Amazon Axes Work From Home & Chipotle Debuts The Avocado Bot
30:12 Share

See site for more details.

Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Chipotle's new avocado-coring robot is ready for its debut. Will the restaurant industry ever be the same? Then who the heck is Moo Dang, the viral pygmy hippo that is changing Thailand's economy? It's Tuesday, September 17th. Let's ride. ♪

So last week, you may have heard us detail the saga of Michael Jordan's suburban Chicago mansion that has been languishing on the market for 12 years now. Well, unfortunately for everyone who headed to Zillow to bookmark the property after listening to the show, the $14.9 million home is unsold.

off the market. According to reports, the ultra custom mansion that is plastered with Jordan's name and Jersey number is under contract with a buyer ending the Chicago enclaves time on the market. Neil, no one knows who the buyer is yet, but I'm hoping it's LeBron James. It might be. I mean, let's just talk about the nineties bulls for a second because they are the worst real estate investors ever.

in history. They should stick with basketball. Jordan listed this for $29 million in 2012. He sold it for under $15 million. Tony Kukoc sold his home for $920,000 after buying it for $1.2 million. And then Scottie Pippen sold his Highland Park mansion for $1.8 million after originally listing it for $3.1 million in 2015. So either the Highland Park mansion

Market is going through a major bust right now, or these 90s bulls just have no idea what they're doing when they buy a home. Spoken like a true Philadelphia 76ers fan. Now, a quick word from our sponsor, Wise Business, the app for doing things in other currencies. Neil, when was the last time you went on vacation? Real vacation? I mean...

Maybe five years ago when the brew was first starting out. Well, first off, you got to take more days off. But also remember how dysfunctional the early brew days were? Startup vibes were strong. Oh yeah, we had five alarm fires to put out every single day. And the brew was totally US-based too. Didn't start hiring internationally for a few more years. Imagine dealing with international payments around that time. Would have been a mess.

I'm getting stressed just imagining it. Luckily, companies have WISE to help out these days. It is super easy to get paid from overseas and gives you full visibility of your money so you stay in control. With all of that time and stress saved, it's almost like WISE could have helped you take more than one vacation in the last five years. Just reading this ad is making me yearn for warmer climes. To learn more about how WISE could work for your business, visit wise.com slash business. That's wise.com slash business.

Amazon's corporate workers will have to go back to the office five days a week, CEO Andy Jassy said yesterday, dealing a big blow to the hybrid work model. Along with offering two-day shipping, Amazon offered its employees two-day skipping. As of 2023, they had to go to the office three days a week,

but could work remotely for two. That is changing in January, Jassy said, primarily to strengthen the company's culture that had been straying from the innovative startup mentality that built it into a $2 trillion e-commerce colossus. In his memo to employees, Jassy wrote, he's seen better collaboration, teaching, learning, and brainstorming at the office, and that teams are better connected to one another that see each other in real life.

Other changes are coming to Amazon, too, to strengthen that culture. Jassy said Amazon has way too many managers and way too many meetings, slowing the company down. He instructed each major organization within Amazon to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers significantly.

by 15% by March, while creating a bureaucracy tip line for employees to flag when they encounter too much red tape. Toby, how do you think Amazon employees are going to react to this? I mean, if you're a middle manager, you are quaking in your boots right now. I mean, they've been, companies around big tech worldwide

world have been trying to remove layers. They've been trying to flatten the organizations for years now, really. I mean, there was this March study that found that 30% of the layoffs in 2023 were middle managers. That was up from 20% in 2019. So clearly there has been this focus on that middle

middle layer of people who are managing people who are managing people who are managing people. And Amazon really just put its foot down here. It is shocking, though, to see where we were even just a few years ago with this huge embrace of remote work saying that you could hire talent from all over the world. And it was this big unlock to now we are seeing the biggest companies in the world saying no five days a week in the office. Yeah, that's pretty. I mean, it's not hardcore in 2019. It does feel hardcore now because it

did seem like it had shaken out to be this three-day-a-week hybrid model for the largest companies. I think this could get a lot of pushback from Amazon employees who are very vocal about their hybrid work situation. Just when they announced the three-day workday,

requirement last year. There was a massive uprising. 10% of Amazon's entire corporate workforce signed a petition against the policy. There was a major walkout. This was seen by Amazon's management as a way to

You know, a soft layoff. That's, I guess, not a corporate jargon word yet. But it basically was seen as a way for for Amazon to weed out its workforce. The people who didn't want to come back to office three days a week, they were happy to say goodbye to. But there was a lot of pushback from Amazon employees. And I wonder how it's going to shake out with this more, you know, intense work.

work from the office requirement. And I mean, it sounds like 10% isn't that big, but when you consider the size of Amazon, that's over 30,000 people. I also just can't help but think back to one Zucks year of efficiency from coming out of 2022, where he's just saying like, hey, let's...

kind of what I just said of like, let's not have managers managing managers, managing managers. And that kind of set the tonal shift there. And then I also can't help but think of just the founder mode memo that just recently came out where people are saying these founders and these leads of these big companies need to get back to more of that scrappy startup mentality. So you can trace a lot of these threads into the culmination of Amazon announcing this, but I think you are fully right that the fully...

Professional era of remote working, COVID era is going to the wayside. Employees are not going to be very happy with it. In July, nationwide office foot traffic hit its highest point since July of 2019. So it's definitely maybe we can close the chapter here on the remote work era that boomed and then now it appears to be busting. If you're the Seattle commercial development officer, you're like, oh my God, thank God. We're going to get way more...

Workers now going to lunch places on Monday and Friday when they probably were at home. Reno, Nevada is earning its nickname as the biggest little city in the world because starting yesterday, a court there will decide the fate of one of the most powerful international media dynasties. I made it sound dramatic because it is. The Murdoch family, Patriarch Rupert and his four eldest children, entered a courtroom in Reno yesterday to settle a bitter fight

over a news empire that includes Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, and TV and print outlets in the UK and Australia. Here is why they're fighting. A few decades ago, Rupert established a family trust that would give each of his four eldest children equal voting shares in his companies upon his death.

Well, Rupert is 93 now, and it appears he changed his mind on that original plan. Instead of splitting the voting pie between his four eldest children, he wants to hand control to just one, Lachlan, the oldest son. It isn't a mystery why. Murdoch's media businesses are on the right wing of the political spectrum, and Lachlan is the one Murdoch child that supports his father's politics.

The others are more in the center or in the case of the other son, James, even on the left. And they're not down with their father ripping up the old agreement and giving total power to Lachlan. So they're taking this dispute to family court, which is how we ended up in Reno. What is at stake?

You know what? It sounds pretty good to me. Game of Thrones. No.

Yeah. Murdoch's whole claim here, the elder Murdoch's whole claim rests on that. If he were to give control of his media empire to his children, it would change the ideological kind of lean of the media companies, which would hurt their value. That's kind of like the key piece there. That's saying that, listen, our audience comes to us for a very specific reason. If we were to change that, we would probably lose our spot as like the number one at,

cable news outlet at night. Remember, Fox gets 2 million viewers per night. That's 267% more than CNN, 77% more than MSNBC. In terms of revenue, Fox News brought in $3 billion, which is double that of CNN. So he's definitely making this monetary argument that

I know I signed this trust. I know that this agreement sprouted up decades ago, but I want to change that now because I think Lachlan is the better steward of this media empire. And this is not even about money. This is about voting control and direction of these companies because all

All of these people are well taken care of. Murdoch left the company last year, but that was after members selling a bunch of Fox assets to Disney for $71 billion in 2019. Each of the kids got paid out well into the billions of dollars. So they all cashed out. They are sitting on so much money. And this is really about the future direction of these companies.

But look, we'd love to tell you, give you updates on what's happening over the course of the two weeks that they're in this Reno courthouse, but we can't. Yeah. Nevada weirdly offers the most private court settings for issues like these family trust decisions. This was actually only revealed to us because the New York times published this report back in July. They actually,

a coalition of media organizations to CNN, New York Times, NPR, and others filed a petition to unseal these proceedings, but actually got shut down by the Reno court saying that this family trust case is essentially a private legal arrangement. But this is why they are in Reno, Nevada. They don't have any connection. They have nothing to do. They all showed up in Reno in their, you know, in their black SUVs. But Nevada has been pushing it.

positioning itself as a place for family trust disputes to get resolved. And that honestly dates back

over a century to where Reno was the divorce capital of the country. And the last time this courthouse was, this particular courthouse in Reno was ever in the national prominence was because it was on the cover of Life magazine in a story about how everyone would go there to get divorced back in the early 20th century. So yeah, another family dispute. We're back in Nevada because they are very protective of family secrecy and their interest in secrecy.

Fresh off surviving another attempt on his life on Sunday, Donald Trump is back in the spotlight, this time attaching his name to a new crypto exchange. World Liberty Financial is a decentralized finance, aka DeFi, platform that wants to challenge traditional banking systems. The project is pretty light on details so far, but it appears to be a platform where you can borrow, lend, and earn interest on crypto with the goal, of course, to make finance great again. DeFi is a platform that is

It's been promoted in recent week by Trump's sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, while new NYU freshman Barron Trump will be the project's DeFi visionary. It's the biggest sign yet that Trump is fully committed to his promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world. Immediately, though, critics called out potential conflicts of interest,

Yes, there are

are two minds about this. On one hand, the crypto industry is very happy that Trump has embraced them because he has pledged to fire the SEC chair, Gary Gensler, who has, according to the crypto industry, waged a war on crypto. It's unclear whether he can actually fire Gensler in practice, but it is a sign that Trump wants to make things much easier for the crypto industry. On the other end, they are skeptical about this particular project because it is being led by

a guy who is largely unknown in the crypto world, Chase Hero. Bloomberg talked to a bunch of digital asset investors and asked them, hey, have you heard of this guy? And they were like, no, no, I have no idea. And then in 2018, in a YouTube video, among other interesting, I will say, quotes, he said, you can literally sell bleep in a can wrapped in

Piss covered in human skin for a billion dollars if the story's right, because people will buy it. So I would say in the mainstream crypto industry, there is a large amount of skepticism toward this particular project, especially because it's in one aspect of the crypto world, which is called DeFi, decentralized finance, which in the past has been prone to suffer from scams and and hacks.

One other aspect that, I mean, the whole reason we're talking about it, honestly, is that political donations from the crypto industry are way up this election cycle. They reached around $190 million. That's nearly double where we were at in this year's midterms. Also nearly double from the 2022 elections. If you go back to 2020, they are nearly 13 times what they were there. So when we say that crypto is becoming a major influence and a major player this election season, that

is what we mean. A lot of money is flowing in. And meanwhile, there was that assassination attempt on Sunday, the second in two months. The previous time you look at shares of truth social, which is Trump's media business. Those surged two months ago during the previous assassination attempt. So there was a lot of scrutiny on what would happen to Trump media shares this time around. They did not get a pop this time and they largely track, uh,

what investors think of Trump's reelection prospects. There is even greater scrutiny on what happens to this stock because the lockup period for when insiders can sell their shares after it went public is coming up on September 25th, just one week from now.

from now. Trump has $2.3 billion stake in this company that's worth about $3 billion. On Friday, he pledged to not sell his stake, which gave the stock a boost, but it is still down 77% since reaching a high of almost $80 a

a share in March. Now it's down to $17 a share. So a lot of attention will be paid to the trajectory of that stock because it does follow Trump's re-elections prospects. Up next, your guac is still extra at Chipotle, but now it's made by robots.

Toby, what do you think makes a great leader? Oof, there are a million answers to that question, but one thing's for sure, a true leader leads by example. Totally. And the Range Rover Sport fits the bill by redefining sporting luxury. Dramatic design meets distinctive sporting character in the sport with a cocoon-like interior for a comfortable, supportive journey. It's a symbol of high achievement and high adrenaline. Yep, it is next-level luxury. Get this, it has adornments

active noise cancellation that filters out unwanted sounds so every drive feels like a sanctuary and every journey can fit your mood with configurable cabin lighting speaking of sanctuary it even has co2 management and an optional pm 2.5 filtration that reduces odors bacteria and allergens explore the range rover sport at land rover usa.com that's land rover usa.com

Neil, I know you always have a million things on your mind. Neil's numbers, editing the newsletter, random lefty pictures from the mid-2000s. I have been known to forget to even eat lunch from time to time, which is good for my finances, but, you know, bad for staying alive. Which is exactly why you should work with MassMutual's financial professionals who can take the weight off your shoulders and your brain by helping you create a plan that works for you. One less thing to stress about would go a long way.

They can help you with everything. Retirement, life insurance, you name it. So you can focus on more important things like remembering how good Dontrell Willis was. Man, what a pitcher he was. Visit massmutual.com to get started and take something off your plate.

Let's head out to the great PNW for an update on the Boeing strikes. Boeing's machinist union stopped work last Friday after over 96% of workers rejected a proposed contract and voted to strike instead. And it turns out that when 33,000 of your airplane-making employees go on strike, it becomes really hard to make money. So Boeing has gone into turtle mode to conserve cashed

It announced a number of cost-cutting measures in response to the strike, including implementing a hiring freeze, limiting first-in-business class travel for executives, and reducing spending with suppliers. Boeing and union representatives are scheduled to restart negotiations today with the assistance of federal mediators. But until a deal is worked out, Boeing's only avenue is to hunker down, reduce spending, and hope negotiations.

they can reach a deal. Yeah, priority number one right now is preserving Boeing's credit rating. Both all three of the major credit rating agencies, S&P, Fitch, and Moody's, warned that Boeing could lose its investment grade status and move into junk status, which is really bad news in general. It's even worse news for Boeing because Boeing has $60 billion in debt it needs to service. When you get cut down to junk, that increases your interest payments. It also...

lessens the pool of, dwindles the pool of buyers that could possibly buy your debt. So as its CFO said on Friday, number one action here is hunker down, preserve cash, preserve that credit rating so things don't go from bad to worse. And this cost coding mode is going deep. It's

It's limiting spending on consultants, advertising, marketing, charitable giving, on-site catering. They're literally going through the balance sheet right now and seeing where they can trim down costs. The big thing that I have my eye on, too, is that it's planning to cut supplier spending. The aerospace supply chain is extremely fragile because there's really only two major players here. If you are a small supplier and you sell one bolt,

to Boeing, and then Boeing stops buying it, you're a little screwed because, yeah, there's Airbus out there, but what if they don't use the Boeing? I'm an airplane hobbyist maker. You're going to start buying up the excess supply of bolts. Yeah, exactly. So...

How are union negotiations going? That's the big question. It does appear that new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, has built up a little bit of goodwill. He spent most of his first days kind of on the factory floor in Renton, Washington. He also announced that he'd do his job from the Seattle offices instead of the corporate offices in Virginia. So it does seem like Ortberg is doing his best here. But you never know with these union negotiations. They didn't like the first deal and they're asking for a lot

They absolutely did not like the first deal. I mean, it was rejected by 95%. So there was a lot of misreading of the room going on. And there's a special, Lee, egg on the face of the union leader, uh,

who John Holden, who agreed to this deal and then took it back to his employees. And then they, and then 9.5 of every 10 said, no, we do not like this deal. They, they, they completely underestimated the resentment that's built up over the course of the last few decades at Boeing, because they signed this deal in 2008 that took away their pensions and, and,

lowered their salary compared to the rest of the industry. Median employee compensation for the aerospace and defense industry grew 12% between 2018 and 2023. At Boeing, it fell 6%. The median worker, the mid-ranking worker at Boeing is making $20 an hour now, which is 25% higher than the $16 at the start of the contract in 2008. But

Inflation has been 44% since then. They also live in the Seattle area, which has insane skyrocketing housing costs. So there's a lot of resentment over this original contract. I think they completely mis-underestimated that, the people at the negotiations. That's why when they presented them with a 25% pay increase, they got soundly rejected. Boeing is going to be losing $500 million a week that

this strike goes on. So you bet they're going back to the negotiating table today trying to get this resolved as quick as possible. The robot takeover has arrived at Chipotle. Yesterday, the burrito bowl giant announced that two new robots were ready to suit up and start working to make customers spend less time in line waiting for their order.

If you go to the Chipotle in Huntington Beach, California, you will find the first robot, the hyped AutoCado. The AutoCado is a machine that cuts, cores, and peels avocados with diabolical efficiency before handing it off to a human worker to mash the fruit into guacamole, your richer friend's order as an add-on. Chipotle thinks the AutoCado could be a serious time-saving hack.

According to the company, human employees take about 50 minutes to prepare a batch of guac, while the avocado could cut that time in half by processing one avocado in just 26 seconds. The second robot doesn't have as exciting a name as the avocado, but the Augmented Make Line, as it's known, is an automated assembly system that will build bowls and salads at Chipotle's Corona del Mar, California location. Making bowls and salads faster is insane.

key for Chipotle's sales since they account for about 65% of the company's digital orders. Toby, these robots are still in the pilot phase at just one location each. If they work, they'll be expanded to more stores. Are you bullish or bearish on the AutoCado revolution? I think

think I am bullish because Chipotle has been experimenting with robots for a while now that they had one named Chippy that was supposed to help with the chips, obviously, but that kind of failed because it was too cumbersome. It was too big, too hard to clean. So I do think they've gone through various iterations here and they've arrived on these two robots that they do think can help efficiency because Roblox

We're talking massive scale here. Chipotle expects to use nearly 130 million pounds of avocados this year. So if you can cut that time down, if you can increase efficiency, it really does lead to some big time-saving games. Same thing goes with the augmented make line because just so many of these orders are coming in via online these days. So they're investing in the areas of the kitchen that they think are the biggest bottlenecks

It's also no surprise that these are rolling out in California specifically because remember, California just raised its minimum wage. So it probably is reflecting this broader staffing strategy to try to offset some of those labor costs. Let's try to introduce some automation into the kitchen. So this is not just a fun experiment. This is something that I do think that they are basing the next decade

kind of iteration of their kitchen on. Yeah, I mean, this is a industry-wide phenomenon. The main problem that these chains have is not getting people in the door. It's keeping them inside when they see a massive line and like, oh my God, am I going to have to wait 20 minutes? I remember going to Chipotle in College Park, Maryland when I was in school there. And the line would be literally out the door. And you're like, I don't know if I'm going to do this. So increasing the throughput of the amount of orders you can make is key to boosting sales. Everyone from Starbucks to Chipotle

to Kava, to Chipotle, to Suikin. This is like top of mind and they think automation will play a big role in it. Obviously, people who look out for workers are saying, is this going to replace workers? What is, you know, obviously this is meant to, you know, the companies say this is going to augment workers. We're still going to have, we're going to hand over the cord Chipotle to the workers to smash because there's nothing like a human smashing avocados to create guacamole, which I guess, but...

Uh, you can see that, you know, it starts at avocado coring and it goes to just making salads on its own. Like sweet green is doing. They have two of these infinite kitchens, which shoot salad items out of a tube and create a salad, uh, all of them all by themselves until, uh, uh,

you know, a human worker mixes them up, but you could see that eventually going away. But you're right. This is a very big response to increasing labor costs during COVID and the dreaded line box of getting more people through the stores. But one avocado in 26 seconds,

I'd like to see you race that, Neil. Oh my gosh, are you kidding me? You gotta open it, you gotta core it, you gotta toss the core. I think that's pretty quick, right? No. I think I could easily do it within 30 seconds. Zeal versus Auto-Cut. I could match the Auto-Cut. I think it's when...

I would get tired and bored after a long time. The avocado just has no brain and no hand cramps. So I think that's maybe where the time-saving gains come. Sabrina Carpenter, Tate McRae, Chapel Roan all have laid claim to being the it girl of the moment in recent months.

But none of those talented sensations has anything on Mu Dang. Toss everything you knew about celebrity culture out the window for today's edition of Toby's Trends because a pygmy hippo has taken over the internet. Yes, all 44 toothless pounds of Mu Dang have been going ultra viral in recent weeks.

Born this July, Mu Dang lives in a Thai zoo and quickly shot to fame after her caretakers uploaded videos of her just living life to the zoo's 2.5 million followers strong TikTok account. The videos mostly include some toothless biting, various naps and walks around her pen, and of course, glamour shots of her being hosed down. Like any human celebrity with a following,

Mudang's star power has led the brands to come knocking. Sephora released a line of blush in Thailand that promises the same pink and peachy tone of Mudang's cheeks, while the Thai embassy in Tokyo is using pictures of her to convince visitors to come visit the country. Neil, Mudang got a full Thai magazine profile. One TikTok of her has over 33 million views. She's literally the most famous hippo on

Earth. She is, and the people who are caretaking her or who are managing the zoo know exactly what they're doing since she was born. 128 of the zoo's last 150 social media posts have been about Mudang. What do you think the other animals are feeling? I think they're feeling a little annoyed actually because it has just led to this massive increase in visitors, but the

the TikTok account of the zoo already was very popular. So this is one of the more savvy kind of zoos out there in the social media landscape. Her chief caretaker said, the moment I saw Mu Dangborn, I set a goal to make her famous. So this was not some...

A child star. Right. It truly is. I highly encourage you to look up videos or pictures of Mudang. You love Mudang. She is just electric. She always looks like panicked in a weird way, but she's also moisturized and unbothered at the same time. So there are literally Mudang stan accounts as well. I talked about celebrity culture and the fact that these fan accounts pop up and just –

keep people updated on their every move. The same thing is happening for this baby pygmy hippo. So it is just truly a bizarre timeline we live in. But yes, I am a Moodang fan and you should be as well.

Let's wrap it up there. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday. For any feedback, questions, or comments on the show, send an email to morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com. Also, we encourage you to share Morning Brew Daily with your friends, family, and coworkers so you don't have to explain to them why all the Murdochs are in Reno. If you need some inspo, Toby has a recommendation. I want you to share today's episode with someone who lives near Huntington Beach who can go get us some boots on the ground or

I'm in.

Devin Every is our chief content officer, and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show, Daniel. Let's run it back tomorrow.