In the United States, the technology was hampered by clumsy marketing, a lack of consumer understanding and the hassle of needing a special app to scan the codes, said Scott Stratten, who wrote the 2013 business book “QR Codes Kill Kittens” with his wife, Alison Stratten.

That has changed for two reasons, Mr. Stratten said. In 2017, he said, Apple made it possible for the cameras in iPhones to recognize QR codes, spreading the technology more widely. Then came the “pandemic, and it’s amazing what a pandemic can make us do,” he said.

Half of all full-service restaurant operators in the United States have added QR code menus since the start of the pandemic, according to the National Restaurant Association. In May 2020, PayPal introduced QR code payments and has since added them at CVS, Nike, Foot Locker and around one million small businesses. Square, another digital payments firm, rolled out a QR code ordering system for restaurants and retailers in September.

Businesses don’t want to give up the benefits that QR codes have brought to their bottom line, said Sharat Potharaju, the chief executive of the digital marketing company MobStac. Deals and special offers can be bundled with QR code systems and are easy to get in front of people when they look at their phones, he said. Businesses also can gather data on consumer spending patterns through QR codes.

“With traditional media, like a billboard or TV, you can estimate how many people may have seen it, but you don’t know how people actually interacted with it,” said Sarah Cucchiara, a senior vice president at BrandMuscle, a marketing firm that introduced a QR code menu product last year. “With QR codes, we can get reporting on those scans.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/26/technology/qr-codes-tracking.html

He did not respond, but days later Apple posted an internal video in which company executives doubled down on bringing workers back to the office. In the video, Dr. Sumbul Desai, who helps run Apple’s digital health division, encouraged workers to get vaccinated but stopped short of saying they would be required to, according to a transcript viewed by The Times.

The video didn’t sit well with some employees.

“OK, you want me to put my life on the line to come back to the office, which will also decrease my productivity, and you’re not giving me any logic on why I actually need to do that?” said Ashley Gjovik, a senior engineering program manager.

When the company delayed its return-to-office date on Monday, a group of employees drafted a new letter, proposing a one-year pilot program in which people could work from home full time if they chose to. The letter said an informal survey of more than 1,000 Apple employees found that roughly two-thirds would question their future at the company if they were required to return to the office.

In Los Angeles, Endeavor, the parent company of the William Morris Endeavor talent agency, reopened its Beverly Hills headquarters this month. But it decided to shut down again last week when the county reimposed its indoor mask mandate in the face of surging case counts. An Endeavor spokesman said the company had decided that enforcement would be too difficult and would hinder group meetings.

The employment website Indeed had been targeting Sept. 7 as the date when it would start bringing workers back on a hybrid basis. Now it has begun to reconsider those plans, the company’s senior vice president of human resources, Paul Wolfe, said, “because of the Delta variant.”

Some companies said the recent spike in cases had not yet affected their return-to-office planning. Facebook still intends to reopen at 50 percent capacity by early September. IBM plans to open its U.S. offices in early September, with fully vaccinated employees free to go without a mask, and Royal Dutch Shell, the gas company, has been gradually lifting restrictions in its Houston offices, prompting more of its workers to return.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise began allowing employees to return to its offices Monday, bolstered by a survey of its California employees that found 94 percent were fully vaccinated.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/business/return-to-office-vaccine-mandates-delta-variant.html

On March 13, 2020, Glenn Kelman, the chief executive of the online real estate broker Redfin, was biking to work when he got a call from Henry Ellenbogen, a longtime investor in Redfin who had started his own fund.

At Harvard, Mr. Ellenbogen majored in the history of technology. One big thing he learned, he has said, was that technology is developed well in advance of people’s ability and willingness to use it.

“Tell me something,” Mr. Ellenbogen asked Mr. Kelman, according to an account the chief executive posted on Redfin’s website. “When people start touring homes via an iPhone, won’t a lot of them decide, even after this whole pandemic ends, that this is just a better way to see houses? And if this whole process of buying and selling homes mostly goes virtual, how will other brokerages compete with you?”

Mr. Kelman, a little preoccupied by how Seattle’s normally bustling streets were eerily empty, said he didn’t know.

“I do,” Mr. Ellenbogen said. “The world is changing in your favor.”

This was not a general view then, and it certainly was not what Mr. Kelman was experiencing. The first confirmed coronavirus death in the United States was a nursing home resident in a Seattle suburb on Feb. 29. Within hours, home sellers decided that maybe they did not want strangers breathing in their living room and bedrooms. Buyers began to pull out as well.

For Redfin, that was the beginning of a crisis. Within a few days, it shut down its 78 offices around the country. Its stock plunged, losing two-thirds of its value.

“The magnitude of the decline was increasing every day,” Mr. Kelman said. He agreed to sell Mr. Ellenbogen more stock for $110 million, thinking Redfin might need cash to make it through a long drought. In early April, Mr. Kelman furloughed 41 percent of the company’s agents, who were salaried employees. More than 1,000 people were affected.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/technology/silicon-valleys-pandemic-profits.html

In any market, it is not uncommon for buyers and sellers to spar over light fixtures, window treatments and appliances, with million-dollar deals sometimes unraveling over items that cost a few thousand. Generally, anything affixed to the walls — cabinets, sinks and toilets — is considered part of the sale, with removable items like light fixtures and mounted flat-screen televisions falling into a gray area that gets hammered out during contract negotiations. If an item goes, it is usually replaced with a contractor-grade equivalent. But ultimately, a contract can include whatever terms a buyer and seller agree to.

And this year, buyers are agreeing to some doozies.

In East Hampton, the sellers of a $2.2 million house decided they wanted to keep a pair of fruit trees, even though removing them left two gaping holes by the swimming pool.

Even the sellers’ agent was confused. “Where did that come from? The buyer freaks out, it’s going to ruin the landscaping,” said Yorgos Tsibiridis, an associate broker for Compass, who represented the sellers in the deal. The trees, about six feet tall, were a gift to the sellers’ children from a grandparent and, it turned out, a deal breaker. “She said, ‘Nope, if they don’t allow me to take them with me I’m canceling the contract,’” Mr. Tsibiridis recounted.

And so, a landscaper showed up recently and dug up the trees in time for the closing, which is expected to happen in a few days.

There are other factors at play beyond power grabs. Housing is in short supply, but so too are appliances, furnishings and building materials, as the global supply chain continues to sputter through the pandemic recovery. As sellers part with their homes, some of them look around and realize that they may not be able to replace the items they’re leaving. So, why not take them?

During the negotiations for a two-bedroom co-op in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, the sellers insisted on keeping the kitchen appliances and the washer and dryer. If the buyers wanted them, they could pay $10,000, a premium for secondhand Samsung appliances. The buyers were livid, as the demand was not mentioned in the listing for the $430,000 apartment.

“They felt it was very petty and cheap to throw it in there at the last minute,” said Jack Chiu, an associate broker with Douglas Elliman representing the buyers. He said they would have altered their offer had they known the appliances were excluded. “It hit them from left field.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/realestate/homes-sellers-market.html

He and other economists said it was too early to tell to what extent, and for how long, rents would prop up overall prices.

“I do think we’ll see some upside from rents, and that will offset some of the declines in goods categories,” said Michelle Meyer, head of U.S. economics at Bank of America. But the “only way” that rents rise enough to keep inflation uncomfortably high, she added, is “if wages are persistently higher.”

How much landlords can charge hinges on how much tenants can afford. Lower-paid workers are seeing strong pay gains, but many economists expect those to fade as the economy gets through reopening.

Another key factor, Mr. Yun said, is whether “homebuilders are being active to supply new homes and apartments to match up with this rise in rent.”

Data do suggest that a substantial new supply of apartments should be on the way this year, but it’s unclear whether they will match up with the demand in location and timing.

For now, the rental experience diverges across markets. Rents have appreciated rapidly in places like Boise, Idaho; Spokane, Wash.; and Phoenix, while big cities on the coasts have lagged, based on Zillow data. Rents in New York City and San Francisco are recovering quickly but remain cheaper than two years ago.

In New York, “the rental market was crushed,” said Jonathan Miller, chief executive of Miller Samuel, a local real estate appraisal firm. But the pace of new leases over the past three months, with tales of bidding wars, is turning that around. Mr. Miller expects rents to fully recover as companies bring workers back to the office this autumn, pulling them back from far-flung remote work locations, he said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/business/economy/rising-rents-inflation.html

“While the rapid ramp-up in June travel demand provided stability to our financial position, it has impacted our operations following a prolonged period of depressed demand,” Southwest’s chief executive, Gary Kelly, acknowledged in a statement on Thursday. “Therefore, we are intensely focused on improving our operations as we restore our network to meet demand.”

Carriers have also struggled to get workers in place to meet that demand. American suffered shortages of catering and wheelchair operators last month, while it also accelerated pilot training to bring more than 3,000 back from extended leaves. Last week, Ed Bastian, chief executive of Delta, said the airline had struggled to train new or long-sidelined employees.

“It takes a few months, and the demand has come back at such a fast clip,” he said. “It’s taken us all a little bit of time to catch our breath. But we’ll be fully back over the next couple of months.”

One form of travel, trips to visit friends or family within the United States, has generally recovered to 2019 levels, with Southwest saying such leisure travel exceeded 2019 levels in June.

Surveys show that corporate travelers are increasingly eager to get back on the road this fall, when business travel typically picks up. Nearly two-thirds of companies that suspended business travel in the pandemic expect to bring it back over the next one to three months, according to a recent poll from the Global Business Travel Association, an industry association. If other companies follow Apple’s lead in delaying a return to the office, though, the corporate travel recovery could be held back.

Delta said it expected domestic business trips to recover to about 60 percent of 2019 levels by September, up from 40 percent in June. Those figures roughly align with estimates from United.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/business/airlines-united-american-southwest-delta.html

Still, on Monday evening Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, set up a procedural vote to begin moving toward debate on the bipartisan deal, even without the text of the plan, on Wednesday. Mr. Schumer said that if senators agreed to consider infrastructure legislation, he would move to bring up either the bipartisan deal, should one materialize this week, or a series of individual infrastructure bills that have been approved on a bipartisan basis by Senate committees.

The plan was an effort to force negotiators to move toward finalizing details and a critical mass of Republicans to commit to advancing the deal, with Democrats eager to advance the legislation before the Senate leaves for its August recess. Mr. Schumer said he had support from the five main Democratic negotiators involved in talks.

“It is not a deadline to determine every final detail of the bill,” he said. A vote of support on Wednesday, he added, would signal that “the Senate is ready to begin debating and amending a bipartisan infrastructure bill.”

On Monday, Mr. Biden pushed for passage of the agreement during remarks at the White House, where he promoted his administration’s economic progress. But administration officials made clear later in the day that their patience for the finalization of the bipartisan agreement was running thin.

“We believe it’s time to move forward with this vote — with congressional action,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said at a news briefing. Asked what the administration’s backup plan was if the plan failed to clear the test vote, Ms. Psaki demurred.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/business/economy/bipartisan-infrastructure-deal.html

Some of the more lasting changes brought about by the pandemic could work against low-wage workers. Restaurants, taxi fleets and hotels in big cities are likely to see less business as companies cut back on business travel and people working remotely cut back on downtown lunches and happy hours.

More job losses should be expected if fast food joints and other service businesses decide to replace their face-to-face workers with robots and software. Yet there are signs that the country’s low-wage labor force might be in for more lasting raises.

Even before the pandemic, wages of less-educated workers were rising at the fastest rate in over a decade, propelled by shrinking unemployment. And after the temporary expansion of unemployment insurance ends, with Covid-19 under control and children back at school, workers may be unwilling to accept the deals they accepted in the past.

Jed Kolko, chief economist at the job placement site Indeed, pointed to one bit of evidence: the increase in the reservation wage — the lowest wage that workers will accept to take a job.

According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the average reservation wage is growing fastest for workers without a college degree, hitting $61,483 in March, 26 percent more than a year earlier. Aside from a dip at the start of the pandemic, it has been rising since November 2017.

“That suggests it is a deeper trend,” Mr. Kolko noted. “It’s not just about the recovery.”

Other trends could support higher wages at the bottom. The aging of the population, notably, is shrinking the pool of able-bodied workers and increasing demand for care workers, who toil for low pay but are vital to support a growing cohort of older Americans.

“There was a work force crisis in the home care industry before Covid,” said Kevin Smith, chief executive of Best of Care in Quincy, Mass., and president of the state industry association. “Covid really laid that bare and exacerbated the crisis.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/business/economy/workers-wages-mobility.html

The pandemic recession is officially over.

In fact, it has been over for more than a year.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, the semiofficial arbiter of U.S. business cycles, said Monday that the recession had ended in April 2020, after a mere two months. That makes it by far the shortest contraction on record — so short that by June 2020, when the bureau officially determined that a recession had begun, it had been over for two months. (The previous shortest recession on record, in 1980, lasted six months.)

But while the 2020 recession was short, it was unusually severe. Employers cut 22 million jobs in March and April, and the unemployment rate hit 14.8 percent, the worst level since the Great Depression. Gross domestic product fell by more than 10 percent.

The end of the recession doesn’t mean that the economy has healed. The United States has nearly seven million fewer jobs than before the pandemic, and while gross domestic product has most likely returned to its prepandemic level, thousands of businesses have failed, and millions of individuals are still struggling to get back on their feet.

To economists, however, recessions aren’t simply periods of financial hardship. They are periods of economic contraction, as measured by employment, income, production and other indicators. Once growth resumes, the recession is over, no matter how deep a hole remains. The recession that accompanied the 2008 financial crisis, for example, ended in June 2009 — four months before the unemployment rate hit its peak, and years before many Americans began to experience a meaningful rebound.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/business/economy/pandemic-recession-over-coronavirus.html

The coronavirus pandemic and a huge explosion in the port of Beirut last August further devastated the economy.

Estimates put the central bank’s losses at $50 billion to $60 billion. The International Monetary Fund has offered assistance, but Lebanese officials accuse Mr. Salameh of blocking an audit sought by the United States and other countries that would unlock I.M.F. aid, as well as a separate investigation into alleged fraud at the central bank.

Most Lebanese have said goodbye to whatever savings they had while the currency has crashed, reducing salaries once worth $1,000 a month to about $80. The central bank is burning through its reserves, spending about $500 million per month to subsidize imports of fuel, medicine and grain.

“Lebanon has been living on borrowed time, and now the chickens have come home to roost,” said Toufic Gaspard, a Lebanese economist and former adviser at the I.M.F. “The whole banking system has collapsed, and we have become a cash economy.”

The crash has soured many Lebanese on their once celebrated central banker.

“I can’t say anything good about Riad Salameh,” said Toufic Khoueiri, a co-owner of a popular kebab restaurant, while having lunch with a friend in Beirut. “Our money is not stuck in the banks, but simply stolen.”

His friend, Roger Tanios, a lawyer, said he had once admired Mr. Salameh for keeping Lebanon financially stable but had changed his mind.

Mr. Salameh, he said, had gone spectacularly off course.

“Every country has its mafia,” Mr. Tanios said. “In Lebanon, the mafia has its country.”

Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut, and Liz Alderman from Paris. Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, and Asmaa al-Omar from Istanbul.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/business/lebanon-riad-salameh.html