Monat: Oktober 2016

How Uber Plans To Conquer The Suburbs

Summit, New Jersey, a bedroom community to New York City, will begin subsidizing Uber rides for residents traveling to and from the local train station starting Monday – a move the town initiated to avoid building a new parking lot, a multimillion dollar effort. For Uber, the partnership is another step in a series of strategic moves to extend its reach to the suburbs.

Summit has a population of about 22,000 people, and its own NJ Transit Rail Station, which is a 45-minute ride from New York’s Penn Station. When Michael Rogers became Summit’s city administrator about a year ago, he noticed that most everyone complained to him about parking, he told BuzzFeed News.

Parking near Summit’s train station is a nightmare. Commuters buy parking permits, but are not assigned spaces, and often waste 15-20 minutes prowling for a spot in the morning, Rogers said. But building a new parking lot to address commuter demand would be a long-term, costly, multimillion dollar endeavor. So Rogers reached out to Uber’s New Jersey general manager, Ana Mahony, last October and pitched an idea: What if Summit subsidized commuters’ Uber rides to the town’s train station? Priced at $2 each way, the rides would cost commuters the same as an all-day parking permit. The deal would reduce demand for Summit's hard-to-come-by parking spaces and create a steady pool of demand for Uber.

“We wanted to offer residents a convenient alternative to driving and looking for parking spaces, which can be scarce,” Rogers told BuzzFeed News. “If I could free up 100 parking spaces, that would help alleviate some of the demand and capacity constraints. One hundred parking spaces is pretty significant in our system.”

Uber was intrigued. After some discussion, it agreed to a 6-month pilot program for about 100 Summit residents.

Summit is about 6 square miles, which keeps ride-hail fares within its boundaries relatively inexpensive. Residents will have to opt into the Uber pilot program, and the ride-hail company will denote their accounts for the promotion. Residents who have already purchased $4-per-day parking permits will be able to take Uber to the train station for free. Those without prepaid parking permits will pay $2 each way. Summit will reimburse Uber for the difference between the flat fares and the true cost of a ride, which drivers will receive upfront.

The benefit is clear for Summit, which now can forgo massive capital expenditures on a new parking lot it would otherwise need to build and maintain. Instead, it can pay a fraction of that amount to shuttle people to and from the train using Uber. Rogers told BuzzFeed News that he expects the deal will only cost Summit about $167,000 annually, a far cry from the likely $10 million it would cost to building a parking lot – plus, Summit doesn’t have enough idle land downtown, anyway.

Via cityofsummit.org

For Uber, the Summit pilot is a new way to tap into the sprawling and unconquered U.S. ride-hail market beyond the major metropolitan ones it dominates. While Uber and Lyft have saturated most major cities, only 15% of Americans say they have used ride-hailing services, and another 33% claim to be unfamiliar with them, according to a late 2015 Pew Research Center survey. Meanwhile, the same survey found that 21% of urban Americans say they have used ride-hail services, compared to 15% of suburb-dwellers.

Partnerships with local governments also help Uber show commuters how ride-hail can be an alternative to driving – especially if it doesn’t cost any more than parking a car in the lot outside the train station. (Los Angeles, a city synonymous with car culture, has become a proving ground for this shift.)

It helps that Summit’s affluent population is already familiar with Uber. In December, while negotiating the commuter pilot program, Summit paid for an Uber promotion that gave residents $5 rides within its borders, an effort to ease congestion and drunk driving during the winter holidays. Rogers said called the promotion “very, very successful.” The partnership worked out nicely for Uber as well: Ridership increased 300% for the month compared to the year prior, Rogers said.

Uber&039;s partnership with Summit is one of a handful of deals with smaller cities and towns outside the major metro areas on which the company built its business. In March, Altamonte Springs, Florida, became the first town to subsidize ride-hail services for its residents. Ten miles north of Orlando, Altamonte underwrites 20% of the cost of every Uber ride within its borders; It covers up to 25% if the rider is going to or from the local light rail. Passengers need only enter “Altamonte” in the promotion code field in the Uber app to receive the proper discount for rides within the city&039;s geofenced boundaries. Then Uber bills Altamonte Springs at the end of the month, and the city cuts a check.

For city administrators and local transportation agencies with strained budgets, ride-hail subsidy programs like these are another solution to the so called “first and last-mile” problem: getting people to a bus or rail stop so they can ride public transportation to their final destinations.

In February, the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority County, near Tampa Bay, Florida, launched a pilot program in which the agency covers half the cost of Uber rides up to $6 to and from designated stops near local transit centers and bus stops. And in San Francisco, the developers of Parkmerced, an apartment and townhome community, offer new residents a $100 monthly stipend toward “multimodal transportation,” including Uber.

The Summit partnership, though, offers a different spin on that model. While other cities have offered Uber or Lyft subsidies in an effort to increase ridership for public transportation, Summit is using Uber to streamline its residents’ commutes, a move that could foster a dependency on the ride hail service in a town, where people own homes with multi-car garages and drive to get everywhere.

“It may affect decisions personally in the future where they realize, a family doesn’t necessarily need two cars,” Rogers said. “They might say, ‘you know, we used to have this second car because I needed it to go to the train station.’ And the car would just sit there.”

Quelle: <a href="How Uber Plans To Conquer The Suburbs“>BuzzFeed

The Not-So-Wholesome Reality Behind The Making Of Your Meal Kit

August 26, 2015, was, by all accounts, a stressful day at Blue Apron’s facility in Richmond, California.

As the sun rose over what would be an unusually warm Wednesday, a 21-year-old employee made a phone call to a supervisor at the $2 billion food startup&#039;s Bay Area fulfillment center, where tens of thousands of meal kits are packed into cardboard containers and shipped across the continental United States. The supervisor didn&039;t pick up the phone that morning, so he left a message.

In it, he said he planned to quit his job at Blue Apron later that day. He also said he planned to bring a gun to the warehouse and shoot his manager, as well as other people at the facility. In two messages, he named three people specifically who he wanted to put bullets into when he got there. Around 8:30, en route to work, the supervisor called the police.

Police apprehended the man, who did not have a gun, later that morning. But at Blue Apron, the day was just getting started.

While company security and a Richmond police officer on patrol monitored threats outside the warehouse, inside, Blue Apron management was meeting with representatives from California&039;s Division of Occupational Safety and Health at the conclusion of a two-week inspection by the agency that would result in nine violations and proposed penalties totaling $11,695 for unsafe conditions that put workers at risk for fractured bones, chemical burns, and more. This penalty came on top of $13,050 following a forklift accident earlier in the year, giving Blue Apron the most OSHA violations in the fast-growing, $5 billion meal-kit startup industry, and among the most in perishable prepared-food manufacturing in California. (Like many companies, Blue Apron appealed these findings, and had some of its violation classifications downgraded to “general” or “other.” One of its cases is still open.)

Just after 4 p.m. on the same day, the police were back at Blue Apron for the third time, following a noontime patrol. They were prompted by yet another call from a security guard, concerned that “a weapon might be brought.”

This time the problem was a 26-year-old man who, after being fired earlier in the day for groping a female co-worker, had then threatened the person who let him go. He was later arrested for sexual assault, as well as for violating his parole on an earlier robbery charge.

“I definitely remember that day,” said David Reifschneider, who was general manager of the facility at the time. “It&039;s not what happens on a typical day in a typical warehouse.”

He&039;s right. This wasn’t a typical day, nor was it a typical old-fashioned warehouse, but the thrumming hub of a fast-growing, well-funded, hugely ambitious food startup. Founded in New York City in 2012, Blue Apron now operates fulfillment centers in Richmond, where the vast majority of the workers interviewed for this article worked, as well as Jersey City and Arlington, Texas. Between them and the company’s corporate headquarters in New York City, Blue Apron employs more than 4,000 people and delivers around 8 million meals every month all over the continental United States. It has raised $193.8 million in venture capital, and in 2015 it was valued at $2 billion; if the Silicon Valley rumor mill can be believed, the company could go public in the next year, with an additional billion dollars tacked on to that valuation. The Richmond facility alone grew from fewer than 50 employees in 2014 to over 1,000 today, making Blue Apron one of the largest employers in the city.

But scaling a manufacturing facility in a historically crime-dogged city like Richmond as fast as if it were a downtown San Francisco software firm hasn’t been easy for Blue Apron. The company has set out to upend the entrenched industrial food system and disrupt the dinner table by changing the way Americans buy, receive, and prepare food, reducing food waste and increasing distribution and delivery efficiencies in the process. To do that, it had to rapidly hire a massive unskilled workforce, bringing jobs to a part of the Bay Area that has been largely left behind by Silicon Valley’s boom times. Yet documents and interviews suggest that it was unprepared to properly manage and care for those workers, and as a result has suffered a rash of health and safety violations.

In the 38 months since Blue Apron&039;s facility opened, the Richmond Police Department has received calls from there twice because of weapons, three times for bomb threats, and seven times because of assault. Police captains have met twice with Blue Apron to discuss the frequency of calls to the police. At least four arrests have been made due to violence on the premises, or threats of it. Employees have reported being punched in the face, choked, groped, pushed, pulled, and even bitten by each other on the job, according to police reports. Employees recalled bomb scares, brandished kitchen knives, and talk of guns.

All told, interviews with 14 former employees describe a chaotic, stressful environment where employees work long days for wages starting at $12 an hour bagging cilantro or assembling boxes in a warehouse kept at a temperature below 40 degrees.

“You put honey in a small container. We would put small peppers in little small bags,” said Glenn Lovely, who worked as a temp in the Richmond facility for three months. “And it was cold — cold as hell.”

Scaling a manufacturing facility in a historically crime-dogged city like Richmond as fast as if it were a downtown San Francisco software firm hasn’t been easy for Blue Apron.

To combat the cold temperatures required by food safety laws, Blue Apron provides each employee with a jacket, thermals, a hat, and a neck warmer. Some people said this was sufficient, but others struggled to adjust. “Your fingers would start to get numb and start to hurt from using them,” said former warehouse lead Andrew Driskell.

One person said Blue Apron was the worst job she&039;d ever had. Others said it wasn’t so bad. But every one of them — even those who mostly liked the job — recalled violence or threats of violence, visits from the police, injuries, high turnover, unfair treatment, or a combination of the above.

“I enjoy jobs where things are on fire more than ones where I’m sitting around,” said one former team lead of his experience at Blue Apron. “But there were times when it was just horrible.”

Blue Apron declined to make an executive available for an interview. In a statement to BuzzFeed News, the company stressed its commitment to “creating the best possible workplace experience for all of our employees. We are proud of our corporate culture and the good work that our employees do every day, bringing families across the country together over delicious, home-cooked meals.”

The idea, on its surface, is simple. Once a week, customers receive a box in the mail with recipe cards and all the pre-portioned, farm-fresh ingredients — down to tablespoonfuls of vinegar and sprigs of oregano — needed to make two, three, or four wholesome, healthy, Instagram-ready, home-cooked meals. The cost per plate is just under $10, and each meal takes an average of 35 minutes to prepare (or so the recipe cards claim). As the sales pitch goes, it’s healthier than takeout, easier than cooking from scratch, and cheaper than a private chef or meal delivery service. Blue Apron’s product is, essentially, hired help in the kitchen at a fraction of the cost — a way for busy professionals and rural foodies to whip up meals like skokichi squash ragù and mafalda pasta with mushrooms, garlic chives, and rosemary or crispy catfish with kale-farro salad and warm grape relish in less than an hour, without setting foot in a grocery store or planning a meal. Its popularity has made the company a rising star among a new class of Silicon Valley disruptors whose product is not software, but real-world products, delivered to your door frictionlessly, quickly, efficiently, and sometimes inexpensively, with just a few clicks of a mouse or taps of an app.

Matthew Mead / AP

“I think that there is a great opportunity today to create, through technology, a leaner food system that cuts out the various steps between the consumer and supplier,” company co-founder Matt Wadiak said in an August Q&A with the nonprofit Food Tank. Words like “sustainable” and “responsible” pepper the company’s website, which features high-resolution photos of happy cheesemakers and sun-baked farms.

But between farm and front door is the massive, mostly invisible process by which all those ingredients are measured, cut, prepped, bagged, packed, palletized, and shipped. For all its outward simplicity, Blue Apron’s business model is predicated on a hugely complicated feat of precision logistics, executed at an enormous volume. Each week, the company has to develop 10 original, relatively healthy, widely appealing, geographically and seasonally appropriate recipes that can be prepared easily and quickly, with ingredients that are affordable and available at scale. It has to source correct quantities of produce, meat, cheese, bread, spices, and staples from “artisanal purveyors and hundreds of family-run farms” across the country. And then it has to precisely portion and package each of those ingredients — 10 to 12 per meal in this week’s boxes — and send them out to hundreds of thousands of people, ideally without breakage, spoiling, lost packages, or missing ingredients. While the USDA estimates that 10% of food produced in the US is wasted at the retail level, Blue Apron aims to waste just 3% of the food it purchases. If it’s successful, Blue Apron will have done something no one else has, and save a boatload of money in the process.

Blue Apron’s Richmond facility opened in August 2013. In June 2014, the company posted that it was hiring 400 people there; the next 18 months would see a period of rapid growth. David Reifschneider, who has worked for Walmart, Amazon, and Zulily, was hired in May 2015 to be the general manager of the Richmond warehouse. That same month, Blue Apron announced the opening of its Texas facility. In June, the company raised $135 million to strengthen its supply chain. In the months leading up the chaos of August 26, 2015, it expanded its original 30,000-square-foot Richmond facility into an adjacent warehouse space. In a statement, the company attributed this period of expansion to “exceptionally high, unanticipated demand for our product.”

“When I interviewed with Blue Apron, they were doing 6,500 boxes a week,” said Sara Custer, who became head of West Coast operations in May 2014. “When I started, three weeks later, they were doing 9,000 a week. When I left, they were doing easily 20,000 out of the Richmond facility alone.”

Rita Childs worked for a year and a half on the Blue Apron assembly line in the pack-out division, where boxes are filled with ice packs, recipe cards, and the appropriate ingredients for every meal. Those ingredients are prepped by kitchen associates, who weigh out and perfectly portion bulk ingredients from Blue Apron’s suppliers into small plastic bottles and bags: tablespoons of soy sauce poured into tiny bottles, for example, or carefully counted fingerling potatoes put into boxes. And after the boxes are assembled, the shipping department loads them onto pallets and, ultimately, trucks.

BuzzFeed News; Source: Cal/OSHA

By the time Childs left Blue Apron in August 2015, she said, the number of boxes being shipped per week had shot up to 34,000. “Everything that goes in the box had to be prepped 34,000 times.” When the prepping and packing was done — sometimes with the help of automated sealing and bagging equipment — shipping associates would palletize the boxes and load them onto trucks.

Flexibility and convenience are central to the Blue Apron pitch: Boxes can be canceled or modified up to about a week before the delivery day. That’s a boon for the customer, but it makes sourcing difficult, especially for a company mission-driven to reduce waste. With hundreds of thousands of people expecting dinner to be delivered on time, there’s little margin for error. “There were plenty of times where the kitchen would say we had 2,000 celery, but we actually had zero,” one former team lead told BuzzFeed News. “So we&039;d run around like chickens with our heads cut off looking for celery.”

Purchasers described scrambling to find more of a certain ingredient when supply was unexpectedly low.

“I would get sent to Whole Foods and buy things if we really needed an ingredient and we didn’t have it in the building,” said the former team lead. Blue Apron told BuzzFeed News that while during early days it sourced some of its product from local stores, the company’s shipments have been too large to make grocery store shopping feasible “for years now.”

Still, two years later, former employees recall a hectic pace. “One day in pack-out could be worse than an entire Black Friday at Best Buy, as far as stress goes,” the team lead added. Another said it wasn’t uncommon to see someone quit on their first day.

“It was crazy. You felt like you were running all the time. Your hair&039;s on fire and you can&039;t keep up,” said Custer.

“There were plenty of times where the kitchen would say we had 2,000 celery, but we actually had zero. So we&039;d run around like chickens with our heads cut off looking for celery.”

Quelle: <a href="The Not-So-Wholesome Reality Behind The Making Of Your Meal Kit“>BuzzFeed

Racist Social Media Users Have A New Code To Avoid Censorship

Racist online communities have developed a new code for racial, homophobic and bigoted slurs in an attempt avoid censorship.

The code, using terms like Google, Skittle, and Yahoo as substitutes for offensive words describing blacks, Muslims and Mexicans, appears to be in use by various accounts on Twitter and elsewhere.

Many tweets using the code are doing so in support of Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump:

The code appears to have originated in response to Google&#039;s Jigsaw program, a new AI-powered approach to combating harassment and abuse online. The program seems to have inspired members of the online message board 4chan to start “Operation Google,” using Google as a derogatory term for blacks in an attempt to get Google to filter out its own name. The code developed from there.

It appears that a number of 4chan posts in which this effort was discussed were deleted. A search of a 4chan archive, 4plebs, cross referenced with Google search, showed the discussion developing underneath a link to a post about Google Jigsaw:

Some referenced Microsoft&039;s AI-powered chatbot, Tay, as an example of how AI can be manipulated by racists.

And the Skype for Jew substitution emerged too:

This isn&039;t the first time a bigoted social media code has emerged. Placing a name in triple parenthesis is meant to identify Jews and target them for harassment.

BuzzFeed News has reached out to Google and Twitter for comment.

Quelle: <a href="Racist Social Media Users Have A New Code To Avoid Censorship“>BuzzFeed