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If youre on the way to the office this morning and want to pick up some treats for your colleagues, you may want to swing by a Krispy Kreme. The donut chain is offering customers a great deal today: the chance to purchase a dozen Original Glazed donuts for less than a buck. Heres what you need to know about Krispy Kremes 88-cent dozen donuts deal. Krispy Kreme celebrates 88th birthday with 88-cent dozen donuts deal Krispy Kreme, the chain that is notorious for seemingly finding any excuse to give away its donuts, is celebrating its 88th birthday today. In honor of that birthday, Krispy Kreme is offering customers the chance to buy a dozen Original Glazed donuts for just 88 cents, with an additional purchase. Krispy Kreme, which now operates in more than 40 countries, was founded in July 1937 by Vernon Rudolph. Rudolph, the company says, began selling his donuts to grocery stores, but when passersby crossed his kitchen, they smelled the scent of the sweet treats drifting across the sidewalk. Rudolph reportedly then cut a hole in the kitchens wall so that he could sell to these pedestrians directly. Eighty-eight years later, the companys name is synonymous with donuts. And today, you can get a great deal on a dozen of them. Heres how to get a dozen donuts for 88 cents For one day only today (Friday, July 18), Krispy Kreme is offering customers the chance to buy a dozen Original Glazed donuts for just 88 cents when they purchase any dozen donuts at the regular price. There are two ways to get your dozen Original Glazed donuts for just 88 cents today: Go to any Krispy Kreme shop and buy a dozen of any variety of donuts and tell the cashier you also want to pick up a dozen Original Glazed donuts for just 88 cents. Buy a dozen of any variety of donuts from Krispy Kreme online for pickup or delivery and enter the code BDAY to redeem the option to grab a dozen Original Glazed donuts for just 88 cents. The full terms of the 88-cent deal can be found here. Free donuts are great, but maybe not for the stock While Krispy Kreme fans may cheer the companys 88th birthday deal, investors certainly arent cheering Krispy Kreme’s (Nasdaq: DNUT) stock price this year. In early May, DNUT shares plummeted nearly 30% after the company suspended its dividend payments. At the same time, Krispy Kreme also announced that it was reassessing its partnership with McDonald’s, which saw Krispy Kreme donuts sold in McDonalds locations across the country. A month later, the two food giants announced that their partnership was indeed ending this July. The companies cited cost issues that made the partnership unsustainable. The McDonalds news came after Krispy Kreme reported poor first-quarter 2025 financial results in early May. For the quarter, it posted revenue of $375.2 million, while previously forecasting revenue of over $385 million. In fact, shares in Krispy Kreme have been trading lower for a while. Year to date, the companys stock price is down over 68% as of yesterdays close. On Thursday, DNUT shares closed at $3.11. That share price is a far cry from the $17 per share at which the companys stock debuted in its initial public offering in July 2021. Since then, DNUT shares have declined more than 80%. But if investors are looking for a little icing on the cake, they can at least take heart in DNUTs recent stock price movement. Over the past month, Krispy Kreme shares are up over 14% as of yesterdays close.
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E-Commerce
If you ask a doctor about ADHD, they will tell you that its a developmental disorder characterized by traits of forgetfulness, impulsivity, and disorganization. However, there are so many great qualities associated with ADHD that dont get discussed, just some of which include creativity, resilience, problem-solving, and hyper focus. Neurodivergent people are the worlds best problem-solvers. We have had to practice it for our entire lives. From a very young age we have had to find unique solutions to really difficult problems because we are intrinsically a little bit different. We are also great at reading other people. We can hyper focus on peoples micro communications, pick up on tiny fluctuations in tone of voice, and little changes in facial expressions that neurotypical people miss. We can recognize patterns in peoples mannerisms, which enables us to judge someones character extremely effectively. Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria People with ADHD people are criticised around 20,000 more times than your average child. We have heard things like, why are you being lazy, stop fidgeting, and be normal. This means that as adults we are often more sensitive to rejection, and might experience something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, which causes intense pain triggered by real or perceived rejection. For example, if you dont explicitly invite an ADHD person to a social event, we will assume you dont actually want us there. If you say, “come if you want,” we will think that our presence at that social event is a nuisance, and might even think you hate us as well. Similarly, if you dont tell someone with ADHD that you explicitly like them, we will assume that you tolerate us. And as a manager, if you ask an ADHD person for a quick chat, we might assume you want a quick chat so you can fire us. Carefully consider your wording and make sure to balance any feedback with positive comments. Be explicit and intentional when sending invitations to work events and briefly explain what any quick chats will cover. Integrating regular breaks When RSD hits us, it hits hard. We might need a minute to remove ourselves from any situation, whether thats going to get some fresh air, or pacing up and down the street for a while. Allowing for breaks and not questioning it will help put space between the stimulus and reaction, allowing our brain time to regulate itself again and not be influenced by intense feelings. The pause also allows us to practise self-compassion and not react impulsively in the moment. If someone asks for a minute, it might be the break they need to return back fully focussed. Burnout and vulnerability Its common for ADHD employees to overwork, stay up late into the night, and push ourselves to the limit. They have spent their whole lives feeling as if theyre not good enough, so its no surprise they might feel like they have something to prove. The early warning signs are unique to all of us and we all need to be aware of our own, but its sometimes possible to spot it in other people as well. Some of these early signs might include: becoming easily agitated, forgetting things that would usually be remembered, becoming less patient, and neglecting self-care. One way leaders can help is by creating culture of psychological safety, where your employees feel able to speak out if they are struggling. If your culture is about purely celebrating wins then you are not really creating an environment where other people feel safe to ask for help if they need it. Its important to set the tone from above that its okay to be vulnerable and speak out about anything that might be causing stresswhether its social interactions, difficulties with tasks, or deadline difficulties. Remember that everyone is unique Many leaders think that a blanket accommodations policy will be beneficial to everyone. You often see companies say that they will integrate movement breaks, adopt flexible working, and normalize fidget toys and noise-cancelling headphones. These are great, but leaders need to recognize that everyone has a brain as unique as their fingerprint, and everyones needs will be different. It’s more important to create a culture of psychological safety, where people feel empowered to speak up and ask for the specific support they need to perform their job well.
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E-Commerce
This is an edition of Plugged In, a weekly newsletter by Fast Company global technology editor Harry McCracken. You can sign up to receive it each Friday and read all issues here. Hello and welcome back to Plugged In. We at Fast Company are uncommonly fond of the year 1995. After all, it’s the year we officially began ongoing publication, after putting out a test issue in 1993. But there’s a more straightforward reason why we decided to publish a series of stories this week about some of 1995’s most significant products and developments. Last year, we produced a package paying tribute to 1994, and it turned out so well we decided to continue the tradition of 30-year-old flashbacks. Here are the seven stories that make up our 1995 Week: How Sega’s surprise Saturn launch backfiredand changed gaming forever ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ predicted our addictive digital future This IBM ThinkPad was astounding in 1995and still is 1995 was the year the internet grew up Windows 95’s look and feel are more impressive than ever How Newgrounds accidentally became one of online culture’s defining sites The AOL hacking tool that invented phishing and inspired a generation Until we began work on these stories, I’d forgotten that in 2015 we published a similar roundup of articles timed to 20 years post-1995 (I told you it’s a special year to us.) The topics were entirely different from what we picked this time, so what the heckhere are those pieces, too: 1995: The Year Everything Changed What it Was Like to Build a World Wide Web Site in 1995 What it Was Like to Attend Hacker High When They Filmed Hackers at My High School How Match.com Has Helped Us Hook Up and Find Love Since 1995 Submerged as we are in a never-ending deluge of news about AI and other pressing subjects, it’s always nice to have an excuse to briefly press pause on concerns of the day and look back. At the same time I get nervous about growing too nostalgic. Any objective assessment of tech circa 1995 should acknowledge that in many ways it was terrible. For starters, the PCs were disastrously crash-prone and prone to eating your work in a way that’s far less common today. Sans modern conveniences such as USB and Wi-Fi, they made tasks as fundamental as adding a printer into a bit of a science project. Online search tools were rudimentary, digital photography wasn’t yet capable of competing with film, and downloading software such as Netscape Navigator over a dial-up connection took so long that it was borderline impractical. In short, I don’t want to go back. Yet thinking about the period as we worked on our new series, I also developed a new appreciation for what we’ve lost. Many of the ways technology has changed everyday life for the better were yet to comebut so were most of its downsides. In case you’ve forgotten the state of computing in 1995or weren’t around to experience ita study from October of that year provides some helpful context. Conducted by the Times Mirror Center, it reported that only 32% of Americans used computers. Of them, only a subset went onlinetypically a few times a week. They typically sent three email messages per day and received five. Just 32% of those online said they would miss it “a lot” if they couldn’t do it anymore, a far lower percentage than the newspaper readers and cable TV subscribers who deemed those media essential. In other words, the digital world didn’t matter all that much, even to most of the relatively few Americans who were online. It’s tough to have an unhealthy relationship with a technology if you use it only occasionally and can easily see yourself living without it. Nobody checked their smartphone a jillion times a day in 1995: Smartphones barely existed and weren’t yet connected to the internet. Even laptops were a rarity, owned by only 18% of people who had a PC, according to the Times Mirror study. Instead, computing was still nearly synonymous with desktop PCs, and going online was a conscious decision involving a dial-up modem and a phone line. Unless you had two lines, you couldn’t even check your email if someone else in the house was making a call. Compared to a modern computer or phone with a persistent internet connection, a 1995 PC on dial-up was a Fortress of Solitude. Hackers were already wreaking havoc when they couldread Alex Pasternack’s story on “AOHell” for proofbut with e-commerce and online banking still rare, there was a limit to how much damage they could do. Being overrun in notifications was unknown, because there was no practical way to deliver them to a computing device. (Even Pointcast, the famously bandwidth-sucking alert system that pioneered “push” technology, didn’t arrive until 1996.) The business models that powered access to technology in 1995 also feel healthier than those of 2025. Online advertising was already getting rollingWired.com ran the web’s first banner ad in October 1994but the days of tech giants collecting vast amounts of personal data and using it to target adertising were still in the future. People paid for tech products with money, not by sacrificing some of their privacy. In retrospect, it all seems downright Edenesque. But the consumers of 1995including medidn’t look at it that way, because we didn’t know what was to come. The Times Mirror survey says that 50% of respondents were already concerned about computers being used to invade privacy. Some 24% considered themselves “overloaded with information,” though perhaps they were more stressed out by an excess of cable channels than anything they were doing on a computer. The Times Mirror Center later changed its name to the Pew Research Center and continues to survey Americans about their attitude toward technology. In April, it reported that twice as many adults thought that AI’s impact over the next 20 years would be negative than those who expected it to be positive. I can’t help but think that the past three decades have left us more jaded than we were in the 1990sand that it’s a fair reaction to what the tech industry has given us. Will the tech of 2045 or 2055 prompt reveries for the simpler times of 2025? It’s a scary thought. I repeat: I have no desire to return to the tech of 1995. But understanding it better can help gird us for what’s next. That was among our goals for 1995 Week, and I hope it shows in our stories. More top tech stories from Fast Company Slack expands AI features with enterprise search, translation, and smart summariesNew offerings will be able to draft documents and answer questions based on knowledge housed in Slack and linked cloud systems.Read More How to launch a great product: Advice from a Google execIt comes down to balancing the three Ps: people, politics, and product.Read More YouTube Shorts algorithm steers users away from political content, study findsResearchers say YouTube’s algorithm downplays political topics in favor of viral entertainment to keep users watching.Read More This beloved retro gaming computer is making a comebackand it’ll cost you $299A reimagined Commodore 64 is now available for preorder, offering nostalgia with updated specs and support for classic games.Read More Inside the redesign that will make you actually want to use NextdoorThe hyperlocal app is moving away from its message board layout with a new focus on local news, real-time alerts, and AI suggestions.Read More Gmail’s new ‘Manage Subscriptions’ tool could change email marketing foreverGoogle is rolling out a powerful unsubscribe feature in Gmail that gives users more controland marketers a reason to rethink their strategy.Read More
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Known for launching Broadway hits and hosting celebrity casts, the storied Williamstown Theatre Festival is writing its next chapter, both onstage and behind the scenes. With a new creative director, expanded programming, and what it describes as a startup mentality, the festival aims to become the “Coachella of theater,” bringing the legacy institution to newfound cultural relevancy. The festival kicked off its 71st iteration on Thursday, July 17, on the picturesque campus of Williams College in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. While not necessarily a household name to non-theater fans, it has been a major springboard for talent for decades, helping to launch the careers of renowned actors Christopher Walken, Bradley Cooper, and Viola Davis, and playwrights Dominique Morisseau, Terrence McNally, and Michael R. Jackson, among many others. Yet despite its storied legacy, the festival is facing similar struggles as its peers. Nonprofit theaters across the country have been hurting since the pandemic, struggling to regain their pre-COVID audiences, leading to a number of closures, fewer shows, and scaled-back programming. “The traditional nonprofit theater model isn’t sustainable anymore, and our choice in this moment was really innovation over inertia,” Raphael Picciarelli, managing director of strategy and transformation at Williamstown, told Fast Company. While before, programming centered on single theater productions, with around seven plays spread out over 12 weeks, the new model condenses the festival’s timeline, offers experiences beyond sit-down shows, and brings big names like Jeremy O. Harris and Kaia Gerber to the mix. Jeremy O. Harris (left) and Raphael Picciarelli [Photo: Matthew Leifheit/courtesy Williamstown Theatre Festival] “We’re really reimagining our entire operating and business model,” Picciarelli says. With big risk comes big investment: The festival is increasing its budget for this summer to $8 million, up from $4.7 million last year. The increase is made possible with help from a number of large anonymous donors, the festival says, while the organization is actively pursuing new revenue streams. Staging transformation Picciarelli first joined Williamstown at a “point of reflection,” he says, following a series of work culture concerns and rising costs in the industry, and with many live theater organizations still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic. With a background in consulting (he advised C-suite executives on how to change organizations from the inside out) in addition to live theater, Picciarelli began consulting for the festival during the summer of 2023. “The leadership and board made a very sound, responsible decision to pull back in terms of programming and to take a second to really think about the future,” he says, referencing a more limited 2023 repertoire. Early on, Picciarelli identified the organization’s strongest traits, its small 14-person full-time team and renowned legacy, which combined with the festival’s yearn for change proved to be a perfect opportunity for transformation. “There was a real desire for innovation, which you don’t always see at legacy institutions,” he says. “Innovation requires the space to try and fail and try again.” For instance, last year the festival held a weekend event with 16 shows to test how many shows could be staged simultaneously. It turns out 16 was too much,” says Antonello Di Benedetto, assistant managing director and a staff member of nine years. “That’s how we settled on eight for this year. We’re going to see if that is the right cadence, or if we need to increase it or decrease it next year. But it’s totally a prototype.” Serving as an experiment for the future of the festival, and theater industry as a whole, Williamstown is spearheading change with cues from the private sector, and startups in particular. “Adopting a startup mindset, as opposed to a more institutional mindset, is about testing new formats, rethinking how people access the work, and creating this more flexible, nimble infrastructure to really support that right,” Picciarelli says. New strategies, big names Operationally, one of the biggest additions to the festival is the creation of its “creative collective,” a group of multidisciplinary guest curators set to rotate every year, led by Harris, who rose to fame as the writer of Broadway’s Tony-nominated Slave Play. “A key part of this innovation in terms of bringing new voices into the artistic process [is] really breaking open the curation model,” Picciarelli says. The collective includes Gerber with Alyssa Reeder; Christopher Rudd; and Alex Stoclet, who are leading the literary, dance, and music curation, respectively. The introduction of musical elements and dance as alternative forms to experience storytelling is also a part of the festival’s transformative push. Additionally, the festival is adopting a multiday ticketing approach. Its like the Coachella or Sundance of theater, where you’re bringing people together over an extended period of time to just immerse themselves,” Di Benedetto says. In terms of onstage programing, organizers are also taking risks and attracting known talentfor instance, by staging the first opera in the festival’s history, or bringing actresses like Pamela Anderson and Amber Heard to this year’s productions. Visitors can also enjoy visual and audio installations, nature walks, comedy shows, and even a show in an ice rink. Building the right guardrails Beyond what visitors can expect to see while at the festival, a lot of the transformation has taken place behind the curtain to build a new work culture. As is common in the theater industry, labor at the festival had been unregulated and oftentimes unpaid. In 2021, the Los Angeles Times reported on a eight-page letter sent to the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s organizers and board of trustees outlining a toxic work culture and pattern of safety hazards in the organization. “People overworked themselves because they were doing it for the love of the art. But we have to be honestit’s also a profession,” Di Benedetto says. “If any other industry behaved in the same way, it would never hold water.” He adds that the theater industry “is now finally catching up to the idea that this is also a job.” Organizers are trying to prove there can be a business model in theater that is not reliant on exploitation. Since 2021, all seasonal workers at the festival are paid regardless of their position, including apprentices and interns. Additionally, while seasonal workers could previously be staffed to do various things, from electrical to costume work, positions are now structured with clear expectations. Written guidelines are also enforced to keep workers and the organization accountable, and to ensure that all team members are treated equitably and respectfully. For instance, daily and weekly hour caps and mandatory breaks throughout the day are now in practice. A list of culture values and statements was also developed ahead of this year’s festival, and will be available on the newly launched “company hub, which centralizes information for staff. “As we are in this startup phase and as much as we’re really pushing forward in inventive ways, we also know where we’ve been,” Picciarelli says. “Part of this work is also continuing to be cognizant and review and be careful with our internal practices to really ensure that this is a healthy, respectful, and sustainable place to beand to work with that, building the right guardrails, investing in our people in the right way.”
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E-Commerce
The already complicated process of paying back student loans just got even more complicated. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision to let President Donald Trump resume hollowing out the Department of Education, lifting the lower court injunction that halted his efforts back in May. (SCOTUS provided no rationale for the decision, other than the lack of any law expressly prohibiting itnot unlike Air Bud rules.) The decision allowed Trump to continue laying off Education employees by the hundreds, and to offload some of the departments key programs to other agencies. The potential disruption in loan servicing systems and processes that may follow, however, is just the latest financial challenge student loan borrowers are now up against. Student borrowers have walked an uncertain path out of the pandemic. In August 2022, during a years-long federal pause on payments that would ultimately end one year later, President Joe Biden attempted to issue a sweeping tide of debt cancellation. He invoked the HEROES Act, a 9/11-era law that lets the Department of Education augment student loans during a national crisis, but the move was quickly challenged by Republican senators and blocked by lower courts. SCOTUS eventually struck down the mass loan forgiveness effort in June 2023, ruling that the president lacked statutory authority. In response, the administration pivoted to selective work-arounds, ultimately approving more than $180 billion in student-debt relief for more than 5 million borrowers by January 2025. A lot has changed in the months since, including the May introduction of involuntary debt collection for some of the 5.3 million student borrowers in default, after years of pandemic-era leniency. Many of the changes, however, have arrived in just the past two weeks, and they’re going to have long-lasting consequences. One big beautiful debacle Considering all the competing concerns around Trumps puerilely titled Big Beautiful Bill, some of its myriad provisions have received less attention than others. Among them are a flurry of changes to the way student borrowers repay loansboth future borrowers and current ones. At the moment, borrowers have the ability to pause student-loan payments if they lose their job or earn less than the minimum wage. The passage of the tax bill, however, completely eliminates those unemployment and economic hardship deferment options for students taking out federal loans after July 2027. Rather than encourage more responsible borrowing, this move seems likely to result in far more defaulting on loans. The biggest change from the tax bill for student borrowers, however, is that the existing slate of at least six repayment plans will be streamlined into just two options as of next summer. Trumps bill terminates current plans such as the Income-Contingent Repayment plan, PAYE plan, and Bidens much-challenged SAVE plan (more on that one momentarily) in favor of either a fixed repayment option or the income-fueled Repayment Assistance Program, which allows borrowers to apply part of their monthly income to loan repayment for up to 30 years. Student borrowers using any current plans have until July 2028 to pick one of the new ones. Of those affected, though, current SAVE plan borrowers may have the most to sweat over. Interest payments return soon for millions When student loan payments resumed in August 2023, after a three-and-a-half-year pause, borrowers had to navigate making them against the rising cost of living and stagnant wages that drove economic panic throughout the 2024 election. No wonder only about half of the nearly 43 million borrowers who collectively owed $1.5 trillion in outstanding student loans as of January 2024 remained up to date on their payments. Easing some of their burden, Bidens SAVE, or Saving on a Valuable Education plan, sought to make student loan payments more affordable by scaling them according to income and family sizeand in some cases erasing them altogether. Last July, though, amid multiple lawsuits alleging Biden lacked the authority to enact the SAVE plan, federal judges in two district courts put SAVE on ice while weighing the legal merit of those suits. As a result, borrowers enrolled in SAVE fell into administrative forbearance, with a pause on monthly payments and interest accrual. But back in February, an appeals court sided with the lawsuits, sending the SAVE plan into further legal limbo. Now the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act includes text that eliminates the SAVE plan entirely starting next year. Within days of the tax bills passage, the Department of Education deemed the Biden administrations deployment of the SAVE plan illegal and announced that loan payments and interest fees for 8 million student loan borrowers would resume on August 1. It was the last major announcement from the department before SCOTUS ruled on Monday that the president could continue gutting it, further obscuring the path ahead for borrowers. More administrative chaos on the way Not only was shutting down the Department of Education one of the objectives listed in Project 2025, its been a goal of the conservative movemnt since at least 1980, when then-candidate Ronald Reagan campaigned for president in part on a promise to abolish the then-newly opened department. (Since Democrats controlled congress at the time, they later blocked the Reagan administrations efforts to abolish it.) Now that this mission to leave education up to individual states is on the verge of total success, the process for repaying loans is potentially headed for total chaos. Trump previously announced plans to move management of the entire $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio from the Department of Education to the Small Business Administration, but conducting a migration of that magnitude without an airtight strategy in place will almost certainly lead to untold disruption in services. “It takes resources to manage that asset, including trained staff to make sure borrowers have good information and colleges can administer loan programs properly,” Peter Granville, a higher education finance expert, told CBS News back in March, when Trump began dismantling the department. “It takes technical expertise that only Education Department officials have.” The sloppy rollout of cuts by Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency this year does not exactly instill confidence that this administration will implement any changes to loan servicing systems with care and finesse. Indeed, when the administration initially laid off half the staff from the Department of Education in Marcha move officially allowed by this weeks SCOTUS rulingan hours-long outage at StudentAid.gov followed the next day, along with other FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) outages. Who knows how much further deterioration will ensue when even more institutional knowledge is lost? The legality of the plan to shut down the Department of Education will almost certainly face other challenges in the months and years ahead, leaving borrowers exposed to potential back-and-forth shifts that could cause billing confusion, lost payment data, or worse. One things for sure, though: Whatever Biden-era student borrowers have learned while in college, when the bill comes due, they may never know exactly how much they owe and to whom they owe it.
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E-Commerce
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