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Ice cream maker Dreyers Grand Ice Cream Company has issued a voluntary recall of select Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Dark Chocolate Mini Bars after discovering they might have wheat in them. An investigation is underway, but Dreyers believes that food with wheat was put in the wrong packaging at the start of a production run, according to its announcement, published by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). There are no related illnesses or injuries as of Dreyers announcement on Monday, November 3. As Dreyers states, Those with an allergy or severe sensitivity to wheat run the risk of serious or life-threatening allergic reaction if they consume these products. According to the Cleveland Clinic, between 0.2% and 1.3% of individuals live with a wheat allergy worldwide. Which products are affected? The recall only affects a specific batch of Dreyers Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Dark Chocolate Mini Bars. Impacted products are in a six-count package with the following batch code and best by date: LLA519501: Best by January 31, 2027 This information should be visible on the side of the packaging, but an image of the product is available on the FDAs website. Where and when was the product sold? Dreyers didnt provide an exact timeframe for when it shipped the affected ice cream bars. However, it did state that the recalled Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Dark Chocolate Mini Bars were distributed to two retailers, Kroger and Giant Eagle. Below are the states where shipments were sent. Kroger: Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Georgia Idaho Illinois Indiana Kansas Kentucky Michigan Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Mexico Ohio Oregon South Carolina Tennessee Utah Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming Giant Eagle: Indiana Maryland Ohio Pennsylvania West Virginia These two grocers are the only ones with recalled ice cream bars, with no other batches or Häagen-Dazs products affected. What should I do if I have this product? If youre not allergic to wheat, then its up to you whether to eat the Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Dark Chocolate Mini Bars. According to Dreyer’s, Consumers with a wheat allergy or sensitivity who have purchased the affected product are urged not to consume the product and instead dispose of it or return it to their place of purchase for a full refund.
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E-Commerce
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has mandated that, beginning today, flights across America will be reduced at 40 airports due to the ongoing government shutdown. According to the agency, the flight reductions are being implemented due to safety issues stemming from a shortage of air traffic controllers, who are not being paid during the shutdown. The reductions are expected to lead to a wave of flight cancellations, the number of which is set to increase every day between now and November 14. Heres what you need to know about the flight reductions, including the full list and a map of the 40 airports affected. Why is the FAA mandating flight reductions? The FAA says it has safety concerns stemming from the ongoing government shutdown, which began on October 1 and is the longest US government shutdown in history. Hundreds of thousands of government workers have been furloughed without pay during the shutdown. But some federal employees, including air traffic controllers, are designated as essential workers. Those workers are required to stay on the job during a shutdown, though their pay is paused. The problem is that those essential workers still have bills to pay, so as the shutdown drags on, necessity dictates that some are resigning to take on other paid roles in the private sector, while others are calling in sick. Fewer air traffic controllers and other essential airport staff reporting to work means the risk to flier safety increases. To help mitigate that growing risk, the FAA has now decided to restrict a select number of flights at 40 U.S. airports. What are the specifics of the FAAs flight reductions? In a notice posted to the FAAs website yesterday, the agency said that it would initiate a 10% reduction in flights at 40 U.S. airports starting today, Friday, November 7. However, the reductions will be phased in gradually over the next week. The first reduction begins today, with the full 10% taking effect a week later. Here is how the reduction phases will work: Friday, November 7: 4% reduction in flight operations Tuesday, November 11: 6% reduction in flight operations Thursday, November 13: 8% reduction in flight operations Friday, November 14: 10% reduction in flight operations Announcing the reductions, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said that the agency was seeing signs of stress in the system, so we are proactively reducing the number of flights to make sure the American people continue to fly safely. He also warned that the FAA will not hesitate to take further action if needed. What airports are affected by the FAA reductions? Most of the major airports in the country are impacted by the reductions, including central hubs like John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport, and Chicago OHare International Airport. The full list of airports affected is as follows: ANC Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport ATL Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport BOS Boston Logan International Airport BWI Baltimore/Washington International Airport CLT Charlotte Douglas International Airport CVG Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport DAL Dallas Love Field DCA Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport DEN Denver International Airport DFW Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport DTW Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport EWR Newark Liberty International Airport FLL Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport HNL Honolulu International Airport HOU William P. Hobby Airport IAD Washington Dulles International Airport IAH George Bush Houston Intercontinental Airport IND Indianapolis International Airport JFK New York John F. Kennedy International Airport LAS Las Vegas McCarran International Airport LAX Los Angeles International Airport LGA New York LaGuardia Airport MCO Orlando International Airport MDW Chicago Midway International Airport MEM Memphis International Airport MIA Miami International Airport MSP MinneapolisSt. Paul International Airport OAK Oakland International Airport ONT Ontario International Airport ORD Chicago OHare International Airport PDX Portland International Airport PHL Philadelphia International Airport PHX Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport SAN San Diego International Airport SDF Louisville International Airport SEA SeattleTacoma International Airport SFO San Francisco International Airport SLC Salt Lake City International Airport TEB Teterboro Airport TPA Tampa International Airport window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}); What flights will be reduced? If your flight is among the reductions, it will be canceled. But it appears that those cancellations will not be decided by the FAA itself. Instead, it will be left up to the airlines to decide which flights they will cut to meet their reduction requirements. In the memo the FAA posted, the agency states that The order does not require a reduction in international flights. Carriers may use their own discretion to decide which flights are canceled to reach the orders goal. Can I get a refund if my flight is canceled? Yesterday, Fast Company reported that many major U.S. airlines, including United Airlines, American Airlines, and Delta Air Lines, confirmed that they would issue full refunds to passengers whose flights are canceled. However, other airlines remained silent on the matter. But now it appears airlines will not have a choice in the matter. The FAAs memo states that Airlines will be required to issue full refunds. However, the FAA says airlines will not be responsible for covering secondary costs, such as hotel stays. That means if your flight is canceled, you can get a full refund from the airline, but if that cancellation requires you to stay at a local hotel until you can get on another flight, the airline will not be responsible for covering your hotel costs. Will flight cancellations get worse? That remains to be seen and is largely dependent on how long the government shutdown drags on. What’s certain is that cancellations will increase from today until next Friday, when the full 10% reduction order takes effect. But there is no guarantee that reductions will remain capped at 10%. The FAA says that Decisions to increase or decrease these flight reductions will be informed by safety data.
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E-Commerce
A decade ago, Ben Collins quit his job as a corporate accountant and started teaching other people how to use spreadsheets more effectively. That move, terrifying as it seemed at the time, paid off brilliantly. Today Collins is the proprietor of an online spreadsheet training academy and the author of a weekly newsletter dedicated entirely to Google Sheets tips. Some 50,000 people subscribe. And yet once again Collins is finding himself facing a sense of uncertainty over what’s nextas the very nature of what a spreadsheet even is enters a dizzying spiral of transformation. “We’ve had more innovation in the last two years than in the 20 before that,” Collins says, referencing the explosion of generative AI technology and its effect on the spreadsheet arena. He isn’t exaggerating. Up until recently, figuring out how to use a spreadsheet to its full potential was akin to learning a foreign language: You had complex formulas, mountains of cryptic functions, and a labyrinth of overwhelming options to decipher. If you were trying to do anything beyond just putting a few pieces of basic data into cells, you practically needed a dedicated spreadsheet expert to figure out how to make it happen. But generative AI is currently reshaping the humble and stubbornly complex spreadsheetwhich, for the most part, seems to be a good thing. After all, no one wants a massive project (or migraine) every time the need for crunching numbers comes up. And while generative AI has plenty of issues both practical and ethical, working within the confines of a single spreadsheet and the black-and-white world of objective data seems to be where those limitations are least troubling, and where AI’s strengths are primed to shine. Still, there’s no escaping that a whole new era is upon us. The biggest question now is how, exactly, it all plays out from hereand whether the need for a spreadsheet expert, be it an independent consultant like Collins or the go-to problem-solver within any office or organization, is bound to evolve or destined to become a relic from a bygone time. The spreadsheet in the AI era When Collins quit his accounting job in 2014 and embarked on a self-made, spreadsheet-centric career path, Anna Monaco was 11 years old. Today, at the ripe old age of 22, Monaco is the founder and CEO of Paradigm, a next-gen spreadsheet service that makes Excel look like an abacus by comparison. Anna Monaco [Photo: Paradigm] The idea behind Paradigm is to take all the complexity and manual effort out of spreadsheets and make managing data simple. Instead of worrying about formulas and functions and formatting, you just upload your dataor even tell the service what sort of data you need and let it source it for you. Paradigm creates your spreadsheet, makes it look slick and professional, and suggests next-step actions to work with the data and put it to practical use. “Manual data entry shouldn’t exist,” Monaco says. “We’re not just a spreadsheet. We’re replacing weeks of labor.” Paradigm and its AI-centric spreadsheet startup contemporariesservices such as Sourcetable, Grid, and Juliusaren’t only replacing labor. They’re also replacing an entire way of thinking about spreadsheets and their role in our lives. And while the reigning spreadsheet-service royalty aren’t exactly rushing to rebuild their long-established interfaces, the same basic principle is already appearing in those environments as well, albeit on a much smaller scale and in a more tacked-on sense. To wit: Microsoft’s AI Copilot is now thoroughly integrated into Excel and can be summoned to help you create formulas and analyze data without needing to do all the traditional heavy lifting. And Google is doing something similar with Gemini in Sheets, now making the chatbot available on demand in any cell with a simple (though extremely familiar-feeling to any longtime spreadsheet user) “=AI” command for summoning its assistance. “You dont need to be an AI or spreadsheet expert to do it,” Google wrote in its announcement of the expansion. Ben Collins [Photo: Ben Collins] Of curse, not everyone is ecstatic about the in-your-face AI in those more traditional spreadsheet setupsespecially people who arent seeking out such features and find their presence can be annoying or even downright dangerous. AI features often insert themselves into situations regardless of whether they’re actively summoned. And while AI-introduced errors within a spreadsheet generally seem at least a little less egregious than generative AI at its most hallucinogenic, Microsoft is warning that Copilot is best suited for “scenarios where deterministic accuracy is not required” and not for “any task requiring accuracy or reproducibility” (ouch). So where, then, does all of this leave the spreadsheet expertsfolks like Ben Collins who have spent decades building up deep knowledge in the inner workings of the spreadsheet and all the logic around it? The answer, it turns out (much like the conventional spreadsheet itself) is complicated. Expertise, reinvented Collins sees what’s happening with spreadsheets at Google and Microsoft, and at the more ambitious scrappy spreadsheet startups like Paradigm, as an unambiguous net positive. “All the AI stuff is democratizing spreadsheets in the same way it’s doing for coding,” he says. “It lets more people have access to those insights and that knowledge rather than just the technically savvy crowd.” And yetlike in so many other industries right nowit’s impossible to avoid questions over the effects this shift could have on the future. We’re all living through a transition where some say AI is taking away countless jobs and others insist it’s creating as many as it’s killing, or at the very least just changing what types of roles matter. As with many careers, the only real certainty surrounding spreadsheet-related professions right now is a complete and utter sense of uncertainty. Collins, for his part, remains upbeat. He says he’s seen a shift in the sort of information knowledge workers are seeking around spreadsheets but that he continues to see a strong demand for a deeper understanding of the tools themselves and the data philosophies around them. “There’s still a need to have a foundation of knowledge and an understanding of how these things work,” Collins says, even if only so you can figure out how to ask an AI assistant for what you need and then assess the quality of what you’re given in return. “It’s less emphasis on pure syntax and the mechanics and more [on] how we can use these tools at a higher level and be more effective,” he adds. Collins also notes that for all the buzz around newer AI-centric spreadsheet tools, the vast majority of peopleand businessesare so deeply engrained in the Google or Microsoft ecosystems and so familiar with those environments and the security assurances around them that they won’t be making a major night-and-day change anytime soon. Even if AI does slowly seep its way into their work within those domains. That’s a point Monaco is well aware of. She sees Paradigm as being less of a play at pulling the masses away from Sheets or Excel and more of a forward-looking option for a different generation of businesses. “There’s a new way that companies are being built, where smaller teams are commanding a lot more resources and doing a lot more powerful things with the resources they have,” she says. “Paradigm is building for that future.” One thing she and Collins agree on is that the need for expertise isn’t going anywhere. Monaco says she’s already seeing the emergence of what she calls “Paradigm consultants”people who specialize specifically in supporting the tool she created and helping users figure out how to get the most out of it. “It’s a different expertise,” Monaco says. “There’s still a huge value in becoming a power user and knowing how to harness these tools. There’s an even bigger value now that these tools are more powerful.” Collins also envisions his role evolving. And he is 100% up to the challenge of adapting right alongside that. “The need for training is as strong as ever,” he says. And that, it seems, is something where a genuine human touch and the type of critical-thinking perspective AI can’t entirely emulate remainsfor the current moment, at leastas important as ever.
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E-Commerce
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