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While the iPhone 17 is expected to be one of the hottest gifts this holiday season, some of the early adopters of Apple’s latest phone may be moving on to something different already. New data from B-Stock, a B2B marketplace for wholesale liquidation of returned and overstock inventory, finds that large cellular carriers are already moving “bulk quantities” of iPhone 17s through the resale channels for B2B customers. One sale on the site currently offers 111 iPhone 17 Pro Max units (with bidding for the lot standing at $80,200 as of Wednesday afternoon). All totaled, there were more than 300 iPhone 17 devices up for resale on the site as of Wednesday. The sales aren’t impacting the value of the phones, however. B-Stock says it’s seeing resale prices on the phones maintaining 94% of the retail price. And to be clear, theres not a big wave of people returning their phones. B-Stock says the return rates are largely in line with predecessors on a percentage basis (and actually lower than the iPhone 16). But with the strong sales of the 17, an overall greater number of units is expected to be returned. The used-phone market has been gaining strength for some time. Earlier this year, tech research and advisory firm CCS Insight said the secondhand smartphone market is growing faster than the primary market, with a growth rate of 6% year over year in 2024. Apple devices make up 60% of the overall used market. “The growing demand for used smartphones is driven by a stronger desire for low-cost devices, increased consumer awareness, and partnerships between telecom operators and retailers,” said Leo Gebbie, CCS Insights principal analyst and director for the Americas, in a statement. “Refurbished smartphones, which are often up to 50% cheaper than new devices, now also come with warranties, flexible financing options, and reliable after-sales service, increasing consumer trust. Last year, secondhand smartphones generated revenues of $7.6 billion in the U.S. (and another $13.2 billion in the Asia-Pacific region). Meanwhile, International Data Corp. (IDC), a market intelligence firm, forecasts global shipments of used smartphones will grow by 3.2% year over year in 2025, which is triple its prediction of sales gains from new smartphones. That’s due to a growing number of trade-in programs, improvements in the quality of refurbished devices, and a rising environmental awareness among consumers. The trend isn’t likely to slow down anytime soon. IDC expects the used smartphone market to see 5.8% growth in 2026 before tapering off slowly to 4.9% by 2029. B-Stock is not the only company seeing the latest round of iPhones hold their value. On SellCell, a marketplace for consumers to sell their smartphones and devices, the iPhone Air had a trade-in value of $760 as of Wednesday, compared with a retail price of $999 for the same model. That’s despite numerous reports that demand for the iPhone Air model was significantly lower than expected, with Apple reportedly cutting production on the line. It’s not just the iPhone 17 that’s seeing sustained demand. The iPhone 16 is retaining 72% of its original price, B-Stock reports. And the iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone 16 Pro Max, and iPhone 14 Pro Max are the three most frequently sold models on the site’s B2B platform. The strong demand in the used smartphone market doesn’t seem to be impacting sales of new iPhone models. Apple is expected to have a record year in 2025, thanks to the latest series of phones, with shipment forecasts of 247 million or more, IDC says. The iPhone 17 is selling very well in China, Apple’s largest market, and has reversed the slowdown Apple was seeing in the U.S. and Western Europe. In fact, the popularity of the iPhone 17 was a key reason Apple’s market capitalization topped $4 trillion earlier this year.
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E-Commerce
The data center boom is fully underway, and the numbers are staggering: billions of dollars in costs, millions of square feet worth of buildings, gigawatts of energy, and millions of gallons of water used per day. But before these AI-fueling behemoths can get up and running, there’s an extensive amount of prep work needed to build the infrastructure those data centers rely upon, with a whole other set of staggering costs, material flows, and resource requirements. The infrastructure behind (and below) the data center boom is in the midst of its own massive scale building boom, with no end in sight. That’s created a thriving business for the companies that provide the raw materials used to make that infrastructure. “The focus for the most part is always on the facility . . . but what gets a lot less attention today is actually what it takes to build the infrastructure around them,” says Nathan Creech, president of the Americas division at CRH, the $81 billion market cap building materials company. “Most people don’t see the below-the-ground infrastructure for water, for telecom, for energy that it takes, or the road systems to get in.” CRH is the largest building materials company in North America and Europe, providing aggregates, cement, road, and water infrastructure for building projects around the world. The company is currently working on more than 100 data centers in the U.S. This data center work was highlighted in the company’s third quarter financial results as a “robust” growth area and part of its $11.1 billion in quarterly revenue, which the company expects to continue to rise for the foreseeable future. Grading and site preparation underway at a Microsoft data center construction site in Aldie, Virginia. October, 2025. [Photo: Lexi Critchett/Bloomberg/Getty Images] Most of CRH’s large data center projects are covered by nondisclosure agreements, but you can probably imagine some of its potential customers. As competition for AI dominance heats up, so-called hyperscalers like Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle are investing in ever bigger data centers. AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have announced multibillion-dollar data center building sprees. According to one report, total data center construction spending is expected to exceed $52 billion in 2025. These investments will lead to a lot of state-of-the-art buildings. But first, they’ll require even more traditional infrastructure. And with construction material costs rising 40% over the past five years, all that infrastructure is part of the reason so much money is being spent to build these data centers. “Think about the water, energy, and communication systems required to operate themit’s a huge logistical challenge and demands a significant amount of expertise,” says Creech. What it takes to build a data center Once a big tech company has identified the site for a new data centera process that requires its own complex calculus to balance spatial demands, electricity generation capacity, and access to watera significant amount of concrete and asphalt has to be laid down. [Image: courtesy CRH] The estimated size of data centers varies from 20,000 square feet to 100,000 square feet, but CRH notes that average data center building typically requires 150,000 tons of aggregates, or enough to build a four-mile long lane of interstate highway. This is used to lay the concrete foundation for the building, as well as subsurface structures like water retention cisterns and retaining walls. Most of this material is mined and supplied locally. Roads have to be built to access these sites both during construction and operation, requiring even more raw materials. CRH operates more than 2,000 manufacturing plants and quarries across the U.S., and Creech estimates that 85% of U.S. datacenters sit within 30 miles of one of these facilities. For those projects that aren’t located near an existing facility, CRH builds them. [Image: courtesy CRH] “You hear about the main investments, but what you never hear about are the investments that we’re making in greenfields and building out new mines and making sure that there’s asphalt plants and concrete plants and pipe plants and paver plants that are in the area,” Creech says. “Because our products, you can’t ship them very far.” Speed has become a priority for many of these projects. Earlier this year Meta revealed that it was accelerating the startup time for new data centers by building them with hurricane-proof tents. A spokesperson told Fast Company at the time that tents are currently being set up as part of at least one of the multi-gigawatt data centers the company is building, located in New Albany, Ohio. [Image: courtesy CRH] Creech says this time pressure has also changed the way CRH approaches these big projects. Typically site works and utility infrastructure can take between three and six months to build, but he says there have been cases where CRH has sped up the delivery timeline of the baseline concrete pad infrastructure to just four weeks. An Amazon Web Services data center under construction on Quail Ridge Ln in Stone Ridge, Virginia. March, 2024. [Photo: Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images] The race to stand up AI data centers has some analysts concerned about overbuilding, cautioning that dynamics in data center technology and future demands may put some of the infrastructure being built at risk of becoming obsolete or even unnecessary. Some have even called this an “infrastructure bubble.” In the near term, none of these concerns seem to be stopping the building boom that’s now underway. And as it continues to progress, it’s going to require a whole lot of concrete. [Image: courtesy CRH]
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E-Commerce
The Phoenix Mercury rebranded for the first time in team history, and the new look is part of a wider trend across the WNBA as teams modernize their logos for a growing league. The new Mercury logo shows an “M” that’s a simplified version of the letter taken from the team’s old script wordmark. The bottom of the “M” is angled up at 19.97 degrees as a nod to the team’s 1997 founding as one of the league’s eight original franchises, and it’s set on a circle with a crescent shadow that represents the planet Mercury. The modernized logo was designed in-house. The rebrand comes at an inflection point for the team, which lost star player Diana Taurasi to retirement in February, and lost the 2025 WNBA championship to the Las Vegas Aces in October. The Mercury are considered the WNBA’s best-run organization, according to an anonymous survey of WNBA players released by The Athletic in July, in part because of their facilities. Mercury President Vince Kozar tells Fast Company, “Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to be a fan.” From left: The teams previous logo, and the new one [Image: Phoenix Mercury] It also comes at an inflection point for the league. Game attendance is at an all-time high, and the WNBA is expanding. The Golden State Valkyries joined last season, with the Portland Fire and Toronto Tempo set to debut next year, and future franchises planned for Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia, which would bring the league to 18 teams by 2030. In a more crowded league, teams are simplifying their branding to stand out. Before the Mercury, the New York Liberty introduced a simplified version of the teams Statue of Liberty logo in 2020 that’s just Lady Liberty’s hand holding a torch. And in 2021, the Seattle Storm dropped a logo showing a detailed Space Needle illustration in favor of a simpler form of the landmark. “What we learned looking at the Storm and Liberty examples was you can do a really clean modernizationone that cleans up the 90s busyness of the logo and streamlines your color schemewithout completely rebooting or reimagining your marks,” Kozar says. [Image: Phoenix Mercury] The mark is the team’s primary logo, but it has other new marks too, including those that set the team name in a futuristic sans-serif font. There’s a global mark that wraps the Mercury logo in a roundel, a “Merc” logo that writes out the nickname over a map outline of the state of Arizona, and a “PHX” logo that Nike created in 2021. Kozar says these additional marks, which will appear on uniforms, courts, and merchandise, “just give our brand so much more depth and diversity.
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E-Commerce
Authenticity is currency. You can spend it recklessly and go broke, or invest it strategically and build wealth. Most leaders are choosing bankruptcy without even realizing it. Right now, workplaces are debating authenticity. Some call “bring your whole self to work” a dangerous myth that punishes marginalized employees. Others claim it’s the secret to engagement and retention. Both are rightand both are missing something. Unfiltered authenticity without skill can be destructive. And yes, marginalized employees pay a higher price when they try to be authentic in systems that weren’t built for them. But your team already knows when you’re faking it. That difference between genuine authenticity and performed authenticity determines everythingtrust, safety, retention, innovation. Think about the best leader you’ve ever had. Now the worst. What separated them? Kevin Built Wealth. Nancy Went Broke An employee once described two former managers to melet’s call them Kevin and Nancy. Kevin had emotional intelligence. When you sent an email that landed wrong, he’d follow up: “Hey, I think you meant this . . .” He remembered small details from weeks ago. You felt seen. He operated from a place of genuine care. Nancy was polished. She said all the right things about supporting her team. But over time, you realized it was packagingfriendly but transactional. Like a car salesman calling you “buddy” while steering you toward the close. Surface-level all the way down. The result? People trusted Kevin enough to be vulnerable, to take risks, to bring their full selves. With Nancy, they performed. Stayed professional. Protected themselves. Kevin built wealth. Nancy went brokelosing her best people in the process. The Cost of Going Broke When leaders perform authenticity instead of practicing it, the price is steep. Trust erodes: Employees start second-guessing everything you say. They stop bringing you problems until they’ve become crises. They smile in meetings but vent about you in private Slack threads. Performance declines: When people feel unheard, they stop trying. They do the minimum, knowing their ideas will be dismissed or reworked later. Half-hearted efforts, wasted hours, and endless redos are all symptoms of leadership that performs authenticity instead of practicing it. Psychological safety vanishes: When you fake authenticity, your team learns to fake it right back. No one risks being vulnerable or challenges ideas. Creativity dies quietly in conference rooms where everyone nods along. Your best people leave: Not always loudly. Not immediately. But they start looking. They stop investing. They give you their labor, not their loyalty. For marginalized employees, the cost is even higher: Research shows the toll of code-switching and masking isn’t just emotionalit’s biological. Black adults, for example, “weather” years faster under chronic workplace stress, aging 6.1 years beyond their peers. Ninety-one percent of neurodivergent employees mask their traits at work, and most report burnout as a direct result. That’s what happens when people spend their careers navigating leaders like Nancyconstantly calculating, code-switching, and self-protecting while leadership performs its way through “authenticity.” It doesn’t just drain engagementit literally accelerates aging and drives talent out the door. What Building Wealth Actually Looks Like Kevin didn’t just happen to be authentic. He had the emotional intelligence to make authenticity work. Here’s what that looks like in practicethe four pillars of authentic leadership: Self-Awareness (Know Yourself): Kevin knew his triggers and blind spots. When he got impatient, he recognized it and communicated expectations clearly instead of lashing out. Nancy probably had no idea how she came acrossor worse, she knew and didn’t care. Transparency & Honesty (Show Yourself): Kevin admitted mistakes and shared challenges thoughtfully. Nancy talked about transparency but never revealed anything real. Her vulnerability was scripted. Consistency & Integrity (Be Yourself): Kevin’s actions matched his words whether you were in the room or not. People knew what to expect. Nancy adapted to the audiencewarm in meetings, different behind closed doors. Respectful Adaptation (Balance Yourself): Kevin was authentic without being unfiltered. He knew how to disagree respectfully, to be real without being reckless. Nancy confused polish with professionalism and never learned the difference. Without EQ, authenticity is chaosbluntness masquerading as bravery, oversharing disguised as vulnerability. With EQ, authenticity becomes the foundation for trust, creativity, and growth. Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself Here’s the uncomfortable truth: You might be Nancy and not know it. Cognitive dissonance lets us live with a lie. When we forfeit self-awareness for comfort, we convince ourselves we’re being authentic while we’re actually performing. We package our niceness. We script our vulnerability. We say the right words while our team watches our actionsand knows better. If this stirs some discomfort, that’s your cue to practice emotional intelligenceto pause, reflect, and not defend. Try this on Monday morning: Practice the pause. When someone challenges you, do you immediately defendor take a beat to ask, “What if they’re right?” Audit yourself. Do you remember what your people tell you? Do you follow up weeks later? When you admit a mistake, are you learningor just managing your image? These small acts separate the leaders building wealth from those heading toward bankruptcy. The Return on Investment When you invest authenticity wiselywith emotional intelligence as your guidethe returns compound: Trust multiplies: People stop hedging. They bring their full thinking, their wild ideas, their honest concerns. Problems get solved faster because no one’s wasting energy performing. Retention stabilizes: Your best people stay not for perks but for purpose. They don’t just work for youthey work with you. Innovation accelerates: Psychological safety fuels risk-taking. Teams build what mattersnot just what looks good in presentations. Culture sustains itself: Authentic leaders create authentic teams. It spreads. New hires learn what’s truly valuednot what’s written on the wall, but what’s modeled in the room. The difference between Kevin and Nancy wasn’t personality or charisma. It was the willingness to do the inner work required to show up authentically and skillfully. Kevin built wealth because he had the emotional intelligence to make authenticity work. Nancy went broke because she never learned th difference between saying the right words and being real. The question isn’t which leader you want to be. The question is: Which leader are your people actually experiencing?
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E-Commerce
In 1983, Howard Schultz was an employee of Starbucks, a small chain of coffee stores that mainly sold beans (and no drinks), when he was sent to Milan for a trade show. As Schultz observed Italians visiting their local cafés, he loved what he saw, describing it as a sense of community, a real sense of connection between the barista and the customer. A few years later, after Schultz convinced Starbuckss owners to sell him the company, the new owner attempted to build that same type of connection here in the U.S. To do so, Schultz knew he had to take care of his people. He called them partners, not employees, a symbol of a more collaborative working relationship. Over the years, Starbucks offered perks that were typically unheard of for part-time workers in food service, benefits like health insurance and contributions to college education. Nowadays, though, Starbucks seems to have lost the reputation for looking after its people. No doubt, at least part of the reason for that is Schultz has stepped down as CEO, multiple times, returning as the company struggled under his successors. A few years ago, after taking over on an interim basis, Schultz even went on a listening tour, visiting stores across the country to find out how the company had lost its way. Starbuckss brass, and even Schultz himself, became hopeful when the company tapped Brian Niccol, former CEO of Chipotle, to take over the helm. In the world of fast food and fast casual dining, Niccol was a superstar. Most recently, he had completed a major turnaround at Chipotle, a company that saw sales double in Niccols first year as CEO, along with a major rise in stock price. Everyone wondered the same thing: Could Niccol do the same for Starbucks? In the beginning, I liked what I saw. Niccol vowed to return Starbucks to its roots, with a renewed focus on serving the finest coffee and a plan to update stores to make them more welcoming. Niccol also returned fan favorites, like condiment bars so customers have more control over customization. But as more details of Niccols turnaround plan surfaced, concern grew. Baristas would be required to adhere to a much stricter dress code. They were given a set of guidelines, even a script, detailing their interactions with customers. Baristas were instructed to write something genuine on each customer cup, with threats of repercussions if they didnt. This is the fatal flaw in Niccols turnaround plans. The workplace has evolved, and command-and-control management is no longer effective, at least not long term. Thats especially true in the service industry, where trust empowers employees to connect with customers. Beyond that, Niccols latest policies are antithetical to how Schultz built Starbucks in the first placea company that prided itself on putting its people at the center of everything it did. In contrast, Niccol and his team would benefit from taking a close look at a recent turnaround story, led by a CEO who, like Niccol, had experience resurrecting a dying brand: James Daunt of Barnes & Noble. A former investment banker turned bookstore owner, Daunt took over the helm of Americas largest bookstore chain in 2019, which had been in steady decline for years. Since Daunt took over, Barnes & Noble has experienced a resurgence, leading to an expansion of dozens of new stores in 2023. This wasnt Daunts first successful turnaround. The British businessman did something similar in the U.K., where he revitalized another chain of flailing bookstores, Waterstones. So, how did Daunt get lightning to strike, twice? His hallmark strategy was simple: Give power to local store managers. We sort of take three steps forward and then one step back, Daunt once said in an interview with The New York Times. The forward is my constantly encouraging and pushing for the stores themselves to have the complete freedom to do absolutely whatever they wanthow they display their books, price their books, sort their sections, anything. Those freedoms are difficult if you lived in a very straitjacketed world where everything was dictated to you. In essence, Daunt turned local Barnes & Noble stores, and Waterstones stores before that, into indie bookstores. The strategy worked because of the trust he put in his people, and the power he gave them. Of course, theres more than one way to turn a company around. Niccol found success at Chipotle. But a focus on efficiency and policies over people is diametrically opposed to Schultzs dream for Starbucks: that Italian-inspired vision of local connection between barista and customer. I believe Niccols overarching goal to return Starbucks to its roots is a good one. But the companys ability to produce that experience of connection will depend on the people who are serving the drinksand that will require rebuilding a culture where Starbucks employees feel supported and cared for, not threatened. If Starbucks can get back to taking care of its people, its people will take care of the customers. And the turnaround will take care of itself. By Justin Bariso Sign up for my newsletter on how to build emotional intelligence in you and your team. This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister site, Inc.com. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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E-Commerce
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