First we were like WHOA, and then we were like OH WAIT WHOAAAAA, then like, OH DAMN!
Remember me, lol?
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This means, for example, Tide and Gain could both be trying to reach potential laundry detergent buyers, but based on the profile of their potential customers and the kind of ads they're posting, Tide might end up paying more to reach each of its desired customers than Gain does.
![[Dramatic reenactment of Hillary Clinton reading Wired]:](https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2018-02/27/17/asset/buzzfeed-prod-fastlane-02/anigif_sub-buzz-32545-1519769976-3.gif)
Facebook declined to comment on how far the candidates' ads spread after they were purchased.
Grubhub is responding to ongoing debates about gender equality by making it slightly easier to support women-run restaurants. The food-ordering company launched a separate website called RestaurantHER this week that features a crowdsourced map of 20,000 women-led restaurants around the country, many of which link out to a Grubhub page to place an order. Grubhub defines women-led restaurants as those “owned or co-owned by a woman or a kitchen led by a woman head or executive chef.”
“It’s been a dramatic year for gender issues,” said Grubhub CEO Matt Maloney in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “There’s not a lot we can do to modify the national conversation, but we do have a lot of scale in restaurants, and restaurant delivery specifically. When we recognized similar patterns of inequality in the segment of restaurants we work in, we thought, ‘what can we do to help these women out and try to promote more women coming out of the industry?’ The map is about giving them additional exposure.”
It’s been about a year and a half since Maloney’s social commentary following the 2016 election led to threats of a boycott and a dip in Grubhub’s share price. In an email to employees in November 2016, he wrote that he rejects “the nationalist, anti-immigrant and hateful politics of Donald Trump” and told employees that if they didn’t support an inclusive and supportive culture “please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here.”
Unlike that incident, however, “I don’t think gender equality is a political issue now,” he said. “For us, this is an attempt to improve the industry we’re in in a way that’s beneficial for our diners and our restaurants.” Grubhub, which owns Seamless, Eat24, Allmenus, and MenuPages, works with 80,000 restaurants around the country.
Women represent just 19% of chefs and 7% of head chefs and earn 28% less in base pay than male chefs, according to the initiative’s website, a discrepancy Maloney said was brought to his attention nearly a year ago.
The restaurant industry, like many others, also has been plagued by reports that it can be a hotbed of workplace harassment. Chef John Besh stepped down from his company following allegations of sexual harassment from more than two dozen women, and Mario Batali stepped away from his businesses following reports of misconduct. Celebrity chef Tom Colicchio, like some other high-profile chefs, in November called out the “dick culture” in the restaurant world.
Still, Grubhub’s new site is an imperfect first step. The map has not been integrated into Grubhub’s apps, so consumers who want to support women-led restaurants must know to go to restauranther.com to find a restaurant near them that may or may not link out to a Grubhub page to order, a process that isn’t exactly frictionless.
Until the end of March, Grubhub will also donate $1 for every pledge (which you can make by clicking a button on restauranther.com) to order from a woman-led restaurant, up to $1 million (the pledge alone is enough for the company to donate). The first $100,000 will go to a group called Women Chefs & Restaurateurs to support its scholarship program and to develop online resources to help restaurant operators address gender issues in restaurant culture. Grubhub said it would spend money pledged in excess of the first $100,000 to “drive beneficial change,” but it has not yet determined specific uses.
Casper
On Tuesday, Casper, which is known for its fast shipping and easy return policy, opened its first permanent store in New York's swanky NoHo neighborhood. The startup had previously dabbled in physical retail through pop-up shops, short-term stores, and more gimmicky strategies like a mobile nap pod.
It also already sells sheets and a bed mat at Target stores and, until 2017, it sold mattresses at West Elm. But Neil Parikh, cofounder and chief operating office of Casper, told BuzzFeed News that it was time for the company "to do its own thing" and launch its first permanent store.
"It's a product people look for in-person," he said. "For us to create a sleep store and take a spin on it and get people to think about it differently, it makes sense that we'd want to do that in person."
Casper
Traditional mattress stores are notorious for high markups and aggressive sales tactics because their sales people are paid on a commission. But while Casper's store has financial targets it aims to meet, workers are paid hourly and do not make a commission on sales. Parikh said this helps eliminate the pressure people may experience in other mattress stores.
Instead, the shop is designed to create "a comfortable and enjoyable experience for visitors," he said.
The majority of the store's sales floor workers have previously worked for a mix of startup, service, and luxury brands, including Warby Parker, Tesla, Apple, Lululemon, and Burberry, the company told BuzzFeed News.
Parikh called mattresses "an intimate purchase."
"A lot of times you have a couple coming in and talking about how they kick their person," he said. "We're not doctors, but we try to be more holistic about what sleep is like."
Casper
Shoppers can touch the fibers that make up Casper pillows and learn the basics about how it will adjust to move with your nightly twists and turns.
Another display features an air vent that blows over a sample bed sheet attached to a black window pane, to highlight how the company's weaving technique is meant to maintain a body's even temperature.
@casper / Via instagram.com
Consumer demand for mattresses has expanded in recent years, according to a December 2017 report from IBISWorld, and so more startups are jumping into the fray, including Tuft & Needle and Leesa, which replaced Casper in West Elm stores.
The emerging mattress brand is projected to continue to grow in 2018. KeyBanc Capital Markets estimates that market share for emerging brands will grow to 11.3% from 8.0% in 2017. That amounts to a projected $2 billion in revenue in 2018 from projected $1.4 billion in revenue in 2017.
And the competition in the industry is fierce. A Fast Company story detailed how Casper used social influencers and affiliate marketing to drum up sales for its mattresses online, and how it later sued certain blog sites, claiming they drove business to its competitors without properly disclosing that the brands were paying the bloggers sales commissions.
Parikh defended the company's decision in October, saying "a lot of the people who we were involved with were SEO content sites that were essentially trying to hijack our traffic and divert it."
Anya Cohen, a retail industry analyst at IBISWorld, told BuzzFeed News that a physical store may attract tech-wary shoppers who have been alienated by digital-only emerging brands.
"By providing a brick-and-mortar space for shoppers to try the product, Casper can increase brand awareness and capture demand from more traditional shoppers who otherwise would not buy a mattress without trying it in person," she said.
@casper / Via instagram.com
"The barriers to entry in this category are low, and there is an increasing level of competition for Casper, which could ultimately limit the upside of the story," Brad Thomas, an equity research analyst with KeyBanc Capital Markets, told BuzzFeed News.
Unlike razor blades or socks, a mattress business doesn't have to sell a high number of products to make a profit. Walmart recently announced its own online mattress line called Allswell, and Pottery Barn has its own online mattress called the Robin.
"They are driving up customer acquisition costs," said Thomas.
Leticia Miranda / BuzzFeed News
Mattress Firm has more than 3,600 stores across the country and recently bought Sleepy's, another traditional mattress store chain. The company's net sales have steadily increased over the last seven years, from about $703 million in 2011 to $2.5 billion in 2015, according to the company's most recent report.
But the company attributes some of its sales increases to acquiring new companies and stores. As it acquired new stores, it also closed dozens more. The company lost $7.5 million on store closings in 2015, which is an increase from $1.5 million in 2013.
A store manager at the Mattress Firm store down the street from Casper's new "sleep shop" in NoHo said that his store carries a sample Casper mattress because shoppers often want to compare the traditional mattresses to the Casper.
But Sunni Goodman, a spokesperson for Mattress Firm's startup mattress brand called Tulo, told BuzzFeed News that Casper's new sleep shop isn't a threat to its business.
"We’ll have a good value for you whatever your budget is," she said. "It's validating that sweet spot of brick-and-mortar and digital."
Casper
"People are just learning to expect more of retailers," Parikh said. "The [retailers] that are going to make it will make it fun to be inside and create a non-pressured environment. I think that's the bar you need to hit."
LINK: Everlane Opened An Actual Physical Store After Saying Forever That It Wouldn't
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In a survey published Tuesday by dating app Tinder, people who date online — and on Tinder specifically — say such services make them more open-minded about dating someone outside their own race or ethnicity.
The swiping app stood out in the findings. According to the survey of more than 4,000 people ages 24 to 45, done by marketing analytics firm Morar HPI, 72% of people who used dating apps thought Tinder was the most diverse app. (Tinder doesn’t ask users to specify their race when they sign up, so they have no way of know the actual racial breakdown of their user base.)
The survey is part of a campaign by the company to include interracial couple emoji. "Love is universal, and it’s time for interracial couples to be represented in our universal language," Tinder said on the campaign page.
Tinder's survey generally supports other research on dating apps and interracial marriage. A 2017 study done by Cornell University showed that dating apps like Tinder increase interracial marriage rates, as they expose users to people outside their traditional social circle. In 2015, 17% of new marriages in the US were between spouses of different races, and in a 2017 Pew poll, 91% of Americans said interracial marriage was good or neutral for society.
But Tinder’s survey is about what people say they think about interracial dating; the actual truth of how people behave is a different story. Tinder doesn’t offer data about how often users actually swipe on people of a different race or ethnicity, but it’s been studied already.
In 2009, OkCupid looked at its user data to examine patterns for racial preference among its users and found that overall, black women and Asian men were less likely to be preferred by people outside of their own race. The company looked at the dating data again in 2014, and found it it was pretty much the same — yet in a survey, the percent of people who said they preferred to date in their own race had dropped. So basically, people’s opinions about interracial dating became more enlightened, but their actual dating habits weren't.
OkCupid’s founder, Christian Rudder, wrote in 2014 that dating preferences don’t necessarily make a person racist, but “the trend — that fact that race is a sexual factor for so many individuals, and in such a consistent way — says something about race’s role in our society.”
And simply dating someone from another race or ethnicity doesn’t automatically mean a person has transcended all forms of subtle racism. A black woman from New York told NPR in January that she went on dates with two white men who expressed racist sentiments to her (one told her, “my family would never approve of you,” and another said, “we have to bring the 'hood out of you, bring the ghetto out of you!”). She met both men on Tinder.
Jeff Chiu / AP
Mike Fish was driving for Uber 10 minutes outside of Boston when he picked up a second passenger in his Uber Pool who, he said, seemed “out of it, drowsy — almost sedated.”
When the drowsy passenger asked him if Boston’s Mass General hospital was the nearest emergency room, “that set off a red flag,” Fish told BuzzFeed News. “I said, ‘Do you need the ER?’ He said yes. It came out that, over the last few days, he’d been passing out and losing consciousness.”
But instead of calling an ambulance to get the urgent medical attention he needed, the sick passenger called an Uber Pool. The shared ride would save him a few bucks, but it meant he’d have to wait for Fish to drop off the first passenger before he’d get to the ER.
“I was a little nervous,” Fish said. “I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Ride hail drivers are, by and large, untrained, self-employed workers driving their own cars on a part-time basis. They’re not medical professionals. But as health care costs have risen and ride hail has become more pervasive, people are increasingly relying on Uber and Lyft drivers to get them to the hospital when they need emergency care.
A recent (yet to be peer reviewed) study found that, after Uber enters new markets, the rates of ambulance rides typically go down, meaning fewer people call professionals in favor of the cheaper option. People have always taken taxis to the hospital — there’s the classic example of the woman going into labor in the back of a cab — but ride hail technology makes it much easier, especially in less densely populated cities. This money-saving tactic might make sense for people in non-critical condition, but it puts ride-hail drivers in an uncomfortable position. They’re forced to choose between assuming potential legal liability if something goes wrong, or dealing with a sense of guilt and the fear of getting a lower rating if they decline or cancel the ride.
Fish didn’t have much of a choice about taking the man to the emergency room — by the time he learned where the rider was going and why, they were already on their way. This happens frequently. But in another instance, Fish willingly agreed to take someone to the ER, a restaurant kitchen worker who’d sliced his hand open while working.
"I was torn between whether to call 911 or continue to the ER, but ... I figured I’d get there quicker than an ambulance."
“With Boston traffic, it was probably quicker than calling an ambulance. If you call an Uber, chances are there’s going to be one within a block or two. An ambulance won’t be as close,” Fish said. “I’m not recommending people do that, but in that case, it worked out pretty well. I got him there in six minutes, and he didn’t need attention from a paramedic, so that actually ended up being pretty efficient.”
But legal professor and gig economy observer Veena Dubal told BuzzFeed News that by allowing the injured man into his car and pressing the button to start the ride, Fish may have exposed himself to serious legal liability.
“You’re not liable if you refuse to take them,” Dubal said. “You’re under no legal obligation to care for them until they get in your car, and then you’re a proprietor conducting business.”
If Uber drivers were employees of Uber, then Uber would be liable if something bad happened to a passenger en route to the hospital. But because drivers are independent contractors, they could be held responsible for any failure to provide care during the business transaction.
“There have been cases where business owners haven't protected people from violence who walk onto their property , and the courts have said there's a special relationship between the business owner and customer, and the business owner acted negligently by not keeping the customer safe,” Dubal said. “In this case the business owner would be the Uber driver, once the rider gets into the car.”
As independent contractors, Uber and Lyft drivers can turn down any ride that makes them uncomfortable. The companies also charge riders for cleaning fees and repay drivers for the expense, though drivers say this process is a major headache that can take weeks. Both companies said low ratings or demerits for canceling on a rider experiencing a medical emergency could be expunged from a driver’s record.
“Uber is not a substitute for law enforcement or medical professionals,” an Uber spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “In the event of any medical emergency, we encourage people to call 911.”
Lyft said the same, adding that “if a driver encounters a passenger with an emergency situation, they should contact 911. After that, they should report the incident to our 24/7 critical response line so we can take appropriate action.”
But drivers told BuzzFeed News that neither Uber or Lyft have provided them with direct guidance about what they should do when a passenger expects to be taken to the ER. “As far as ambulances or medical emergencies, to my knowledge, Uber's never said anything about it,” said said Russ Fisher, a ride hail driver in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “They just vaguely say any ride is your decision, use your common sense.”
When Fisher picked up a young woman whose destination was Mercy Hospital, he didn’t immediately suspect that her ride was urgent. In fact, he’d gotten a ping from her during surge pricing, only to have her cancel the ride and rebook it a few minutes later when the surge went away. So he was surprised when, a few minutes into the trip, she asked him to pull over so she could throw up on the side of the road. Later, she told him she could barely walk and was experiencing the worst pain of her life.
“I was a little nervous when she got out to vomit,” Fisher said. “I haven’t been in a situation like that. I haven’t trained for that. I was torn between whether to call 911 or continue to the ER, but since I was only two minutes away, I figured I’d get there quicker than an ambulance.”
An Uber might have been the speediest solution in that particular situation, but ambulances and the paramedics are prepared to handle emergencies, while ride hail drivers aren’t. Sirens and lights allow emergency vehicles to bypass traffic and red lights, and the EMTs on board are trained and able to start providing medical care as soon as they arrive on the scene.
"I drive my kids in the car. I don't want deathly ill people in my car."
And it’s not just the patients who are put at risk when they opt to call a car rather than an ambulance. When drivers give rides to sick people, they’re exposed to germs and the possibility of infection. One driver remembered with horror picking a patient up at the hospital whose colostomy bag exploded on the way home. Another said he had to wipe down the backseat of his car after driving a woman in labor to the hospital. Experienced drivers recommend getting leather or plastic, never fabric, seats.
“If someone leaves bodily fluids, it's up to me to clean,” said an Uber driver named Jamie.
Jamie was driving Uber in Pittsburgh around 2 a.m. one morning when he picked up two riders headed to the hospital. One of them looked very sick. “I was nervous, but I didn’t say anything. He was in bad, bad shape,” Jamie said.
He dropped the couple off at the hospital without incident, but later he found out the sick rider had died of a long term illness. Jamie was sympathetic, but he wondered why they didn’t call an ambulance.
“I drive my kids in the car,” he said. “I don’t want deathly ill people in my car, to be honest.”
Uber and Lyft didn’t create this problem. Emergency medical transportation is expensive, with ambulance rides costing patients hundreds or even thousands of dollars, even if they have health insurance. More than half of Americans say an unplanned $1,000 expense would put them in debt.
“What it says is something awful about the state of health insurance, that it's so expensive to get to the hospital via ambulance,” said Dubal, the law professor. “It means this is a new, weird, privatized way that people are dealing with emergencies, and the drivers aren't equipped to deal with those things, and they're taking on risks that they're unaware of.”
Dubal said it’s unlikely that an attorney would be willing to sue an individual ride hail driver for failing to provide adequate medical care during a ride, largely because there’s no money in it. But what they might do, she said, is sue Uber, claiming the driver was acting as the company’s agent, even though they aren’t formally employees. The high likelihood that Uber would settle such a case would make such a lawsuit tempting.
“Uber is settling cases left and right because they don't want this issue of whether drivers are employees or independent contractors to be decided in a court,” Dubal said. “So they’re highly motivated to settle. I wouldn't be surprised if this lawsuit doesn’t already exist, or will exist soon.”
