SOCIAL MEDIA: Does Your Restaurant Need to be on Vero?
If you follow any major influencers or celebrities on social media, you might have noticed a new social platform called Vero. That’s right, alongside Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, and a handful of other platforms, people still have time for another one. But does it match the hype and do restaurants need to be on Vero?
DID YOU KNOWS…
Streaming Gold
Hulu says 63% of its subscribers streamed the Winter Olympics live or on-demand this year. It amounted to 15 hours per viewer and totaled 6.5 million hours of streaming coverage. Hulu provided portal views to pick certain events, and sent out alerts to subscribers as to when they would air. The most popular events were snowboarding, skiing and ski jumping.
Fired for Fake Reservations
An OpenTable employee has been fired after booking fake reservations on a competitor’s site. The employee made several hundred reservations at restaurants using Reserve, one of OpenTable’s competitor, resulting in hundreds of no-shows over three months. Yikes.
The Best & Worst Countries for Women Worldwide
The global Women, Peace and Security Index measures women's well-being by assessing various factors such as inclusion, justice and security in 153 countries. Iceland comes first, followed by Norway and Switzerland. The U.S. is in 22nd position and its lack of paid-maternity leave is one possible reason it trails other developed countries. Along with Papua New Guinea, the U.S. is the only country worldwide that doesn't offer new mothers paid maternity leave. Here are the best and worst countries for women.
The Infatuation with Zagat
Why it matters to you: Google sold Zagat to the Infatuation for an undisclosed amount.
The Infatuation recently purchased long running crowd-sourced review book Zagat from Google. This deal comes shortly after Google announced its’ plan to search for a buyer for Zagat in January. Google purchased Zagat in 2011 for $151 million which gave them access to a large cache of reviews of restaurants, nightclubs, and retail stores which helped stave off competition with Yelp a little longer. However, Google let the brand slowly wither and halted most publishing of the guide-book as they switched back to crowdsourcing reviews.
Zagat will transition to a new tech-driven platform that hopes to create a “stronger, more meaningful alternative to other crowdsourced restaurant reviews.” Nobody knows how this will all truly pan out for Zagat, but our fingers are crossed. We all know how bad Yelp can be for small businesses.
LUNCH WITH A SIDE OF HEALTHY CONFRONTATION
Why it matters to you: One chef in New Orleans is charging two different prices for white & black diners to try to redistribute wealth & provide a learning experience.
The median income difference between black people and white people is significant and unfortunate. Higher education and overall privilege are major contributing factors in this gap. Higher education alone can raise the average black family’s income by $60k. So, what does this have to do with food? Tunde Wey opened a pop-up restaurant last month called Saartj and it’s designed to teach diners about the racial wealth gap and make an impact by redistributing wealth to customers of color.
The business model is simple: a meal costs $12 but white guests are asked to pay a suggested price of $30 to represent the racial wealth gap (i.e. difference in an average family’s income). The extra $18 is then gifted to a customer of color to level the playing field and hopefully teach everyone a lesson. It’s truly an interesting technique but we have doubts whether or not it will be successful. Would you or any white person you know go to a restaurant where they knew they were being overcharged? Probably not and therein lies the problem.
While this is a solid concept, it suffers from one major flaw: its’ avoid-ability. We all know it is far too easy to avoid one restaurant in a city whether accidentally or on purpose, so what is really being gained here if that is the case? If someone like Tunde Wey could get an entire city on board for even a single day, then a conversation would really be started. For this to really succeed, people mustn’t be able to avoid it. The lesson simply cannot hit home the way Tunde would like it to if people don’t have to care. Simple as that.
