Nepals prime minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, resigned on Tuesday after youth-led protests sparked by a government ban on social media in the Himalayan country left nearly two dozen people dead and hundreds injured, CNN reported. That ban has since been lifted, per Reuters.
Protesters reportedly set government buildings, police stations, and the houses of politicians on fire Tuesday, a day after police fired tear gas at and used rubber bullets on protesters storming parliament in the country’s capital, Kathmandu, per Reuters.
The protests, led by Nepal’s Generation Z, ages 13 to 28, come after the government blocked Facebook, X, and YouTube, saying the social media platforms failed to register and comply with necessary oversight.
What started as an outcry against a social media ban has grown violent and expanded into widespread criticism of the nation’s political elite and poor economic prospects for its citizensespecially young people, who are frustrated by their lack of opportunity, according to The Associated Press.
Unemployment among Nepal’s youth is staggeringly high at 19%, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO), with thousands estimated to be leaving the country daily to seek work elsewhere.
Last Thursday, Nepals minister for communication and information, Prithvi Subba Gurung, said about two dozen social media platforms were repeatedly given notices to officially register their companies. TikTok, Viber, and three others were allowed to continue operating because they had registered. Critics argue it was an attempt at censorship.
On X, where “Nepal” is trending, one user wrote: “Nepal protest is primarily against corruption and misgovernance. Social media ban was just the tipping point.” Others posted videos of Nepal’s parliament burning and Gen Z protesters in the streets.
The clashes are the deadliest Nepal has seen in decades, and come after a long period of turbulence marked by a dozen different governments since it became a republic, following the end of the monarchy in 2008 and a decade-long civil war.
Amid the uncertainty around tariffs earlier this year, some companies had delayed their plans to go public. But despite the typically sleepy end-of-summer season, the initial public offering (IPO) market has been heating up again heading into the fall. Investors appear to want in after recent successful listings from companies like Figma, Bullish, Circle Internet Group, and others.
In fact, this week is expected to be one of the busiest weeks for IPOs in years, with a number of well-known companies expected to list their shares on the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq.
Here are five of the IPOs were watching this week. (Note that the expected dates are subject to change.)
Klarna Group (KLAR)
Founded in 2005, Klarna Group is the Swedish fintech startup known for its buy now, pay later services.
The startup exploded in popularity during the early days of the pandemic when online shopping was at its peak, reportedly reaching a peak valuation of $45.6 billion in 2021. However, that figure declined after stay-at-home restrictions were lifted.
After announcing its target IPO share price last week, the company is expected to list on Wednesday, September 10, with a share price of $35 to $37.
Legence Corp (LGN)
Legence Corp, a San Francisco-based engineering and maintenance provider backed by Blackstone, is expected to list on Friday, September 12, with a share price of $35 to $37.
Via Transportation (VIA)
Via Transportation is a tech startup working to change public transit across cities. The company filed for an IPO earlier this month and is expected to list on Friday, September 12, with a share price of $40 to $44. The offering is being led by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Allen & Company, and Wells Fargo Security.
Black Rock Coffee (BRCB)
After it was reported back in July that the Arizona-based coffee chain filed confidentially for an IPO, Black Rock Coffeea fast-growing rival to chains such as Starbucks and Dutch Brosannounced its target pricing last week. It is expected to list on Friday, September 12, with a share price between $16 and $18.
Gemini Space Station (GEMI)
Gemini Space Station, Inc. is a cryptocurrency exchange company founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. After recently securing a $50 million from Nasdaq, it is expected to list on Friday, September 12, with a share price of between $17 and $19.
Some say there are no new ideas. When it comes to the iPhone Air, maybe they are right.
Announced today, the iPhone Air will debut on September 19 for $999. Its selling point? The iPhone Air is 5.6mm thick. Except for the camerathat part still sticks out.
Truly amazing and unlike anything you experienced before, according to CEO Tim Cook, the iPhone Air is Apples attempt to reignite excitement in the iPhone business, which hit a 6-year low in new activations last year as people decide to stick with their perfectly adequate phones for longer.
On one hand, a thinner iPhone seems to be a page right out of the playbook of Steve Jobs and Jony Ive. This is classic Apple! you might think. Thinness was a gimmick during Apples golden age, but it was a beloved one. Apple might have advertised thinness as a feature, but it didnt define the design unto itself. Thinness was but one advancement that enabled it to rethink entire product categories.
[Image: Apple]
Apple was always about more than thin
Apple’s obsession with thinness started in 2001 with the iPod. The first iPod was remarkable compared to anything we’d seen. It squeezed a thousands songs into something the size of a deck of cards. But it was still a hefty thinga modified laptop hard drive that was still a third of a pound in your hand.
[Photo: Apple/Getty Images]
Over several generations, the iPod thinned out significantly, to the point where its entire effect felt less like a cleverly packaged computer component and more like a product with its own uncompromising design language. (Biased, but the third generation iPod will always be a personal favorite for its almost jewelry feel and glowing orange buttons.)
[Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]
Still, Apple kept going. It introduced the much smaller iPod mini in 2004 (with a unique, 1-inch microdrive hard drive). It was more diminutive, but also more expressive in candy colors. It edged toward some platonic ideal of what music in your pocket should be.
[Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]
That thought experiment culminated with the first generation iPod Shuffle. The iPod, at the end of the day, could be nothing more than the clickwheel control living on a clip that needed no pocket at all. But that didnt stop the release, in 2005, of a ridiculously enticing object: the thin and tall iPod nano (so much smaller thanks to flash storage). This cadence of releases was parodied by SNL, but at the same time, we couldnt get enough. Smaller, lighter, cheaper iPods democratized the platform and drove its profits to new heights. And critically speaking, you only needed to scope out the latest iPodeach a tantalizing new technological wonderto realize its justification to exist.
The introduction of the Macbook Airthe iPhone Airs namesakein 2008 didnt create as long and branching of a design lineage for Apples laptop line, but it was radical all the same. Its core innovation was a smaller motherboard developed in conjunction with Intel. The new design wasnt just about a third of an inch thinner than earlier Macbooks overall: It featured an elegantly tapered edge that gave it motion and harkened to its own implausibility.
[Photo: Tony Avelar/AFP/Getty Images]
Oh, and it was also a full 2lbs lighter.
Perceptually, the weight was what made it feel like something worthy of that Air namesake; as if we fast forwarded ten years into the future overnight. It was the difference between a 5 lb laptop and a 3 lb laptopthe difference between grabbing it with one hand or two.
Like the iPhone Air, the Macbook Air’sbattery life and processing power didnt keep up with Apples bigger models. But the gulf between its standard laptop and the Air was wide. It was so wide that it wiped out the budget mini laptop market at the time (a wave of tiny-screened laptops introduced by the Asus Eee), and prompted the entire PC industry to launch a wave of ultraportable thin laptops based upon much of the same core architecture.
Yes, incremental thinness drives the entire portable electronics industry. But in Apple’s hands, it’s often meant more. It’s been a tool for immediate and long term categorical disruption.
[Image: Apple]
The iPhone Air is engineering, not design
Apple, at its best, used thinness to redefine what a product was and where it could go next. But the iPhone Air isnt defining a new category of thin phones. (Incidentally, Samsungs S25 phone already offered an ultra-thin approach to disappointing sales.) Apples most loyal fanbase is concluding that, if nothing else, the Air is a peek at the future of thinner phones, or even a preview for a folding iPhone to come.
I dont mind that Apple introduced a thinner iPhone. They do so every year. This one just happens to be thinner than usual. But I do mind that it failed to release a smaller iPhone before prioritizing other ideasand that the iPhone Air does nothing to push forward the greater experience of using an iPhone.
Why didnt Apple resurrect the beloved iPhone Minia phone that fits into pockets and has a smaller screen that can be easier on a thumb? I also cant help but wonder: If Apple is re-entering its gadget era, why arent we seeing explorations into the Mini/Nano/Shuffle versions of what the iPhone can be?
Maybe those explorations would be silly and misguided. But at least theyd be different. And at least theyd be interesting.
To me, the most notable hardware announcement of the day is that the Airpod Pro is getting a heart rate monitor, negating a major advantage of an Apple Watch, and pointing to Apples greater ambitions in what an AI-infused headphone will be in just a few more years. The second is that the iPhone’s camera has a new sensor so that you can take a landscape photo in portrait mode, so media is just media, no matter how youre holding the iPhone.
With the iPhone Air, Apple did not present a concept car of the future, which challenges the status quo or ushers in a new design language for the company. It didnt imagine how AI and industrial design could merge into a radical, or even notable, new idea. Instead, it’s selling three iPhone models that are all ostensibly the same thing in different thicknesses.
Even if Apple purely wanted to focus on aestheticsif it saw this as a moment to truly merge its industrial design with the UX of Liquid Glassthat could be interesting! Maybe functionally unimportant, but at least its a product with a point of view.
But the iPhone Air is like so much of what we see coming out of Apple these days: not made from the heart of innovation, but responding to the demands of shareholders curious when theyll offer the same lineup of hardware we see from Samsung, Google, and Meta.
With the iPhone Air, Apple feels like its cosplaying Apple.
Math and reading scores for U.S. high school seniors are plummeting, according to new federal data released on Tuesday. Reading skills in particular have suffered, with test results dropping to their lowest scores since the assessments first began in 1992.
According to the new data, 32% of 12th grade students performed below the assessments basic reading achievement level, which measures whether students can find relevant details within text and come away with a literal understanding of what they read. In 1992, the portion of 12th grade students falling below that basic measure of reading comprehension was 20%.
Only 35% of 12th graders demonstrated a proficient level of reading skill, meaning that they could connect key points across reading samples and make more sophisticated inferences about tone, word choice, and themes. In 2024, the portion of students who demonstrated proficient reading skills dropped by 2% compared with 2019, and 5% compared with the tests 1992 baseline scores.
The new test data on high school seniors was collected in 2024, making it the first set of scores to be published after the educational disruptions that students experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data is part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a federal testing program also known as the Nations Report Card. Fourth grade and eighth grade students are given the assessments every two years, while 12th grade students are evaluated every four years.
High school seniors also performed worse in math, achieving the lowest scores since the math assessment began in 2005. Only a third of seniors performed at a level that showed they were academically ready for college, down from 37% in 2019.
These results are sobering, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) acting commissioner Matthew Soldner said. The drop in overall scores coincides with significant declines in achievement among our lowest-performing students, continuing a downward trend that began even before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unprecedented setbacks
The latest scores for high school seniors show that all is not well in the American educational system. Test scores have been sliding for more than a decade, a trend made worse by disruptions to schooling during the pandemic.
The new score data, published for the first time since 2020, shows that pandemic-linked performance losses for students arent fading away as time passes, like many had hoped. That trend is backed by this years assessment of 8th graders, whose reading scores fell even further in 2024, deepening a steep drop-off in scores observed from 2019 to 2022.
Reading scores began dropping prior to the pandemic, but researchers and educators are still trying to make sense of why. How time spent on screens influences children is a complex issue and can trend positive or negative, depending on how much time they spend and what theyre doing.
Some research has shown that deeper reading comprehension is worse when kids read on screens, but rolling back the digital revolution in the classroom isnt likely to emerge as a one-size-fits-all solution. In the U.S., adults are consuming digital media more and reading for pleasure less than ever. The way adults consume information has changed radically in recent decades, with the emergence of algorithm-driven social media, the rise of information disseminated via short-form video, and the continued deterioration of news sources.
Beyond the classroom, all of those changes will continue to influence young learnerswho are plunged into a fast-paced, unpredictable digital information ecosystem, often as early as age 8. With AI now in the mix, students are doing their best to navigate a complex world filled with potent new tools that are already upending life for many adults.
Linda Yaccarinos departure as CEO of X on July 9 caught many by surprise. While reportedly in the works for weeks, the absence of leaks and the timing of her announcementone day after Xs AI chatbot Grok made antisemitic comments referencing Hitler during a prompt about Texas floodingsparked heavy online chatter.
Two months later, that chatter has faded, but the executive office remains vacant, with no signs of being filled soon. (Yaccarino, meanwhile, has since taken over as chief executive of eMed Population Health, a digital health company developing a platform for GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.)
X declined to comment on the CEO search, and Elon Musk has only weighed in once, thanking Yaccarino for her contributions on the day she stepped down. If his past remarks are any guide, hes in no hurry.
CEO is fake title. You need a president, a controller and a secretary for a C Corp, but all the chief [whatever] officer stuff is superfluous, Musk wrote on X two years ago. That echoed comments from 2021 at The Wall Street Journals CEO Council Summit, when he said president, secretary and treasurer were the only meaningful corporate titles. (To underline the point, his title at Tesla is technoking.)
On prediction market Polymarket, bettors arent expecting an announcement anytime soon: 51% dont think a decision will come this year, up from 22% the day after Yaccarino left. The current frontrunner is serial entrepreneur Nikita Bier, with 19% betting hell get the job. Bier, who joined Xs product team as Yaccarino departed, has pushed for useful content and a crackdown on AI slop, which he says have boosted App Store downloads.
Musk himself is second on Polymarket with 10% odds, likely reflecting the assumption hell remain the final decision maker regardless of who holds the CEO title. Other names have low odds, including White House AI policy advisor Sriram Krishnan, X CFO Mahmoud Reza Banki, and Grok itself, each at 4%. Longshot candidates include MrBeast, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, and Sheryl Sandberg.
Time will tell if the next CEO makes it past Yaccarinos two-year run.
Ford is recalling almost 1.5 million vehicles in the United States because the rear view camera may show a blank or distorted image on the center display screen while the vehicle is in reverse, which can reduce or distort the driver’s view of what’s behind the car and increase the risk of a crash.
The recall includes certain vehicles from model years 2015 to 2019 of the Lincoln Navigator, Lincoln MKC, Mustang, Ranger, Transit, Transit Connect, Econoline, Edge, Expedition, F-250 SD, F-350 SD, F-450 SD and F-550 SD.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Monday in its safety recall report that Ford is aware of 18 accidents and no injuries related to the camera issue.
The agency said that vehicle owners will be notified by mail and instructed to take their vehicles to a Ford or Lincoln dealer to have the rear view camera inspected and replaced, if necessary. There will be no charge for the service.
When Pandora launched its music service in late summer 2005, it came with a straightforward pitch: ten free hours of music a month before users had to subscribe. We didnt have much money in the bank, recalls former CEO Joe Kennedy. The paywall was meant to keep costs in check while laying the groundwork for a subscription business.
Except, people didnt want to pay. The free trial drew huge interest, while conversions to paid were abysmal. Even worse, the most devoted fans found ways to bypass restrictions. People were getting to the end of their trial, and hacking around [to keep] listening, says an early employee who spoke to Fast Company on the condition of anonymity. It was very clear that we were onto something.
Within months, Pandora pivoted to a free, ad-supported model, and growth exploded. Over the next decade, Pandora became North Americas most popular music streaming service, peaking at more than 81 million monthly listeners.
But the past 10 years have been defined by steady decline. Last year alone, Pandora lost close to three million monthly users. This spring, its audience averaged around 43 million.
In hindsight, the culprit seems obvious: Spotify. But Pandoras two-decade journey is not simply a story of losing to a superior rival. Its a case study in the innovators dilemmariddled with missed opportunities, flawed pivots, and a toxic relationship with major labels that undercut the company long before Spotify entered the market.
They were never going to give us deals that were going to allow us to succeed, says the early employee about the major labels. They just hated us.
This two-part history of Pandora draws on numerous interviews with former employees and executives, many of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidlyeither out of fear of retaliation or because their current employers bar them from speaking to the media. (Part two of this story will be published later this week.)
Finding the core of every song
Pandoras paywalled launch in 2005 wasnt the only sign it was running on a shoestring budget. Another was its headquarters: instead of leasing space among San Franciscos trendy startups, the company moved into a nondescript office building in downtown Oakland. It had previously been a parking garage, recalls Kennedy. Very unglamorous, not particularly a great space.
If you visited Pandoras office in those days, youd find a bunch of people hunched over their computers, wearing bulky headphones, cardboard boxes full of CDs within reach. Many of them were musicians or musicologists, hired by the company for cheap on a part-time basis. Their job was to meticulously analyze every song the company could get its hands on not just by style and genre, but also mood, instrumentation, vocal timbre, and more. That painstaking work fed into the Music Genome Project, a vast database that powered Pandoras playlist algorithms.
Over the years, human experts hand-categorized 2.2 million tracks. That information not only shaped recommendations but also trained machine-learning models that expanded the catalog further. Even today, the Music Genome Project influences what Pandora streams next. You probably couldnt get funding to do that kind of thing anywhere now, but its a hell of an incredible data source to have, says a former employee who worked on the recommendation engine.
The Music Genome Project was the brainchild of cofounder Tim Westergren, who started Pandoras predecessor, Savage Beast Technologies, in 2000 as a way to boost CD sales for B2B partners. Monetization proved elusive, forcing the company to reinvent itself with a direct-to-consumer model focused on streaming, and seek new capital. Westergren had to pitch Pandora hundreds of times until he was finally able to raise $9 million from Walden Venture Capital, $2 million of which immediately went to paying back employees who had worked for months without a steady paycheck. It had been a rough road, Kennedy says. Picture a group that had spent the last five years crossing the desert, running out of water. (Westergren did not respond to Fast Companys request for comment.)
What Pandora lacked in money, it made up for in grit and determination. It was a super resilient group, Kennedy says. That resilience showed when staff hacked an early iPhone to start building an app before Apple had even opened the device to third-party developers. The gamble paid off: Pandora became a prominent App Store launch partner in 2008, and usage skyrocketed.
That was a serious inflection point, Kennedy says. We would have a hundred thousand new listeners every day.
A clash with the major labels
Listeners flocked to Pandora in part because of its simplicity. Type in the name of a favorite band, and Pandora would generate an endless stream of similar music. Users could refine those streams with thumbs up or thumbs down ratings, until eventually they could just let Pandora run for hours, interrupted only by the occasional ad break.
That stood in contrast to other services of the time. Apples iTunes store, launched two years earlier, charged $0.99 per download. And in 2001, Listen.com introduced Rhapsody, a $10-a-month all-you-can-stream subscription, pioneering a model that was later perfected by Spotify.
Nice idea, but there’s just not a business there, Kennedy remembers thinking when he first heard of Rhapsody. Pandora chose a proven model instead. Eighty percent of music listening historically, pre-internet, was to radio, Kennedy says. Pandora wanted to evolve that radio model, and supercharge it with the capabilities of the internet.
There was also a practical reason behind Pandoras radio-like approach. Services such as Rhapsody had to secure expensive licensing agreements for every song in their catalogs. Pandora instead relied on a copyright law provision that let it bypass individual deals and pay into collective licensing pools, just as traditional radio did.
That strategy infuriated many in the music industry, still reeling from the MP3 piracy wave. Unlike Napster, Pandora did pay royalties for every song it streamed, but major labels believed those payments were far too low. It got pretty tenuous pretty quickly, recalls an early employee.
A year after Pandoras founding, the major labels pushed to triple its royalty rates. [Those rates] would have put us out of business, Kennedy says. Pandora started lobbying lawmakers, and even got listeners to contact their representatives en masse. It took two bills being passed by Congress, signed by the president, that enabled us to survive, Kennedy says, referring to the 2008 Webcaster Settlement Act and a subsequent 2009 settlement agreement that set lower royalty rates..
The resulting more moderate rate increase was welcome news not only to Pandora and its users, but also to a growing number of independent musicians. Smaller bands discovered that Pandoras algorithms offered visibility they could never get on mainstream radio. Pandora ended up playing over 30% independent music, Kennedy says. It wasnt because we tried to. Its because we actually were so good at the needle in the haystack probem.
Still, the fight cemented the major labels hostility toward Pandora. They were just so adversarial, the early employee says. They really thought we were pure evil.
A competitor with some powerful backers
With royalty rates under control and smartphone ownership accelerating, Pandoras business was booming. When the company filed to go public in early 2011, it reported $55 million in revenue from the prior fiscal year. By the end of 2015, annual revenue had soared past $1.2 billion, with 81 million people tuning in every month.
But a new rival was gaining ground. Spotify had launched in parts of Europe in 2008 and expanded to the U.S. in 2011. Pandoras leadership dismissed the threat. Here comes another try, Kennedy recalls thinking. This takes billions of dollars to do. Good luck!
[We] believed that the majority of people werent going to pay for a monthly subscription, or make playlists, and actively interact with their music, says the early employee, adding: That was obviously wrong.
Spotify had been able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding, and was putting that money to good use. Spotify offered student programs, family programs, and free listening for six months, says a former Pandora employee.
In addition to deeply discounted rates and generous free trials, Spotify had another ace up its sleeve: Free on-demand listening, which allowed desktop and tablet users to pick and choose individual songs without having to sign up for a paid subscription. By comparison, Pandoras modelpersonalized streams with a cap on skipssuddenly felt antiquated.
Because of our adversarial history, the labels refused to give us free on demand, says the early employee. But they were very willing to give that right to Spotify.
These discrepancies werent just based on past animosities: Spotify had given Warner Music, Sony Music, and the Universal Music Group significant equity stakes in exchange for access to their catalogs. The labels had chosen their horse, and Spotify sprinted ahead. By the end of 2015, Spotify counted 91 million monthly users10 million more than Pandora. A year later, Spotify reached 123 million users per month, while Pandoras growth flatlined.
Spotifys rapid ascent quickly became too hard to ignore for Pandora. A board meeting couldn’t go by without some discussion of Spotify, recalls Kennedy. But with more than 80 million users who loved Pandoras existing service, executives were wary of drastic changes. And without Spotifys labels connections, they felt they were at a significant disadvantage.
It was a little bit like fighting Spotify with one arm tie behind your back, says the former employee. We had no response.
Part two of this story will publish next week.
The U.S. job market was much weaker in 2024 and early this year than originally reported, adding to concerns about the health of the nation’s economy.
Employers added 911,000 fewer jobs than originally reported in the year that ended in March 2025, the Labor Department reported Tuesday.
The department issues the so-called benchmark revisions every year. They are intended to better account for new businesses and ones that had gone out of business. The numbers issued Tuesday are preliminary. Final revisions will come out in February 2026.
The revision showed that leisure and hospitality firms including hotels and restaurants added 176,000 fewer jobs than originally reported, professional and business services companies 158,000 fewer and retailers 126,000 fewer.
The report comes after the department reported Friday that the economy generated just 22,000 jobs in August, adding to fears that President Donald Trump’s erratic economic policies, including massive and unpredictable taxes on imports, have created so much uncertainty that businesses are reluctant to hire.
Sal Guatieri, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets said the revisions painted a much weaker portrait of the job market than initially thought. While the revision doesnt say much about what has happened since March, it suggests the labor market had less momentum heading into the trade war. And, recent data suggest the market has downshifted further. Since March, monthly job creation has decelerated to an average 53,000.
When the benchmark revisions last year showed 818,000 fewer jobs in the year ended March 2024, then-presidential candidate Trump declared the numbers had been rigged to conceal economic weakness and help Democrats in the 2024 election. However, he did not explain why the government would release the revised numbers two and a half months before voters went to the polls.
The revisions will likely increase pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates at its meeting later this month to give the economy a boost.
After the Labor Department issued a disappointing jobs report for July, Trump fired the economist in charge of compiling numbers and nominated a loyalist to replace her. He was especially enraged by revisions that took 258,000 jobs off May and June payrolls.
Government economists have been struggling with a dramatic drop in the number of employers that respond to their surveys. Still, most economists and financial analysts consider the official jobs numbers reliable.
Paul Wiseman, AP economics writer
In May 2024, seafood restaurant chain Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy. While there were many factors that contributed to Red Lobsters Chapter 11, one in particularits endless shrimp offeringtook much of the blame.
But now the company, having emerged from bankruptcy, is leaning into that financially disastrous offering by launching a new promotion that plays on peoples familiarity with its endless shrimp history. Heres what you need to know about Red Lobsters new SpendLESS Shrimp campaign.
Endless shrimp helped send Red Lobster into bankruptcy
In May 2024, Red Lobster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Many of the headlines surrounding the companys bankruptcy concentrated on how its then-endless shrimp offering, where customers could eat as much shrimp as they wanted for a fixed price, led the company to an $11 million loss and, ultimately, insolvency.
However, as Fast Company previously reported, while its endless shrimp losses helped contribute to Red Lobsters financial woes, they werent the only source of Red Lobsters troubles. Like many restaurant chains, Red Lobsters bottom line was impacted by declining foot traffic post-pandemic, inflationary pressures, and burdensome rental leases.
But by the fall of 2024, Red Lobster emerged from bankruptcy with new owners, new bosses, and fewer storesand hopes for a return to profitability. Since then, the company has added new menu items and the return of old events to excite diners and boost sales. And now, the company is embracing its endless shrimp fiasco in hopes of clawing back even more customers.
SpendLESS Shrimp is here
Endless shrimp is probably never coming back, but that wont stop Red Lobster from trying to capitalize on its disastrous marketing campaign that helped send the company into bankruptcy.
Red Lobster has announced a new campaign called SpendLESS Shrimp, which is clearly a bit of name play on its former endless shrimp promotion. In a press release announcing the campaign, the company didn’t even shy away from the association, stating, Red Lobster is turning the tide one year after emerging from bankruptcy by introducing a fresh take on a fan-favorite promotion.
But SpendLESS Shimp, as its name suggests, wont allow you to access unlimited shrimp. Instead, the new campaign offers customers a new dish called Ultimate SpendLESS Shrimp, which is three different shrimp offerings for a fixed price of $15.99. Included in the Ultimate SpendLESS Shrimp dish is:
Garlic Shrimp Scampi
Shrimp Linguini Alfredo
Popcorn Shrimp
Announcing the promotion, Damola Adamolekun, Red Lobsters newest CEO, said, “Since stepping into this role, I’ve gotten questions about Endless Shrimp ‘Is it coming back? ‘What really happened with the promotion?’ ‘How much shrimp is too much shrimp?’ And it’s time we officially turn the tides.
Adamolekun said the new Ultimate SpendLESS Shrimp dish is part of a new chapter at Red Lobster. It may not be endless, but you’ll definitely spend less.
Yet it’s a dish that the company clearly hopes makes customers come in and spend more, so it can avoid a repeat of its recent past in the years ahead.
Two former executives for the now-shuttered classified site Backpage.com are scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday in Phoenix for conspiring to facilitate prostitution by selling sex ads.
A prosecutor has recommended five years of probation and restitution payments for former CEO Carl Ferrer and sales director Dan Hyer, both of whom pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2018. The prosecutor said both men acknowledged their crimes and cooperated with authorities by testifying against a company founder during the 2023 trial.
Backpage founder Michael Lacey was convicted of a single count of international concealment money laundering and sentenced to five years in prison and fined $3 million, though he remains free while he pursues an appeal. Chief financial officer John Brunst and executive vice president Scott Spear are each serving 10-year sentences for conspiracy and money laundering convictions.
Prosecutors had argued that Backpages operators ignored warnings to stop running prostitution ads, some involving children. The operators were accused of giving free ads to sex workers and cultivating arrangements with others who worked in the industry to get them to post ads with the company.
Backpages operators said they never allowed ads for sex and made an effort to try to delete such ads by assigning employees to remove them and creating automated tools. Their legal team maintained the content on the site was protected by the First Amendment.
In pleading guilty, Ferrer acknowledged knowing a majority of Backpages revenues came from escort ads, conspiring to sanitize ads by removing photos and words that were indicative of prostitution and publishing a revised version of the notices.
In sentencing memos, both the prosecutor and Ferrers attorneys say he helped shut down the site through his cooperation.
His lawyers say Ferrer provided evidence linking defendants to the criminal enterprise and testified that Backpages increase in revenue stemmed mostly from prostitution.
Hyer has previously participated in a scheme to give free ads to sex workers in a bid to draw them away from competitors and win over their future business.
His attorney said her client is sincerely remorseful for his actions and contributed directly to the convictions of other defendants.
Laceys first trial in 2021 ended in a mistrial when another judge concluded prosecutors had too many references to child sex trafficking in a case where no one faced such a charge.
Before launching Backpage, Lacey founded the Phoenix New Times weekly newspaper with James Larkin, who was charged in the case and died by suicide in 2023 just before the second trial against Backpages operators was scheduled to begin.
Lacey and Larkin held ownership interests in other weeklies such as The Village Voice and ultimately sold their newspapers in 2013. But they held onto Backpage, which authorities say generated $500 million in prostitution-related revenue from its inception in 2004 until 2018, when the government shut it down.
A U.S. Government Accountability Office report released in June 2021 said the FBIs ability to identify victims and sex traffickers had decreased significantly after Backpage was seized by the government, because law enforcement was familiar with the site and Backpage was generally responsive to requests for information.
