fortune--2020-06-24--Russia’s online censorship machine is no longer running smoothly

Not long ago, it looked as if the Kremlin’s control of the Russian Internet would just get tighter and tighter. But as events of recent days have shown, the country’s online censorship regime may be faltering.
On Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) dealt a blow to Russia’s extensive website-blocking regime by ruling, in four separate cases, that the blocking measures were excessive and violated the right to free expression. And just days before, Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor ended its largely ineffective two-year blockade of the messaging and microblogging app Telegram.
The ECHR polices the European Convention on Human Rights, which has been agreed among the 47 member states of the Council of Europe—including not only those in the EU, but also Russia, Turkey, and several non-EU Eastern European countries. When it rules that a country’s legal system has violated someone’s rights, the court tells the country to fix the problem that caused that violation. However, enforcement is often lacking.
Russia’s online censorship targets a range of content, including some that is banned across much of the world—notably child sexual abuse material—but also material that describes drug use or suicide methods in detail. It also cracks down on material it considers extremist and routinely goes after websites that it rules run afoul of the country’s so-called “gay propaganda law.” Roskomnadzor enforces the censorship by giving Internet service providers an ever-expanding list of websites they must block their customers from accessing.
One of the cases leading to this week’s ruling was brought about by former chess champion and current Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov, whose website was blocked by Roskomnadzor in 2014 on the grounds of promoting mass disorder or “extremist speech.”
Going overboard
The ECHR said Roskomnadzor had gone overboard by forcing Internet service providers to block Kasparov’s entire site, rather than specifying pages that broke the law, so the site’s administrators could remove them or challenge the decision. It likened the blocking of the whole site to banning a newspaper or TV station, without “any legitimate aim.”
Another case involved a site that had been blocked because it showed people how to bypass Russian Internet censorship mechanisms.
“The Court found that suppressing information about technology for accessing information online because it could incidentally aid access to extremist material was no different from trying to restrict access to printers and photocopiers because they could be used for reproducing such material,” it said. “In the absence of a narrowly defined and specific legal basis, the Court found that such a sweeping measure was arbitrary.”
Kasparov tweeted Tuesday that he was glad the court had decided in his favor, but he’d rather see the Council of Europe expel Russia.
Glad that the European Court of Human Rights decided in my favor that my news site https://t.co/GOtOaPoWf7 was illegally banned in Russia. But I'd rather the Council of Europe ban Putin's Russia instead of legitimizing his criminal regime. https://t.co/fg6OF6G00r — Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) June 23, 2020
Fortune has asked Roskomnadzor multiple times whether its site-blocking tactics will change in response to the ruling, but has received no response at the time of writing.
According to the U.K.-based free-expression NGO Article 19, the ruling’s timing is useful, given that the EU is currently considering stiffer regulation of online speech.
“The Court’s judgment is a decisive victory for freedom of expression online in Russia, and will set an important precedent on the safeguards against website blocking powers,” said senior director of law and policy Barbora Bukovska in a statement. “As EU discussions continue on the Digital Services Act and other issues such as filtering, the Court’s judgment provides an important reminder of the minimum safeguards that the law should provide when using blocking technology.”
Collateral damage
Another one of the cases decided Tuesday by the ECHR involved a site—Electronic Publishing News—that was blocked in 2012 not because it itself broke any law, but because it shared an Internet (IP) address with another website that did break Russia’s law against promoting drug use. (The same law once led to Wikipedia’s brief blockage in Russia.)
This overblocking is a recurring theme in Russian online censorship—and one that notably popped up at the start of the Telegram block in 2018.
Roskomnadzor tried to block Telegram because it refused to give the security services encryption keys that would allow the monitoring of private conversations. In order to dodge the blockade, Telegram started hosting its service on servers with IP addresses different from those listed on the blocking order.
As Telegram hopped from server to server, the censorship agency responded by trying to block every IP address it could associate with the app. It ended up blocking millions of IP addresses, accidentally knocking out Amazon’s and Google’s cloud services in Russia, along with the websites of universities and national media.
Despite the best efforts of erstwhile Roskomnadzor head Aleksandr Zharov, Telegram didn’t just survive; its Russian user numbers doubled to 30 million over the course of the attempted blockade, and senior Kremlin officials continue to use it. Late last week, Roskomnadzor—under new leadership since March—announced that it was lifting the Telegram ban.
The regulator suggested the change was the result of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov’s “readiness…to counter terrorism and extremism.” Indeed, Durov said back in late 2018 that he was willing to provide terrorist suspects’ IP addresses and phone numbers if presented with a court order. However, Telegram reportedly still has not handed over those encryption keys or secret messages.
“To characterize the ban as a case study of failed Internet censorship is to put it lightly,” wrote Foreign Policy Centre research fellow Lincoln Pigman in a Monday postmortem. “Its resort to shock and awe saw millions of IP addresses blacklisted in the weeks following Telegram’s proscription. Yet Roskomnadzor succeeded only in causing sporadic outages while inflicting significant collateral damage.”


fortune--2020-06-24--Sallie Krawcheck’s women-focused investment startup expands to debit cards and a membership model

The coronavirus pandemic is changing political polling as we know it

The last financial crisis helped transform former top Wall Street executive Sallie Krawcheck into an entrepreneur. The current one seems to be turning her back into a banker—though of a less traditional type.
Ellevest, the women-focused wealth-management startup that Krawcheck cofounded in 2014, is expanding its financial products and launching a new membership model that will provide customers with debit cards and bank accounts for a monthly fee starting at $1. The shift is part of a new effort by the New York company, which has historically competed against the robo-advisers and wealth managers used by higher-income investors, to attract a larger, and broader, customer base.
“We want to be absolutely as approachable as possible,” Krawcheck, Ellevest’s CEO, tells Fortune in an interview. “Our reason for being is to get more money in the hands of women—and part of that mission is, Who needs us? It’s people who in many cases aren’t ready to invest.”
The membership model, which Ellevest is announcing Wednesday morning, will mostly replace its current core business of charging a percentage of the investments it digitally manages for customers. Instead, for a flat fee of $1 per month, Ellevest will continue to manage customers’ money and also provide them with a debit card and a savings account, both run by a partner bank. For $5 per month, customers will also get access to specialized retirement-planning services, and for $9 per month, Ellevest will provide additional investing accounts with personalized advice on other financial goals, such as purchasing a home.
All three membership tiers will also give Ellevest customers access to webinars and other general financial advice, and discounts for one-on-one coaching sessions on specific financial problems. For example, a half-hour phone call to put together a personal budget would cost $125 before an Ellevest member’s 20% to 50% discount; another session to figure out a debt-paydown plan would be $150 before the discount.
Ellevest first started working on the launch of its debit card last year but accelerated its plans after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Krawcheck says that while her company has seen an uptick in investments during the recent stock market volatility, the health crisis and the ensuing recession added new urgency to her strategy shift.
“Women have gone backwards during the pandemic,” says Krawcheck, who regularly draws attention to the gender money gap and especially the wealth gap. Even though they live longer on average, women invest only 32¢ for every dollar invested by men.
The statistics are much worse for women of color, especially the black and Latinx women whose jobs and health have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic and the current economic downturn. “The big drivers of wealth creation in this country have been investing and real estate,” Krawcheck says. “And those have been out of reach for so many people.”
Ellevest’s new fee-based membership model includes debit cards that don’t charge any additional fees, including for ATM withdrawals. Courtesy Ellevest
A former chief financial officer at Citigroup and head of Merrill Lynch under Bank of America, Krawcheck was once widely considered a potential candidate to be the first female CEO of a big Wall Street bank. But the financial crisis, and the widespread restructuring it caused at top banks, upended her career as well as the industry’s tentative diversity efforts, leaving Wall Street “whiter, maler, and middle-age-er,” as Krawcheck puts it.
She left Bank of America in 2011 and in 2014 cofounded Ellevest, which launched in 2016. The company has since raised $79 million in venture backing from investors including Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures, former Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, former Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, Mastercard, and PayPal.
While Ellevest does not disclose revenue, it claims more than 90,000 customers and more than $634 million in assets under management. The average customer is 34 years old and 94% identify as women, although Ellevest says it also welcomes “nonbinary people and male allies in all stages of their financial lives.”
Krawcheck also hopes that this pivot towards a membership-fee model will help her company reach profitability faster, although she declines to project when that will be. Other robo-adviser startups, including Betterment and Wealthfront, have also broadened their services to provide some traditional banking services and checking accounts; and with the membership model, Ellevest now seems to be thrusting itself into competition with other fintech investing startups like Stash and Acorns, which also offer some banking services in partnership with more traditional financial institutions, starting at $1 per month.
Despite her former career on Wall Street, Krawcheck says she has little interest in turning her company into a more traditional, full-service bank.
“I know a lot about banks. And being in the back office, with all of the regulatory and operational requirements of it, is not something we aspire to do,” she says. “That’s not a driver of us helping get a member more money, or helping get her along the path to financial stability.”


fortune--2020-06-24--Are women-led companies better positioned to survive the pandemic?

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Rep. Karen Bass is in the mix for VP, Rhode Island drops the rest of its name, and we check in on how female founders are faring amid the pandemic. Have a wonderful Wednesday.
– Surveying startups. Given the multitude of ways the pandemic has hit women especially hard, I was particularly interested to check out this new survey from Female Founders Fund, which digs into the COVID-19 impact on women-led companies.
As you might expect, most female founders say their startups are feeling the effects—falling revenue, struggles to land new funding, and an acute pressure to cut costs.
But when Emma, who wrote about the survey here, attempted to get a sense of how the impact on these women-led ventures compares to venture-backed startups as a whole, a slightly different picture emerged. According to F3’s survey of female founders, 20% of respondents say they’ve actually increased revenue projections for the next year. Meanwhile, an April survey by Startup Genome of about 1,000 global startups found that 12% of respondents were experiencing that same kind of growth. Forty-six percent of the female founder survey respondents cut headcount costs through layoffs, furloughs, or salary reductions. Compare that to the Startup Genome survey respondents, 74% of whom said they had terminated workers.
To be sure, these surveys are nowhere near apples-to-apples comparisons. But it’s interesting—and refreshing!—to consider the ways in which women-led startups might actually be better positioned to withstand the pandemic than many of their male-led counterparts.
For more on the current state of female founders’ businesses, you can read Emma’s full story here.
Kristen Bellstrom
kristen.bellstrom@fortune.com
@kayelbee
Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- The challengers. In Tuesday night's elections, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez handily defeated her more moderate primary challenger, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. Longtime Rep. Carolyn Maloney is still locked in a rematch with her 2018 opponent. There's not yet a winner in the Kentucky race between Amy McGrath and Charles Booker, both aiming to challenge Sen. Mitch McConnell in November. New York Times
- Veepstakes. Another name in contention for VP? Rep. Karen Bass, the California congresswoman who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus. Joe Biden's vetting team has contacted Bass, who is a leading voice on police reform in Congress. CBS News
- Just Rhode Island. Rhode Island's official name was, until this week, "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations," a reminder of the state's history in the slave trade. Gov. Gina Raimondo signed an executive order removing the phrase from the name. NPR
- Inclusive ERGs? In employee resource groups meant to provide support to all kinds of LGBTQ people, white gay men are overrepresented, according to a study by the Boston Consulting Group. The finding carries extra significance now that, following the Supreme Court's recent decision, LGBTQ workers are protected by U.S. nondiscrimination law. Fortune
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Stacy Brown-Philpot is stepping down as CEO of TaskRabbit; she's one of few black women to lead a Silicon Valley company. Sophia Amoruso resigned as CEO of Girlboss, the media company that sold to Attention Capital in December. Before going public, Palantir added the first woman to its board of directors; the new board member is Alexandra Wolfe Schiff, who resigned her role as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal to accept the seat. Goldman Sachs hired AT&T's Fiona Carter as its first CMO. The Lasker Foundation added to its board of directors foreign secretary of the National Academy of Medicine Margaret Hamburg; MIT president emerita Susan Hockfield; and Brigham Health president Betsy Nabel. Earnin hired MedMen's Morgan Sokol as VP, policy. Brightside hired meQuilibrium's Lucy English as head of measurement. Anchorage hired Salesforce's Julie Veltman as head of finance.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- The assist. Washington Mystics player Natasha Cloud and Atlanta Dream player Renee Montgomery, like WNBA star Maya Moore before them, are sitting out this season of their sport to advocate for a cause. Both want to work on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement.
- Economic consequences. The disproportionate way recent months' job losses have affected women may hold back the U.S. economic recovery. As women navigate health risks and hiring freezes, industries dominated by female workers will suffer—which in turn will hurt the economy more broadly. Wall Street Journal
- Court reporter. A Missouri appeals court upheld the verdict that Johnson & Johnson's talc-based baby powder caused ovarian cancer in 22 women, but cut the damages from $4.7 billion to $2.1 billion. J&J said in May it would stop selling the product, which was especially advertised to black women, amid decreased demand. Wall Street Journal
ON MY RADAR
When will black women see justice? The Cut
I'll Be Gone in the Dark is a touching eulogy for Michelle McNamara, the writer obsessed with finding the Golden State Killer MEL Magazine
Bill Cosby granted an appeal in Pennsylvania sexual assault case Fortune
PARTING WORDS
"I’ve always been raised, by my mother, my nana ... to understand that, whatever I was going to do, I had to do it 110%."
-Supermodel Naomi Campbell


fortune--2020-06-24--China wants U.S. soybeans checked for the coronavirus, further complicating the trade deal with Trum

China wants U.S. soybeans checked for the coronavirus, further complicating the trade deal with Trump

More food shipped to China will now have to be cleared for COVID-19.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that soybean importers asked exporters in the U.S., Brazil, and Canada to sign a letter guaranteeing that their cargo is not contaminated with the coronavirus. U.S. soybean exporters told Reuters that they had yet to reply to China’s request, though Sergio Mendes, director general of the Brazilian export grain association Anec, said that his group was preparing a response. Still, Mendes said that COVID-19 contamination of soybeans would be nearly impossible given the automation of the soybean ship-loading process and the beans’ weeks-long journey to China.
“We would be guaranteeing the unimaginable,” Mendes told Reuters.
The report follows weeks of rising fears in China that imported food—meat, mainly—may lead to further outbreaks of COVID-19. And the new demands on soybeans specifically risk adding another layer of complexity to China’s promise to purchase more U.S. soybeans as part of the trade deal.
How we got here
Beijing is China’s most recent coronavirus hotspot, with more than 200 people testing positive for COVID-19 since the city reported a locally transmitted case on June 11. The city had claimed to be free of COVID-19 for the preceding two months.
The outbreak now appears to be largely contained. Chinese public health officials traced its origin to the Xinfadi food market in southern Beijing, where investigators found COVID-19 particulates on cutting boards for imported salmon and other meats.
At the time of the discovery, health officials said it was unlikely that the virus spread from imported frozen foods, but still possible given that COVID-19 particles can stay alive longer at colder temperatures.
Last week, Hong Kong University epidemiologist Ben Cowling told Fortune that it is more likely the virus spread via humans who shopped at the market or handled the food, rather than by goods shipped across the ocean in refrigerated containers.
In any event, China has since halted imports of meat from a Tyson Foods plant in Arkansas that suffered a coronavirus outbreak among its workers. China has also asked other frozen meat exporters to sign declarations that their products are coronavirus-free and launched a nationwide campaign to inspect food imports for the coronavirus.
Inspecting frozen meat for the coronavirus is one thing; doing the same for soybeans is another, says Darin Friedrichs, senior commodity analyst at FCStone in Shanghai.
It’s implausible that soybean shipments could carry the coronavirus across an ocean, he says.
“There’s no human interaction with soybeans,” Friedrichs says. “They get taken by truck to a grain elevator, then machinery moves it to a train or a barge, then machinery moves it onto a boat.”
The soybeans then sit on a cargo ship at air temperatures for three to six weeks on their way to China, according to Friedrichs.
According to a study published in The Lancet medical journal on April 2, the longest COVID-19 could survive on a surface at room temperature is seven days.
Anxiety over soybeans is likely “indicative of how much emphasis is being put on preventing reemergence of COVID-19 in China,” says Friedrichs. “[For] local officials, it’s better to err on the side of being overly cautious rather than not cautious enough.”
A trade challenge
China’s increased scrutiny of soybean imports may present an additional challenge to resolving the U.S.-China trade war.
On Jan. 15, China and the U.S. agreed to a phase 1 trade deal, in which China agreed to purchase $36.5 billion worth of agricultural products from the U.S. in 2020.
China’s import of U.S. soybeans was crucial to meeting the goal. The crop accounted for 52% of all U.S. agricultural exports to China before the trade war started in 2017; trade in it plummeted as Washington and Beijing exchanged tariffs. The January deal was expected to jump-start soybean exports to China to levels exceeding pre–trade war highs.
Then the coronavirus hit, slowing China’s soybean purchases, as economic lockdowns disrupted global supply chains. Through April 2020, China had purchased only $6.3 billion worth of agricultural products from the U.S., putting it well behind the pace needed to meet its target for this year, according to an analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Despite the slow clip of purchases and escalating tensions between the two countries, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on June 18 that China was committed to honoring its phase 1 obligations. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the deal remains “fully intact.” Yet his administration has publicly expressed frustration at the unhurried pace of China’s purchases—and that was before China requested the additional step of soybean coronavirus checks.


fortune--2020-06-25--Coronavirus cases surge among adults under 50

The big question now is how to reopen

Coronavirus cases are climbing rapidly among young adults in a number of states where bars, stores and restaurants have reopened — a disturbing generational shift that not only puts them in greater peril than many realize but poses an even bigger danger to older people who cross their paths.
In Oxford, Mississippi, summer fraternity parties sparked outbreaks. In Oklahoma City, church activities, fitness classes, weddings and funerals seeded infections among people in their 20s, 30s and 40s. In Iowa college towns, surges followed the reopening of bars. A cluster of hangouts near Louisiana State University led to at least 100 customers and employees testing positive. In East Lansing, Michigan, an outbreak tied to a brew pub spread to 34 people ages 18 to 23.
There and in states like Florida, Texas and Arizona, young people have started going out again, many without masks, in what health experts see as irresponsible behavior.
“The virus hasn’t changed. We have changed our behaviors,” said Ali Mokdad, professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Younger people are more likely to be out and taking a risk.”
In Florida, young people ages 15 to 34 now make up 31% of all cases, up from 25% in early June. Last week, more than 8,000 new cases were reported in that age group, compared with about 2,000 among people 55 to 64 years old. And experts say the phenomenon cannot be explained away as simply the result of more testing.
Elected officials such as Florida’s governor have argued against reimposing restrictions, saying many of the newly infected are young and otherwise healthy. But younger people, too, face the possibility of severe infection and death. In the past week, two 17-year-olds in Florida died of the virus.
And authorities worry that older, more vulnerable people are next.
“People between the ages 18 and 50 don’t live in some sort of a bubble,” Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt said. “They are the children and grandchildren of vulnerable people. They may be standing next to you at a wedding. They might be serving you a meal in a restaurant.”
The virus has taken a frightful toll on older people in the U.S., which leads the world in total deaths, at over 120,000, and confirmed infections, at more than 2.3 million. Eight out of 10 deaths in the U.S. have been in people 65 and older. In contrast, confirmed coronavirus deaths among 18- to 34-year-olds number in the hundreds, though disease trackers are clamoring for more accurate data.
For months, older adults were more likely to be diagnosed with the virus, too. But figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that almost as soon as states began reopening, the picture flipped, with people 18 to 49 years old quickly becoming the age bracket most likely to be diagnosed with new cases.
And although every age group saw an increase in cases during the first week in June, the numbers shot up fastest among 18- to 49-year-olds. For the week ending June 7, there were 43 new cases per 100,000 people in that age bracket, compared with 28 cases per 100,000 people over 65.
With the shift toward younger people, some hospitals are seeing a smaller share of their COVID-19 patients needing intensive care treatment such as breathing machines.
“They are sick enough to be hospitalized, but they’re not quite as sick,” said Dr. Rob Phillips, chief physician executive of Houston Methodist Hospital. He said he still finds the trend disturbing because young people “definitely interact with their parents and grandparents,” who could be next.
In one Florida hospital system, nearly half the COVID-19 patients were on ventilators during April compared with less than 3 percent now, said Dr. Sunil Desai, president of the Orlando Health hospital system.
Some of the young people who have fallen ill describe stretches of extreme pain and fatigue.
“My chest and my body hurt. Almost like I’d gotten in a car accident,” said Emily Ellington, 25, of suburban Austin, Texas, who tested positive about six weeks after the state began reopening.
In Florida, where many restaurants and bars reopened in early May, 32-year-old Kristen Kowall of Clearwater dined out with her fiancé in early June. Like others in the restaurant, she didn’t wear a mask. She tested positive over the weekend.
“I just feel really groggy and tired. It hurts to walk. Especially my ankles and knees, it feels like my bones are going to fall apart,” she said. “I definitely would advise people from going out. It’s not worth it.”
The increase among young adults may not all be due to reopenings and could also reflect wider testing that has reached younger, less sick people. Yet since May, younger adults have had a higher share of tests come back positive than their older counterparts.
In late March and April, that wasn’t the case — the highest positive rates were in people over 65. For the past month, roughly 7 percent of tests done on 18- to 49-year-olds nationwide have come back positive. That is about 2 percentage points above older groups of adults.
Amid the surge, some Florida cities and counties are requiring people to wear masks before entering businesses. An Orlando bar popular with University of Central Florida students had its liquor license suspended after more than 40 people who went there upon its reopening tested positive.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis warned other bars they could lose their licenses if they don’t follow social distancing guidelines.
“If you go in, and it’s Dance Party USA, dancing up to the rafters … there’s no tolerance for that,” he said.


fortune--2020-06-25--Disneyland and Disney California Adventure reopenings postponed

Biden now leads in 6 states key to Trump ’ s 2016 victory

Disney is postponing the mid-July reopening of its Southern California theme parks until it receives guidelines from the state, the company announced Wednesday.
Disney had hoped to reopen Disneyland and Disney California Adventure in Anaheim on July 17 after a four-month closure due to the coronavirus. But the state has indicated it won’t issue guidelines until after July 4, the company said.
“Given the time required for us to bring thousands of cast members back to work and restart our business, we have no choice but to delay the reopening of our theme parks and resort hotels until we receive approval from government officials,” Disney said in a statement.
The company didn’t provide a new reopening date. The parks closed on March 14 and the reopening requires government approval.
Gov. Gavin Newsom “appreciates Disney’s responsiveness to his concerns about reopening amid the recent increases in COVID-19 infections across many Southern California counties,” Newsom spokesman Nathan Click said. “The governor, the state and our public health experts continue to be in contact with the company and their workers — as well as other theme parks in the state — as we track and combat the spread of the virus.”
Disney also said it is still negotiating agreements with employee unions, some of which have raised safety concerns about the reopenings. Disney said it has signed agreements from 20 union affiliates representing more than 11,000 employees, detailing enhanced safety protocols.
Disney also will delay the planned July 23 reopening of its Grand Californian and Paradise Pier hotels.
The Downtown Disney District restaurant and shopping area will reopen on July 9 as previously planned “with health and safety protocols in place for our cast members and guests,” Disney said.
Disneyland fans normally can bank on the park being open regardless of what’s going on in the world around it. The park closed only a handful of times in 65 years. The last time was after the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
The company indicated it still planned to proceed with reopening Disney World in Florida on July 11. Disney resorts in Shanghai and Hong Kong already reopened.
California is seeing a COVID-19 spike, recording a 69% increase in new cases this week.
The virus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people but for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause pneumonia and death.


fortune--2020-06-25--Biden now leads in 6 states key to Trump’s 2016 victory

The big question now is how to reopen

Joe Biden leads Donald Trump in every one of six key battleground states, all but erasing the advantage with White voters that Trump used to put together a razor-thin victory four years ago.
The New York Times/Siena College poll of swing states, together with national polls showing Biden with a double-digit lead, helps to draw an Electoral College map that will be increasingly difficult for Trump to win.
Biden leads Trump by 10 percentage points in Pennsylvania and 11 in Michigan and Wisconsin, potentially reclaiming the three “blue wall” states that Trump broke through to beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
But the presumptive Democratic nominee also holds narrower leads in other states thought to be more reliably Republican, including Florida by 6 points, Arizona by 7 points and North Carolina by 9 points.
If the rest of the map remains unchanged, the poll results suggest a 335-203 Biden win in the Electoral College.
It’s a map that both candidates know well. The president traveled to Arizona on Tuesday to inspect construction of the Mexican border wall and flies to Wisconsin Thursday to visit a shipyard and broadcast a Fox News town hall.
Biden, who has largely remained within driving distance of his Delaware home since the coronavirus pandemic hit, will visit Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on Thursday for a health care event.
A repeat of Trump’s 2016 performance depends on his ability to keep at least one of the three “blue wall” states, where discontent over trade and the loss of manufacturing jobs helped propel him to the White House.
And while battleground state voters still give Trump high marks for his handling of the economy — a 56% approval rating — his response to the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests has overshadowed his economic policies.
Only 31% of battleground voters approve of Trump’s response to the Floyd protests, and 63% say they would rather that the president address the causes of discriminatory policing than cracking down on protesters.
The roots of Trump’s troubles in Michigan may be deeper. There, 37% of voters say Trump treated the state more unfairly than most in responding to the coronavirus after the president feuded with Governor Gretchen Whitmer over her criticism of the federal response.
Biden’s improved polling in battleground states comes from a cross-section of demographic groups, but the Times poll shows the most significant movement comes among White voters — especially college-educated ones — and young people. He’s also flipped voters age 65 and older to his column, which helps to explain his standing in Florida and Arizona.
Biden isn’t doing much better than Clinton with Black and Hispanic voters, despite widespread discontent with Trump’s handling of the Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police last month.
The Times poll shows neither candidate getting more than 50% support in any battleground state, suggesting that there’s still room for undecided voters to have an impact.
And state-level polling — despite its key to forecasting the Electoral College result — is generally less reliable than national polling. In 2016, national polls were largely accurate in predicting a popular vote win for Clinton but failed to anticipate Trump’s narrow victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The margin of error for each state poll in the Times survey is plus-or-minus 4.1 to 4.6 percentage points.


fortune--2020-06-25--As hospitalizations hit new records and states impose quarantines, businesses reconsider reopening

The big question now is how to reopen

The Covid-19 pandemic is tearing through the U.S. heartland, setting records for hospitalizations and forcing businesses to rethink their plans to reopen as new modeling predicts the virus will kill 180,000 Americans by October.
With the U.S. seeing one of its highest-ever increases in cases Wednesday, some states took drastic measures, imposing face mask orders and internal quarantines. The country recorded more than 34,500 new infections for a second day, rattling markets as numbers neared the peak of 36,188 set April 24, when the virus was coursing through New York.
The resurgence, coming just as the regions first hit by the pandemic start to emerge, reflects the pathogen’s inexorable spread in states that were slow to enforce lockdowns or quick to lift them. It also made clear to places where the disease was late to arrive that there are no magical escapes.
Florida and Texas each hit records for cases Wednesday, with health officials in Houston saying their infrastructure was “overwhelmed.” Arizona, meanwhile, reached a peak in hospitalizations. In California, which also saw an all-time high for new infections, Walt Disney Co. delayed the reopening of its theme parks indefinitely, while Nevada’s governor ordered everyone to wear masks in public as some of Las Vegas’ biggest casinos made them a condition of entry.
New York, New Jersey and Connecticut set quarantines for incoming travelers from the hot zones, and North Carolina put its reopening on ice for three weeks.
Financial markets took note. The S&P 500 plunged 2.6%, led lower by energy and airline stocks, while Treasuries climbed.
Thomas Giordano, chief of infectious diseases at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, compared the outbreak to a wildfire that started in the northern corners of the U.S. and slowly spread south.
“As people started emerging and businesses started opening, it was like oxygen for those embers and it’s stoked the fire,” he said. “It’s been burning in Texas and other places in the South without any changes in policy. I do worry that this is going to run wild.”
The fresh estimate of deaths comes from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and is actually about 10% lower than a previous model. But after months of lockdown without a unified national strategy, more than 121,000 Americans have already died. The Trump administration has largely left policy-making to the states, which have followed strategies ranging from tight lockdowns in the Northeast to relative laissez-faire in the South and West.
Virus ‘Amnesia’
In California, which was early to enact statewide shelter-in-place rules in March, Governor Gavin Newsom urged residents to recommit to slowing the pandemic. Newsom, who last week issued an order requiring face masks in public, said too many people were letting down their guard against the virus, which has killed more than 5,600 people in the state. California has seen record numbers of confirmed infections and hospitalizations this week, as more businesses open and social justice demonstrations continue.
“We cannot continue to do what we have done over the last number of weeks,” Newsom said at a media conference Wednesday, after the state reported more than 7,100 new cases. “Many of us, understandably, developed a little cabin fever. Some, I would argue, have developed a little amnesia.”
Disney had originally planned to reopen its parks in Anaheim in July, but had to walk those plans because it didn’t think it could get state approvals, or agreements with worker unions in time.
In Florida, leaders rushed to pass mask mandates and crack down on the bars and nightclubs where the pandemic is spreading, including a threat to pull liquor licenses in Orlando.
Texas posted its worst day so far for new cases, with a jump of 5,551 to 125,921, according to the state health department. The 4.6% one-day rise exceeded the 3.7% seven-day average. Hospitalizations climbed by 7.3% to 4,389, the data showed.
“Our infrastructure is overwhelmed,” David Persse, Houston’s director of emergency medical services, said during a media briefing Wednesday.
Demand for intensive-care beds there jumped 10% in one day. At the Texas Medical Center, a cluster of hospital systems that together operate the world’s biggest medical complex, the number of intensive-care cases surged to 1,298 in a system with a normal operating capacity of 1,330.
The complex could be out of intensive-care capacity as soon as Thursday, and exhaust its backup capacity in another 10 days, it said.
The fresh surge raised the specter of new shortages of ventilators and gear. In Colorado, “hospitals have increased their capacity by upwards of 20%,” Governor Jared Polis said at a news conference. “If we hit much higher levels, we don’t currently have the supplies in place to handle that. We would enter another kind of crisis.”
The spike in cases comes as states across the U.S. have either already lifted or are easing lockdown orders, many at the behest of President Donald Trump. Some should reconsider, said Ali Mokdad, professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington.
Mokdad said states with surging cases should consider requiring masks and closing certain businesses. He said the pre-emptive closures could be for a set period to give businesses more certainty than the previous shutdown.
“I can’t see a possibility of any of the states with the increases you are seeing right now not dialing back,” Mokdad said. “From a public-health standpoint, shutting down faster, you can open faster and earlier and your economy will open faster and much better.”
Reopening Halted
Indeed, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper on Wednesday halted that state’s reopening after new daily cases hit 1,721, up from 848 the day before. He ordered that masks be worn in public and said the state would delay further decisions for three weeks. “Our increasing numbers show we need to hit the pause button while we work to stabilize our trends,” Cooper said.
The state was among those whose residents were targeted by quarantine orders in the Northeast, which was struck early and has largely quelled its outbreak. The governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut said travelers from nine Southern and Western states where more than 10% of tests for Covid-19 were coming back positive would have to seal themselves off for 14 days. New York is threatening thousands of dollars in fines for noncompliance.
In a mark of how the Covid landscape has changed, the list includes Florida and Texas, which both imposed similar restrictions on travelers from the Northeast in March. “We did a full 180 degrees,” Cuomo said.
The other states on the list are North and South Carolina, Arizona, Arkansas, Utah and Alabama, where Governor Kay Ivey once scoffed at Covid-19 lockdowns: “Y’all, we’re not Louisiana, we’re not New York state,” she said on March 27.
Nevada’s face-mask order came two days after the state saw a single-day record for cases—most in the county where Las Vegas is located. Caesars Entertainment Corp. had already said earlier on Wednesday that masks would be required at all of its properties nationwide, while MGM Resorts International said in a statement that it will require masks for all guests and visitors inside public spaces at its U.S. resorts starting Friday.
“Guests who do not wish to comply will be asked to leave the property,” the company said. “Masks have proven to be one of the best ways to curtail the spread.”
America is on track to lose 180,000 lives to coronavirus by the start of October, roughly equivalent to the population of Providence, Rhode Island, according to the University of Washington experts, though they said an embrace of masks would mitigate the damage.
The forecast is predicated on the expectation that the outbreak will pick up in late August and intensify further in September. If more than 95% of Americans start regularly wearing masks in public, that number would drop to 146,047 deaths.
In Houston, Mayor Sylvester Turner promised a redoubled effort. He said police and fire departments will step up monitoring of taverns and clubs to ensure compliance with occupancy limits and mask requirements.
“We want to create a board of shame for those who are violating the rules,” he said.
–With assistance from Joe Carroll, Christopher Palmeri, Renata S. Geraldo, Vincent Del Giudice, David R. Baker and Elise Young.


fortune--2020-06-25--The big question now is how to reopen

The big question now is how to reopen

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Good morning. David Meyer here in Berlin, filling in for Alan.
It would be something of an understatement to say the question of reopening businesses right now is a fraught one. Look at Apple, which—in the context of rising coronavirus infection figures—is already shutting some of its U.S. stores again, or Disney, which is delaying the reopening of its Anaheim, Calif. theme park in response to workers’ fears of unsafe conditions.
At Fortune we have been examining the issue for a while now as part of our How to Reopen campaign, and this morning we are publishing an online-only mini-magazine devoted to the subject. Here’s the cover:
The package is fronted by this great Geoff Colvin piece about how it’s the boldest companies that will win out at this critical moment. As he writes:
“Economic calamities—even tragic, once-a-century global pandemics—require business leaders to find opportunity in the chaos. It’s there to be found. Leaders who can seize it will mitigate the pain for employees, consumers, vendors, communities, and investors. The big lesson from past downturns is that the competitive order within industries will change far more now than it ever will in prosperous times.”
Meanwhile, Katherine Dunn delves into British cinema operators’ quest to reopen their doors and finds some theater owners are worried about a shortage of quality new films to bring in customers next month. McKenna Moore examines the push for the U.S. to “go cashless” in the context of virus-transmission fears—spoiler: that’s not going to happen overnight—and Lydia Belanger explains why pop-up retail is having a moment right now. And Aric Jenkins spoke with PGA golfer Troy Merritt about the reality of bringing live golf back to our screens.
It’s a powerful and timely package that also includes reopening-related articles from the last couple months. You can find it here.
News below.
David Meyer
@superglaze
david.meyer@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
Interstate restrictions
One reason markets are falling (the Dow was down 2.7% yesterday and some Asian markets also fell slightly today) is the coronavirus situation in the U.S., where numbers are shooting up in many states. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have now said anyone coming in from hard-hit Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Utah will need to go into quarantine for two weeks. New York Times
Tariff threat
The other reason for the drop, perhaps, is the possibility of the U.S. imposing new tariffs on EU products, as part of the dispute over subsidies to planemakers. The WTO had already agreed with the U.S. that the EU was illegally subsidizing Airbus, so now the U.S. gets to impose tariffs, and yesterday the U.S. Trade Representative revealed the potential list, covering products such as olives, chocolate and beer. The EU says this round of tariffs could go beyond what the WTO allows. CNN
Roundup settlement
Bayer will pay up to $10.9 billion to settle current and future lawsuits over allegations that its Roundup herbicide causes cancer. The German giant will not admit that this link is in fact valid, but it hopes the settlement will make the whole mess go away. That's no certainty; up to $9.6 billion of that cash is to settle nearly 100,000 existing claims, leaving not much (relatively speaking) to settle future claims, and there could still be a lot of those, as the weedkiller remains on sale. Fortune
Wirecard insolvency
Surprise! Wirecard, the German payments firm caught up in a massive alleged accounting fraud scandal, has filed for insolvency. The move comes after Bank of America said its shares may be worth just one euro apiece. Reminder: a week ago, before audit results revealed the likely non-existence of $2.1 billion on Wirecard's books, and before the cops came for suddenly-former CEO Markus Braun, those shares were trading at over €100 each. Financial Times
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Corporate leadership
Former Honeywell CEO Dave Cote has written what Fortune's Shawn Tully calls "the War and Peace of books on corporate leadership." As Tully writes of Winning Now, Winning Later: "Current and aspiring CEOs should pay close attention, because for Cote, many of America’s big companies are wrestling with how to invest for the future while still generating the quarterly results investors expect." Fortune
Son and Ma
SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is to step down from Alibaba's board, effective today—the same day that Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma leaves SoftBank's board. It's the end of a 15-year era of close cooperation, though Son said the parting of ways is "perfectly amicable." Rikkyo University professor Michiaki Tanaka: "The joint board membership was a big positive for both companies because it gave them a way to benchmark their respective business models. Not having that board-level contact is a big loss." Bloomberg
Meng Wanzhou
After a legal opinion stated the Canadian government could free Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou—being held for extradition to the U.S.—if it wanted to, a top spokesman for China's foreign ministry suggested that doing so could pave the way for the release of two Canadians being held in China. China has previously denied that its detention of former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor, held on espionage charges, had anything to do with the Meng case. Globe and Mail
eBay harassment
Do set aside some time for this crazy story about how eBay employees allegedly harassed online critics that they suspected were being funded by rival Amazon. Six people have now been charged with cyberstalking—including sending the critics live cockroaches, a funeral wreath and a bloody-pig mask—and the U.S. attorney's office is investigating whether any other similar campaigns were carried out. WSJ
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.


fortune--2020-06-25--Pop-up retail was made for the pandemic

Pop-up retail was made for the pandemic

If a business opened its doors just before the coronavirus-related lockdowns swept across the globe, you might consider that bad timing. But for a pair of shop owners who opted to launch their store as a pop-up late last year, the pandemic has hardly been a setback.
Fredrik Lindfors had worked for years at a fish shop adjacent to London’s Kensington Place restaurant. When both closed, Lindfors and a business partner, Chris D’Sylva, decided to open their own seafood business in nearby Notting Hill. Rather than commit to a long-term rental agreement, they got a three-month rolling lease via Appear Here, a retail real estate intermediary that helps brands find locations for pop-ups, or temporary storefronts. They opened the Notting Hill Fish Shop last October.
D’Sylva says that opening as a pop-up removed the pressure to lock in a strategy right away. “I was able to treat the space as a lab,” he says. “You can’t do that with most other stores under classical, long-term leases. You’ve got to go and tell the landlord what it is: It’s rigid, you’re stuck.”
Fredrik Lindfors (left) and Chris D’Sylva opened Notting Hill Fish Shop in 2019. Courtesy of appear[here]
That freedom of experimentation continued after the two business owners locked in a long-term lease in February—right before the pandemic began to sweep across the U.K.
On March 18, Notting Hill Fish Shop shared a post to Instagram that read: “Hiring. Experienced fishmongers. Chefs & customer services people.” Five days later, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposed a lockdown in response to the pandemic. But that didn’t slow down the fish shop, which was allowed to stay open as a purveyor of essential items.
Lindfors and D’Sylva quickly adjusted to the new normal. With a slowdown in fishing as a result of the coronavirus, the fishmongers expanded their menu while promoting other local businesses, such as farm-sourced Flourish Produce. They hired chefs who’d been laid off from nearby restaurants to serve as “chaperones” for customers inside the Notting Hill Fish Shop. And they turned the process of queuing up outside their store, necessary for social distancing, into an event.
“Rather than put out markers like Scotch tape or cones, we put out these black folding chairs to allow people sit and socialize in the line,” says D’Sylva. “It became iconic, and it reinforced a need beyond the functional need of buying produce from us—the need for customers to talk and see other people.”
In May, Lindfors and D’Sylva took a three-month lease on another nearby location and launched a grab-and-go version of their fish shop—a pop-up offshoot that is likely to become permanent. “We have no intention of leaving,” says D’Sylva.
COVID-19 has forced retailers around the world to adjust their operations and rethink strategy. As Fortune has reported, national U.S. chains such as Macy’s and Gap saw their sales drop 50% in the first quarter of this year because of store closures. Meanwhile, online shopping is up 31% year over year, and in the first six weeks of lockdowns, e-commerce platform Shopify saw a 62% increase in first-time users. Overall, consumer retail spending in the U.S. is down 6.1% year over year, despite increasing month over month from April to May as the initial shock of the pandemic wore off and reopenings began.
“I was able to treat the space as a lab. You can’t do that with most other stores under classical, long-term leases. You’ve got to go and tell the landlord what it is: It’s rigid, you’re stuck,” D’Sylva says. Courtesy of appear[here]
Consumers, meanwhile, are adapting their shopping habits to a reality in which choices are more limited—to what’s in stock, what they can get delivered, and, in many cases, what happens to be open down the block. As a result, the ability for businesses to operate with a makeshift physical presence has perhaps never been a bigger opportunity. A temporary lease is less of a financial gamble than a long-term commitment, so a pop-up can be a lower-stakes springboard for refining everything from product offerings to store protocols.
“During this pandemic, retailers that have made up a lot of their sales by being online have seen those sales coming from an area around their physical footprints,” says Appear Here CEO Ross Bailey.
He cites two trends that have been brewing in recent years: One is a growing correlation between local brick-and-mortar shopping and a consumer’s investment in the person, or story, behind a product. The second is that pop-ups are becoming fixtures in sleepier neighborhoods, versus the shopping corridors in city centers they’re typically associated with. Amid the public health crisis, Bailey says he senses that “people now care about community and have a respect for the independent even more so than before.”
Add it all up, and the incentive for retailers to experiment with pop-ups has never been stronger.
Popping up everywhere
The definition of a pop-up is hard to pin down, because so many different types of brands have used them for a range of purposes. Halloween or holiday stores that only occupy a strip mall space a few months out of the year are technically pop-ups, as are brands that cycle through a kiosk or installation within a larger store or shopping center. A food hall is a pop-up marketplace, as is a fleet of food trucks. To broaden the definition, you might say a farmers’ market is, too.
Today, among the most prominent examples is the temporary storefront or stand that an emerging or trendy brand—often one that has made a name for itself online—operates to generate buzz. Examples of such brands that have popped up include skin care line Supergoop and lingerie startup ThirdLove (which closed its Manhattan pop-up during the city’s lockdown), along with countless others. Even more established brands with permanent brick-and-mortar stores sometimes do pop-ups in new cities for exposure, as New York City–based beauty brand Glossier did last year with a stint in Austin.
In areas that were under lockdown this spring, pop-ups that sold nonessentials couldn’t operate as physical stores or booths, so some retailers found alternatives. Pop-up space provider Storefront has been helping tenants experiment with creating virtual reality showrooms that present customers with a 360-degree view of a store from the comfort of their homes, then direct them to make purchases online.
The town of Fort Erie, Ontario, hosted an hour-long “Virtual Pop-up Market” via Instagram Live on June 18, in which local businesses showcased products and offered giveaways. Similarly, Ruddington Village Market of Nottinghamshire, England, has been live-streaming “virtual stalls.” New York’s Buy Local East Harlem is another group that has tried this. It might seem like a stretch to call these broadcasts “pop-ups,” but it’s the closest some businesses have been able to get to their customers lately.
Meanwhile, regions are in various phases of reopening. In the U.S., just under 8.6% of SBA Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan recipients were retail businesses. Some have already shuttered, while others are struggling and eager, albeit cautiously, to welcome customers back in person. Depending on government orders, retailers in some areas already have been allowed to do so.
Faire, an online wholesale marketplace, took a survey of the retailers on its platform on June 10, and 42% reported they have seen foot traffic return to moderate or original (pre-pandemic) levels, according to Faire CFO Lauren Cooks Levitan.
“We’ve seen our business recover very quickly as the retailers have adapted,” Cooks Levitan says of Faire, highlighting strategies such as offering curbside pickup (80% of retailers that use Faire have the option) or new products such as candles and masks to meet the needs of largely homebound, socially distant consumers. And while the retailers that were new to the Faire platform this spring were mainly online businesses, Cooks Levitan, a former retail research analyst, says she sees great potential for growth on the brick-and-mortar side as things reopen.
“It’s possible that you’re going to see a lot of entrepreneurs emerge out of this. We’ve seen that in the past: People lose their jobs, and they go and create a job for themselves by starting a business,” Cooks Levitan says. “And there’s probably going to be an availability of real estate, possibly in very high-quality locations, potentially at lower costs,” she says, freed up for nascent or surviving retailers.
Rescue retail
Pop-ups often serve as testing grounds for newcomers and legacy players alike looking not only to try out a particular space, but “to refine their retail concept,” writes Garrick Brown, VP of retail intelligence, Americas retail services, at Cushman & Wakefield, in his December 2019 report, Experiential Retail: Pop-Up-A-Palooza. He lists Samsung, Amazon, Everlane, and Warby Parker among the many brands that have gone this route.
One fresh idea for this not-so-new use case, as the threat of the coronavirus looms, is using temporary spaces to test new health safety protocols, such as social distancing and contactless payment, says Melissa Gonzalez, founder and CEO of The Lion’esque Group, a pop-up retail strategy firm.
“Brands and retailers are going to have to find that balance of what are the right safety protocols, how has consumer behavior shifted, and how do we still make it feel good?” Gonzalez says, describing a recent visit to a local coffee shop as too “clinical” for her comfort. “You can buy something with a click of a button, but shopping is an emotional experience. So, how do we make sure we continue to remember that side of it and layer that back in?”
Surely, retailers can and will dream up ways to use temporary space to gather data and gain exposure. But even if there is a glut of vacancies on the market in the aftermath of COVID-19, the question that remains is whether landlords, whose best interests often lie in longer-term arrangements, will be willing to extend short-term leases.
“I think we’re going to be in a phase where the pop-up isn’t going to be about experience, it’s going to be about rescue,” Cushman & Wakefield’s Brown says. “The leverage is undoubtedly on the tenant side right now, and landlords, I think, would be foolish to not consider every option.”
Especially in cases in which landlords have multiple properties or storefronts in one area or shopping center, they will be more likely to lure back lost foot traffic if they keep spots filled. Landlords also might consider loosening restrictions on, for example, tenants setting up stands in parking lots, as Canada’s Real Estate News Exchange reports.
Brown wrote in his December report that “typically, if the pop-up is not related to an event or seasonal in nature, and is for a user that plans to utilize the space for traditional physical retail, roughly a third of pop-up deals eventually translate into a longer-term commitment.”
Going forward, there will be no one-size-fits-all model for a leasing structure, he says. A landlord might decide to charge a discounted rate for a temporary lease, then raise the price if and when the tenant decides to transition to full-term. Or they might charge a premium in the short-term and incentivize a conversion to a longer-term commitment with a deal. “It’s going to be like throwing spaghetti against the wall,” Brown says. “I suspect that there won’t be one correct strategy. It’ll really be a case-by-case basis.”
And in cases in which pop-up retail requires a city permit, Brown stresses governments should also be generous and open-minded. Doing so may be in a municipality’s best interest as it struggles to recoup the tax revenue from businesses that fell victim to the pandemic.
Making flexibility work
Another not-so-new practice that may gain steam, Gonzalez predicts, is pop-ups as a permanent strategy. Streetwear brands are the kings of this tactic, which they use to generate hype and faux scarcity periodically. As businesses tighten their belts and bolster their e-commerce, they might decide they don’t need year-round stores in every market. Some markets might be better suited for summer or holiday pop-ups, for example.
But if more retailers opt for this sort of flexibility, where does that leave a workforce that is experiencing a near-record level of unemployment?
It’s in the best interest of retailers to take a “holistic” approach to staffing, Gonzalez says. When The Lion’esque Group helps hire staff for pop-ups, she says, it prioritizes versatility. But training, too, goes a long way in setting up someone to be a long-term or recurring staffer, even if they work at a brick-and-mortar location or event for only a short time. As Gonzalez says she’s heard from one retailer she’s spoken with recently, instead of resorting to layoffs or furloughs to bear the financial blow of the pandemic, his store “repurposed” people.
“Even for those who had just opened pop-up stores, as things hit in the beginning of the year, those people understood talking points of the brand in a firsthand way,” Gonzalez says. “They’d been in the stores, they’d talked to customers, they knew what the pain points were. They became the best equipped for call centers and customer service online.”
Retailers often aren’t alone in training their workers, however. Elevate, a global staffing agency, has a database of tens of thousands of people it helps to pair with brands across the world to work events, pop-ups, and more. Over the past three months, the company has been thinking about what more it can do to foster safety and security, building off its existing role as a benefits coordinator.
“We’re now requiring all of our workforce to go through varying levels of health and safety training, which we run digitally through our tech platforms,” says Elevate COO Carina Filek. “We’ve got a couple of different levels, and we work with our clients to ascertain what their needs are and make sure we’ve got the right level of training in that person for their activity.”
Elevate also advises clients to make sure they have the appropriate number and type of staff, and that employers are on the same page as staff when it comes to aspects such as headcount restrictions, or how to greet customers or event guests to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.
Despite protocols and optimism, Cushman & Wakefield’s Brown warns that retailers must balance this optimism with caution this summer and beyond, and not read too much into month-over-month growth.
“Is there pent-up demand, and do people want to get out? Sure. But don’t fool yourself into thinking this is over,” Brown says. “If you want to be effective in risk mitigation, you have to look at this and plan for the worst, hope for the best. And in the retail space, it is critical that you create the safest environments possible.”
Pop-ups may be temporary. But winning the trust of customers is critical in the long run.


fortune--2020-06-25--Jumpy investors grapple with a dreaded record-high—in coronavirus cases

This is the web version of the Bull Sheet, Fortune’s no-BS daily newsletter on the markets. Sign up to receive it in your inbox here.
Good morning. So much for COVID fading out by summer. From Australia to California, spikes in new coronavirus cases pushed investors to sell, sell, sell yesterday. But the mood is lifting, as are stocks.
Let’s see where the bulls are putting their money.
Markets update
Asia
In afternoon trade, the Asia indexes are mixed. Tokyo was down; Shanghai was up a tick.
was down; was up a tick. The IMF added to yesterday’s markets gloom when it slashed its global growth outlook for 2020. Again. “We are definitely not out of the woods,” said the group’s chief economist.
added to yesterday’s markets gloom when it slashed its for 2020. Again. “We are definitely not out of the woods,” said the group’s chief economist. Trade tensions and geopolitics have spooked investors of late. They won’t like this then: the Pentagon has drawn up a list of Chinese companies it says have ties to the Chinese military, the FT reports. Huawei makes the list, as does China Telecom and China Mobile, both U.S.-listed.
Europe
The European bourses fell for a second straight day out of the gates, only to recover, and climb. Germany’s DAX led the indexes higher, up 1% two hours into the trading session.
fell for a second straight day out of the gates, only to recover, and climb. led the indexes higher, up two hours into the trading session. Bayer took off, up 2.6% at the open after announcing a $10.9 billion plea deal (the full tab is more than $12 billion ) to settle three-quarters of the Roundup weedkiller cancer claims in the states.
at the open after announcing a plea deal (the full tab is ) to settle three-quarters of the cancer claims in the states. Budget airline EasyJet plans to raise £450 million in a rights issue. It needs the funds to weather the worst of the coronavirus downturn, but the move may run into turbulence from company founder and main shareholder Stelios Haji-Ioannou.
U.S.
The Dow , S&P 500 and Nasdaq each fell by more than 2% yesterday, the worst trading session since June 11 . The futures are flat, though off their lows.
, and each fell by more than yesterday, the worst trading session since . The futures are flat, though off their lows. Seven states reported new records for coronavirus cases as America’s COVID-19 crisis takes a worrying turn. The spikes are forcing companies to rethink reopenings. Apple closed seven stores in Houston and Walt Disney said it will push back the planned reopening of its California theme parks beyond July 17 .
reported new records for coronavirus cases as America’s COVID-19 crisis takes a worrying turn. The spikes are forcing companies to rethink reopenings. Apple closed and Walt Disney said it will push back the planned reopening of its California theme parks beyond . That Q-word again. Quarantine. Beginning just a few hours ago, New York imposed two-week quarantine orders on travelers coming in from 9 states. Fail to comply, and you get hit with a fine. New Jersey and Connecticut also have similar plans in the works.
Elsewhere
Gold is down.
is down. The dollar is up, slightly.
is up, slightly. Crude is falling again in choppy trade. As I write, Brent is below $40/barrel, a big two-day drop.
“Not out of the woods”
As is her style, Gita Gopinath, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, did not mince her words yesterday. “We are definitely not out of the woods. We have not escaped the great lockdown,” she said in a video conference call. “This is a crisis like no other and will have a recovery like no other.”
The IMF did something unusual yesterday, slashing its current year global growth forecast for the second time in the past two months. And it wasn’t a mere tweak. They basically tore up the old forecast, and replaced it with a far gloomier one.
Here’s what they now see for the U.S. and global economy this year and next:
Let’s start at the top. The IMF now sees the U.S. GDP contracting by 8% this year; in April, they were predicting a more mild 5.9% 2020 hit. Global GDP will now fall by 4.9% this year, and will grow by a less impressive 5.4% next year. Again, these are not mild tweaks.
The impact on the labor market is worth noting, too, a fitting theme today as the latest batch of U.S. jobless claims are due out in a few hours. According to the IMF, the lockdowns in Q2 alone created a massive global decline in work hours, the equivalent to the loss of about 300 million full-time jobs, CNBC notes.
The IMF seems to be paying more attention to jobs as a downward drag on the recovery than most other forecasters. And other forecasters are calling them out on it.
In an investors note this morning, Paul Donovan of UBS pointed out that the IMF has a track record of seeing things glass-half-empty. “The IMF has been too pessimistic on growth in 27 of the past 30 years,” he wrote. “It tends to be significantly too pessimistic when there are big structural changes.”
Even still, the IMF numbers added to investors’ gloom yesterday, which has lingered into today’s choppy trading session.
***
Have a nice day, everyone. I’ll see you here tomorrow.
Bernhard Warner
@BernhardWarner
Bernhard.Warner@Fortune.com
A note from my Fortune colleagues on a timely new initiative:
Many companies are speaking out against racial injustices right now. But how do they fare in their own workplaces? Black employees in the corporate world, we want to hear from you: Please submit your anonymous thoughts and anecdotes here. https://bit.ly/WorkingWhileBlack
As always, you can write to bullsheet@fortune.com or reply to this email with suggestions and feedback.
Today's reads
The thing about options. Fueled by exceptional market volatility, an army of retailer traders and their no-fee apps, options trading is soaring, up 45% year-on-year, the Wall Street Journal reports. The upside of these kinds of trading contracts can be lucrative. And the downside? Well, here's what you should know about that.
Unfriending Facebook. The list of big-name advertisers now boycotting the social media giant has grown to REI, Patagonia, and Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s, to name a few. Fortune's Danielle Abril digs into what impact—if any—it could have on this FANG favorite's bottom line.
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Market candy
"You're not important. We don't care."
The Daily podcast's latest episode tells the story of three Americans who lost their jobs in recent months. They're all coronavirus victims. Their stories are extraordinary—but in America these days, all too ordinary. If you only have a few minutes, do yourself a favor and listen to the first story.


fortune--2020-06-25--Q&A: PGA golfer Troy Merritt on golf returning as one of the first live sports on television

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Sports are slowly but surely starting to creep back into our lives. In Europe, the top soccer leagues have returned in Germany, England, Italy, and Spain, each of these countries having successfully flattened the rate of COVID-19 infections. But in the U.S., the story is a bit different as the coronavirus pandemic surges in some Southern and West Coast states.
That leaves the future of sports still uncertain on this side of the pond. The NBA is scheduled to resume at Walt Disney World on July 31, but COVID-19 cases are currently spiking in Florida. The NHL is still working through its return plan. MLB owners voted on a 60-game return plan earlier this week but still have hurdles to clear before that becomes official. Even the NFL, set to return in the fall, isn’t guaranteed to start on time.
One of the few sports that is successfully back in action? Golf. The PGA Tour resumed on June 11 with the Colonial National Invitation Tournament in Fort Worth. As with similar reopening measures across the country, the PGA has implemented strict social distancing procedures. To get a sense of how the return is going and what it’s like being one of the few sports on television in a nation starved of athletics, Fortune spoke with PGA Tour golfer Troy Merritt.
Troy Merritt joined the PGA tour in 2008 and has 2 career tour victories. Photo Illustration by Fortune; Images: Michael Reaves—Getty Imagesl; Kevin C. Cox—Getty Images
This conversation has been lightly edited.
Fortune: Golf made its return this week after a three-month hiatus. It’s one of the few sports on live television right now. How have you found the experience so far, in one of the few sports available to consumers at the moment?
Troy Merritt: The nice thing about playing golf, unfortunately, is when you take out the fan aspect of it, we can social distance pretty well. We play on a pretty big ballpark week in and week out. We played the Colonial [National Invitation Tournament] last week and the Heritage Classic in Hilton Head this week. They’re smaller and tighter venues, so we’ve had to be reminded by tour officials time and time again to social distance, just because there’s not as much space. Once we get to bigger courses, it’s not going to be as much of a problem. The only thing we’re missing is that fan interaction—the clapping, the cheers, the boos, sometimes the heckling.
A lot of the guys kind of social distance most weeks anyways. We keep to ourselves. We’re not out partying all the time; we grab-and-go dinner. We spend a lot of time at the course hotel. So in that aspect, it’s not that much different. We’re not supposed to be out at restaurants right now; we just got reminded again this morning. The only thing really different is that we have a lot of hand sanitizer on the golf course right now and a couple restrictions where you can and can’t go. And then that nasal swab week in, week out is something that is not overly desirable.
In addition to the nasal swab for COVID-19 testing, there are some other safety procedures that you have to adhere to: fever screenings on a daily basis, filling out tracing questionnaires, and so on. Does it provide a sense of security and relief or do you view it as more of an errand or task you have to deal with?
We get a text message every morning regarding our health. It’s two questions, you fill them out and submit them. If there are any issues, [the PGA is] right on top of it. If [a player] had a cough, they’re getting a call within seconds. The temperature screening is different but very noninvasive. It doesn’t take any of your time at all, you’re just walking through.
The tour has done a fantastic job. They’ve had to go over the top to make sure we can play. You have to give them credit for that. And you have to give credit to the players and caddies. For the most part, we’re doing our best. We don’t want to get shut down. This is our livelihood, how we make a living, and we don’t want that taken away. We’re learning as we go. We’ll try to improve each and every week. We want to give folks back home something to watch, something to cheer for. I know they’ve been missing that for the past couple of months. Whatever we can do to help others out, I think that’s a pretty small ask.
We want to give folks back home something to watch, something to cheer for. Troy Merritt
Does it feel as if there’s heightened attention around the tournament and sport right now, since golf is one of the few live sports on television? Without many other sports to compete with at the moment, do you find there’s more interest and intrigue generated?
Yeah, I think so. I don’t know if we’ve brought in people who don’t normally watch golf. But I know that the average golf fan to the absolute fanatic have been very happy to see the PGA Tour back—especially with the quality of the [competitive] fields the first two weeks. We usually don’t see the big names in these two events as much: To have each of the top five players for both weeks, to have 15 of the top 20 players in the world playing here in Hilton Head, which is usually bypassed by the big names because it’s the week after the Masters, the fans are loving it. I know my friends back home are absolutely loving watching golf on live TV, along with my family. It’s been nice to be able to provide that product, and we just want to make sure we take care of business so that we don’t have people saying, “I told you so. You guys shouldn’t have been opening back up so soon.”
As an athlete in general, what are your thoughts on the role fans and spectators play? How do you see the world of sports operating potentially for another year at least—maybe more—without the availability of fans?
Golf is a little bit different. It was jokingly said that the only big difference would be some of the marquee groups [of fans]. Those guys that hit errant shots are going to end up in bad spots instead of accidentally hitting spectators and ending up back in the fairway maybe. We don’t hear the roars coming down the stretch when a guy makes birdie to get into contention or take the lead, so you really don’t know what’s going on in that respect. But we’re doing just fine.
With regard to other sports, it’s going to be vastly different—we’re seeing it with soccer now. Basketball is going to be different when it starts back up. Hockey will be different. And football, I think, will have the biggest impact. You want to talk about a crazy game in the States? Football is it. Whether or not they play, whether or not they play with fans or a limited number of fans, it’s going to impact the game a little bit. The guys will love being back out there, I imagine, but to play with limited to no fans is something they’re really going to have to adjust to.
Are there any silver linings to navigating the strict coronavirus measures in place?
The nice part about our job is that not only are we professional golfers, but we’re professional travelers. We’re used to taking care of ourselves while we’re in airports and restaurants: washing our hands, staying away from other people, showering when we get to our destination and getting the airplane and airport germs off of us. I will say I’ve used hand sanitizer a lot more these past two weeks than I ever have in my life. You’re just trying to do these little things. They’re not asking us to use it at every hole, but when you see the stations every four to five holes you wipe your hands off. You do catch yourself thinking, “Maybe in years past I didn’t wash my hands quite enough. Maybe in the past I didn’t take care of myself like I should have.” You’re just trying to find different ways to keep yourself healthy and clean, and that’s the learning curve we’re all going through these days.


fortune--2020-06-25--Why America won’t be going cashless anytime soon

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There’s a reason they say cash is king.
Commodity money—physical objects like coins and paper bills that hold value—has been used since ancient societies made the switch from bartering goods like salt and cattle. America started issuing its own currency, which evolved into the dollar we know today, in 1776, just before the country declared its independence.
Cash is still the second-most-used form of payment in America today after debit cards. But many advocates for “going cashless” believe that the paper dollar’s time is nearly up.
As the coronavirus pandemic ravages communities around the globe, the use of cash is raising concerns around cleanliness and viral transmission, even though the cotton that paper money is made of has been proved to carry virus particles for around the same time or less than plastic credit and debit cards do. And as digitization tightens its grip on the world, new technologies are popping up left and right to make paying for goods and services easier and more frictionless.
Cash is still the second-most-used form of payment in America today after debit cards, but many advocates for “going cashless” believe that the dollar’s time is nearly up. PM Images/Getty Images PM Images/Getty Images
While its use has certainly declined in recent years, cash will likely never disappear as those in the cashless movement would hope. Many cities like Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York have recently passed legislation banning merchants from accepting only card and contactless payments. New Jersey passed a similar bill in 2019 on the state level, and cashless merchants have been banned in Massachusetts since 1978.
There are many reasons experts list in arguing that cash must remain a viable payment option: Going cashless excludes the millions of unbanked and underbanked people in America, most of whom are people of color; cash is the best way to pay while maintaining a modicum of privacy; cash is integral to many cultural practices like tipping and gift giving; cash is resilient in a way that digital payments are not; and finally, consumer choice is one of the most important tenets of the free market, and eliminating cash removes one of the key payment options available to consumers.
“The cashless movement is a dangerous movement,” assistant director of the National Consumer Law Center Lauren Saunders says.
Going cashless disadvantages the unbanked and communities of color
Approximately 6.5% of U.S. households—14.1 million adults and 6.4 million children—are unbanked, according to the FDIC’s 2017 National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households, meaning they live in a household holding no accounts with formal, insured financial institutions. Another 18.7% of households are underbanked, which means they have at least one account at an insured institution, but they also use financial products or services outside of the banking system, like payday loans or cash-checking services.
“Any move to cashlessness is, by definition, exclusionary to those groups,” Christina Tetreault, senior policy counsel at Consumer Reports, says.
If you have a bank account, it’s easy to get checks cashed and transfer money for free. But the unbanked typically have to use check-cashing services or money orders to get cash and transfer money, methods that cost quite a bit in fees.
“It’s expensive to be poor, and it’s very expensive to be unbanked,” says Martin Chorzempa, research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Banking in the United States has unnecessarily high barriers to entry, says Chorzempa. That leaves lower-income people—often people of color, particularly black people—from participating in the formal economy. America’s long and racist history of excluding nonwhite people in all corners of society rears its ugly head here too.
Simply put, the American banking system was not built for people without disposable income. So, when low- and middle-income people use these systems, they are often hurt more than helped. For instance, most major banks require checking and savings accounts to carry a minimum balance to avoid incurring fees. These and overdraft fees are simply “fees for not having money,” Tetreault says.
Other fees that disadvantage poorer people include but certainly aren’t limited to ATM withdrawal fees, wire transfer charges, and debit card swipe fees. Those add up.
“Most overdraft fees are repaid within three days, and the median fee in 2014 was $34,” reads an article by the Berkeley Economic Review staff. “However, the annual percentage rates for payday loans are between 300% and 600%; if overdraft fees were treated as a payday loan that is repaid within three days, the APR would be 1,700%.”
Absence of Bank Branches in Communities of Color New York City, 2019 Courtesy of New Economy Project; Sources: FDIC Summary of Deposits (6/2019); American Community Survey (2017)
Another way lower-income people and people of color are disadvantaged in the formal economy is the physical placement of banks, which are often few and far between or entirely absent in communities of color, Deyanira Del Río, codirector of the New Economy project, said in her January testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services Task Force on Financial Technology.
For instance, in New York City neighborhoods of color, there is one bank on average per 10,000 residents, according to a New Economy map made by compiling data from the FDIC and the 2015 American Community Survey. In majority-white neighborhoods, there are 3.5 banks per 10,000 residents.
Mounting fees along with the banking deserts and irritations like ATMs dispensing only $20 bills when people may want or need to withdraw smaller amounts add up to a crippling financial situation for many, Tetreault says. That forces people to abandon their bank accounts and the formal economy in favor of the cheaper and easier-to-predict fees associated with informal services like payday loans and check-cashing. She says that most unbanked people used to have bank accounts, but chose to forgo them for these reasons.
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU, explains that “digital redlining”—named after the redlining in the housing market that denied mortgages in neighborhoods of color—has worked against communities of colors for decades now. Digital redlining refers to a number of practices that profile customers of color (again, particularly black people) and excludes them from and disadvantages them in financial systems.
And while wealthier people’s money works for them—accruing interest in bank accounts, earning dividends in the stock market, and racking up rewards points with credit cards—the unbanked essentially lose money as inflation increases while their stockpile stays stagnant. This negative return rate ends up digging a deeper hole, leaving the unbanked with even less money, further from being able to participate in the formal, digitized economy if they want to.
“The reasons that people are shut out of bank accounts that would allow them to transact electronically are largely structural,” Tetreault says.
Bernardo Batiz-Lazo, a professor at Northumbria University and an expert in financial technology and business history, says for the cashless movement to succeed and not disproportionately disadvantage the unbanked and underbanked, the systems that work overtime to exclude those people must be rethought.
Del Río speaks of this in her testimony: “Too often, discussions about financial access disparities focus on the choices and behaviors of individuals, or on the need to design ‘alternative products,’ rather than on structural barriers that block poor people, immigrants, and people of color from mainstream financial institutions and freedom.”
Chorzempa says that if cash were to disappear, individuals without the access or means to pay for things with the newest financial technology effectively become second-class citizens.
“I think there’s going to be a big social justice question that would block the complete adoption of [cashlessness],” says David L. Stearns, an expert in the history of payment systems and author of Electronic Value Exchange: Origins of the VISA Electronic Payment System.
New York City Councilman Ritchie Torres, the prime sponsor of the ban on cashless merchants that the city passed in late January, says businesses going cashless is “discrimination not in intent, but in effect.” However, he adds, in knowing who tends to pay with cash and who could go cashless, business owners could control who shops at their stores, making the discrimination more overt.
A cashless society would surrender privacy
In the digital modern world, people lose more and more of their privacy every day—if there is any of it left at this point at all. Cash is the most anonymous form of payment that exists right now, preserving privacy in a way that even cryptocurrency doesn’t.
There are plenty of reasons, not all of them nefarious, to want anonymity in transactions, Stearns says. From under-the-table, taxless payments to buying a gift for a spouse with a joint bank account, privacy is a concern in the financial world.
There is an entire data-brokering industry that wants the data that comes from consumers’ financial records, Stanley says. And Congress, he believes, is allowing weak privacy laws to go unchecked and unchanged, placing few to no limits on what data banks and financial services companies can share and with whom.
In a blog post for the ACLU, Stanley detailed how companies can gain access to a wealth of knowledge from very little information. When given a credit card for payment, a seller can, at the very least, learn the consumer’s full name. That, with the customer’s zip code, either asked for or guessed (most transactions take place in a credit card’s registered zip code), can lead to a shocking amount of information. Using “data appending” services, the name and zip code can get that seller the consumer’s mailing address, email, and phone number. And with that knowledge, sellers can get into the giant databases and learn even more.
Under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, companies can sell customer financial data to just about anyone they choose. Consumers, then, have no privacy under federal regulations unless they take steps to opt out of that data-sharing with every company that might have their information.
Cash is one of the last strongholds left to maintain anonymity and keep purchasing information truly private without handing heaps of data to the corporations that make a buck off your receipts—or worse, to hackers, in the case of a data breach.
Despite cryptocurrency’s claim that it keeps users’ information private, there are plenty of ways to track the likes of Bitcoin back to their last owners.
Cash is ingrained in our cultures
What would you do if you couldn’t slide the kind woman that brings all your bags to your hotel room a five? If you couldn’t gift the kids in your life crisp new bills in a red envelope on Lunar New Year?
There are a lot of cultural customs we forget about when we discuss the merits of nixing cash. From tipping to gift giving to collecting, cash is deeply ingrained in our practices, Stearns says.
In the U.S., people use cash to tip people who perform services for which there isn’t a mandatory transaction, like an airport shuttle bus driver. Americans also teach their children about money and budgeting with cash, using it to pay weekly allowances and reward children who are too young for bank accounts for chores and the like. And don’t forget about the tooth fairy!
In Southern Indian culture, people throw kuri kalyanam parties, to which guests are expected to bring a cash donation for whatever big cost the host is raising funds for. When that host gets invited to someone else’s kuri kalyanam feast, they are expected to donate twice what they received at their party.
And at weddings in many cultures, including Greek, Mexican, and Polish, guests pin bills onto the happy couple’s clothing as they dance.
Having a physical object of value like cash is key to these practices, Stearns says. If cash dies, so too could these traditions.
Cash will be there when technology fails
In a doomsday scenario where we have no access to the Internet, how would we access our money? This may seem far-fetched, but it’s an important question to ask when creating laws and infrastructures. When technology fails, cash is there.
“We need to have cash because we need to have backup systems,” Batiz-Lazo says.
The economy as it is in America today was built for cash, he says, and it needs to be rethought for the way consumers use their money now. But cash is still important to keep around, he says, if only as an anchor for when technology doesn’t work according to plan.
Stanley writes that electronic payments systems are far less resilient than cash and leave consumers open to centralized points of failure. “If a hacker, bureaucratic error, or natural disaster shuts a consumer out of their account, the lack of a cash option would leave them few alternatives,” he writes for the ACLU.
Consumer choice is key
“Consumer payment choice is critical,” Tetreault says.
One of the key reasons that experts don’t see a cashless future is that the pros don’t outweigh the freedom that would be taken away.
“Minimizing is one thing,” Saunders says of cash use. “Eliminating it is something else.”
She also points to groups like the Consumer Choice Payment Coalition, a mix of consumer representatives and businesses committed to fighting for consumers’ right to choose cash.
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s 2019 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice makes clear that consumers value cash as an option, even if it’s mainly considered a backup to digital forms of payment. The diary also shows that cash is the preferred payment type for small transactions, used in nearly half of all transactions under $10, and 42% of those under $25.
While cash use is declining little by little each year, it remains an important option in the financial lives of Americans.
Is going cashless even legal?
A section of U.S. Code on the American monetary system states that “United States coins and currency are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues.” That sure makes it sound like cash must be accepted everywhere, doesn’t it? Not so.
All U.S.-minted money is a valid form of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor, but there is no federal statute mandating that private businesses, individuals, or organizations have to accept cash as payment for goods and services.
Because federal and state governments can regulate government services, and there is no federal law mandating cash acceptance, it falls to city lawmakers to ban cashlessness. Local governments have to act to fill the voids and protect their unbanked and minority constituents that are disproportionately affected by cashless merchants.
“I have no choice but to legislate at the margins,” Torres, the prime sponsor of the bill banning cashlessness in New York City, says.
The New York bill was introduced in November 2018 and had plenty of pushback from already-cashless merchants, technology companies, and credit card companies, primarily Mastercard. Many in the tech industry, he says, feel that clinging to cash is a Band-Aid for real systemic problems and that it is an anti-tech move.
Torres says banning cashless merchants does nothing to prevent technology from being used or advanced—it just allows for more choice. And while he says he believes that there should be legislation to address the many issues causing people to go unbanked, this is what has to be done to protect that population for now.
“Then people would be less resistant,” he predicted. But until then, he says, we can’t force fintech on the unbanked and underbanked or those worried for their privacy.
Don’t expect America to go cashless anytime soon, if at all
Despite what some of the loudest voices in tech want you to think, cash probably isn’t going anywhere.
Some experts, like Batiz-Lazo, believe the pandemic will be a strong force for change in the payments landscape, but not one that eliminates cash. He believes that change will likely be a push for stronger legislation protecting consumer financial data and reassessing the role of—and maybe even breaking up—big fintech companies like Mastercard and Visa.
“If we just have some enlightened people that remember they have to take care of vulnerable consumers,” Batiz-Lazo says, the American financial system will get better for all involved.
The cashless movement, which money historian Stearns says started in the late ’60s and early ’70s, still hasn’t managed to go mainstream after all these years.
“The decline of cash is overstated,” Tetreault says. “There’s been a talk of the death of cash for many years, and it is true that many people make more electronic payments now, but I think cash is still king.”
The way the American economy functions these days is what some experts call “cash lite,” meaning that there are a lot of payment options for consumers to choose from, and most prefer the digital ones. But cash is still an important option to maintain.
Even as new and exciting financial technologies become available, people keep returning to cash. Despite fears at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that cash might increase the risk of contracting the virus, people are using paper money at the same rate as they were in the fall of 2019.
“In the way we pay for things, we’re super stubborn,” Stearns says.
So though some say cashless is the future, the experts don’t see that future arriving anytime soon.
As Stanley says, “Sometimes the oldest, simplest things have their place and continue for a reason.”
Editor’s note: The map in this article has been updated to reflect more recent data.