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Is This Company The Next Chipotle?

My co-worker, the legendary Bill Palifka, came up to me today and had some advice for what I should write about next: Zoe’s Kitchen, a Texas-based “fast-casual” restaurant chain that serves kabobs, pitas and other Mediterranean food (full menu here). “I’d invest in that company,” Bill said, who raved about the food and how he felt like he was getting good food, served quickly, as opposed to the traditional fast food fare. He said he wouldn’t feel guilty taking his son to dinner there, which he said he would if he took him to McDonald’s. Investors agree. Zoe’s went public earlier this …Read more »

Why Smart Businesses Love Hard Times

As you have probably noticed while filling up, gas prices are down. In fact, The Wall Street Journal reports that crude oil prices have hit a four-year low last week at $81.76 a barrel, thanks to growing supply. While that’s good news for you and me, you would think that would hurt a company like Halliburton, a $47 billion provider of oilfield services and equipment. Higher oil supply means lower margins for oil companies like Halliburton, and many would guess that the company would be conservative right now, not aggressive. But, in fact, the opposite is true. On Monday, Halliburton, …Read more »

Want A Raise? Take A Vacation

In 2013, American workers permanently lost 169 million days of vacation time they didn’t use, the most in four decades, according to ustravel.org. That’s time that cannot be rolled over, paid out or used for any benefit whatsoever, just lost forever. That totals $52.4 billion workers just gave away. Essentially, rather than take the time they were due off, millions of American workers said to their bosses, “Hey, no problem, we’ll work for free.” Sounds like a great deal for businesses, right? All those extra man hours for free? Well, when you really analyze it, it isn’t. Instead, businesses would …Read more »

Why I Won’t Shop On Thanksgiving

This will be the first year in at least the past five that I won’t have to work on Thanksgiving. Before, I worked as a journalist, and news breaks every day, including holidays (in fact, particularly on the holidays, as alcohol and families don’t always make a good fit). My girlfriend is working this Thanksgiving at her job as a CNA. Her mother, a nurse, is probably working as well. So are her two brothers; one a security guard, another a police officer. A lot of waiters and cooks will work on Thanksgiving. So will most movie theater employees. And …Read more »

The Impossible Proven: Lose Weight Just By Thinking Differently

Today is a pretty amazing day in the world. The European version of NASA landed a probe on a comet. No big deal, really, except that the comet is roughly the size of a dishwasher, it’s 300 million miles from Earth and was traveling at roughly 25,000 miles per hour. Simple, right? Not that we should be surprised. The human mind is unquestionably the most powerful force on planet Earth, as we are capable of both the unbelievably extraordinary and the astonishingly awful. We’ve built medicines that have saved millions of lives, systems that connect the entire world and bombs that …Read more »

An Emmy Doesn’t Qualify You for a Job at the Container Store

A post on café.com by Deborah Copaken, an Emmy-winning, best-selling author, has gone viral after she was not hired at The Container Store. The premise was pretty simple: Copaken won an Emmy, she’s a best-selling author; surely, she’s good enough to get a retail job. In the post, Copaken wrote about several other troubles she went through recently; most notably, getting divorced, being diagnosed with breast cancer and losing her health insurance. Those are some terrible ills and I sincerely hope she wins her battle with cancer. But not getting a job at The Container Store does not belong on …Read more »

The World’s Most Successful People Are On HGH (Proverbially)

Human Growth Hormone (HGH) is among the most controversial drugs in the world. Some have heralded it as the fountain of youth, a way to counteract the aging process. Others have declared it incredibly dangerous and unproven, and it has been banned in most major sports, such as the NFL, MLB and the Olympics. What exactly are the positive and negatives? Well, the fact is HGH hasn’t been studied enough to answer that question definitively, but many suggest it essentially amplifies whatever your body is doing naturally. So that means muscle cells are built faster, as an example, so you …Read more »

The Genius of Wearing the Same Outfit Every Day

  What do Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, our current president and Homer Simpson all have in common? They’ve all worn the same outfit, pretty much every day. Why? It isn’t a coincidence. Jobs and President Barack Obama, for example, are both part of the same-outfit club, but for different reasons. And both are logical, from both a scientific and business perspective. The Science If you notice, Obama wears a blue or gray suit all the time (when he wore a tan suit earlier this year, it nearly blew up the Internet). Why? Here’s the explanation he gave to famed writer …Read more »

Study: Want To Increase Hiring? Elect A Democrat For President (Or Reagan)

Today is Election Day, and since I write primarily about hiring, I wanted to see what correlations there were between politics and hiring. I went into the research with a scientific mind, with no hypotheses or biases clouding my line of thinking, instead just trying to discover what effect politicians have on the overall employment rate, i.e. hiring. And what I uncovered was a pretty strong correlation: in the past 85 years, when a Democrat was president, the unemployment rate dropped; and when a Republican was president, the unemployment increased (with the one, glaring exception being Ronald Reagan). Since 1929, …Read more »

The Critical Lesson SNL Teaches About Hiring Millenials

By any measure, Saturday Night Live is one of the most successful shows of all time. The NBC hit has lasted 39 seasons, won 36 Emmys and nearly two-dozen characters created on the show have been turned into movies (i.e. Blues Brothers, Wayne’s World, Coneheads). And year after year, it is one of the highest-rated shows in its time slot. So what’s its “secret to success”? Well, the most amazing part about SNL is that the only constants about it are success and creator Lorne Michaels. Writers and players have come and gone, the vast majority lasting less than five …Read more »

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