companies’ ability to match the number, Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of the online jungle, has asked other business leaders to step up. Although he’s mainly speaking to Amazon’s top retail competitors, egging them on my saying, “Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us,” many leaders in business feel the pressure to do their part by giving employees a wage that is actually sustainable.
Of course, for small businesses looking to bootstrap their beginnings and pay attention to lean margins, the considerable minimum wage pay can feel daunting - if not impossible. This, of course, begs the question: Should $15+ minimum wages be something small businesses need to consider?
Public debate about minimum wages has made headlines frequently over the last few years, engaging employees and business owners in every industry - from fast-food to luxury retail. And while big companies (the Amazons, Walmarts and Targets of the world) have announced plans to start hitting the $15 mark, the reality is that the federal minimum wage hasn’t budged since 2009 - today it’s still at the same $7.25 per hour.
Small businesses are left, then, to weigh the pros and cons of increasing the pay for their employees, knowing, for better or for worse, where Bezos stands.
Saving Cottage Cheese with Better Branding, Innovative Marketing and Smart Fundraising
When was the last time you thought about cottage cheese? Or, maybe more importantly, when was the last time you ate it? For the majority of Americans, chances are that it has been a long time. With Greek yogurt still all the rage, it might, then, seem strange to want to build a business behind what seems to be a dying niche.
But that’s exactly what Good Culture has done.
Launched in 2014, Good Culture saw an opportunity to revive cottage cheese, recognizing a lack of creative branding and packaging within the unique niche. Jesse Merrill, one of the co-founders of the brand, said that the “sad state” of the category was caused by a “lack of innovation” and “dated packaging”. “We thought there was a good opportunity,” he says, “to come out and reintroduce or re-imagine cottage cheese and make it relevant to younger consumer segments.”
And that’s exactly what the brand has done.
With a cleaner ingredient list (no additive offenders), a focus on animal welfare (organic milk from pasture-raised cows), and a better (smoother) texture, Good Culture is helping cottage cheese become a staple in health-conscious households again. Gaining steady momentum since 2015 and its simultaneous debut at Expo West, Good Culture products can now be found in nearly 12,000 stores - a 500% growth since 2016.
And that’s not all.
With more products in the works, Good Culture is proving that good food, when met with good marketing and some ambitious fundraising, is one of the best businesses to be in.
The War on Social Media Algorithms (You’ll Never Guess Who’s Leading the Charge)
If you are an active participant in social media, then you most likely now have a new understanding of the word “algorithm”. A hot-topic as of late, social media algorithms are a mysterious type of scapegoat, blamed for nearly everything that transpires online - the good, the bad, and the highly filtered.
Facebook’s algorithms have been studied for years and are said to be built to “maximize engagement and clicks”. But, lately, these algorithms have been taking on a more negative role, cited to be the source of much of the harmful content that spreads across platforms.
With seemingly everyone, from tech giants to angry parents and small business owners, looking to find a way to bring Facebook’s algorithms down, it comes as some surprise that the company itself is planning its own attack against them. (Perhaps a case of man building a machine that has a mind of its own.)
Just this week the company announced “a slew of new features and incremental product updates that counter the core engineering of its own systems”. The goal, according to Facebook, is to “reduce the spread of misinformation and sensational news”. Playing a more active role in the content that is published and shared online, Facebook’s latest announcement has been applauded by many, although some skeptics wonder how much these tweaks are going to actually do.
More than anything, it looks like Facebook is working hard to gain back the trust of the public, and its using algorithms as its shared target.