Twitter vs NPR, McDonalds layoffs, Chipotle files lawsuit against Sweet Green

0:12Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Our top story today is about Twitter's controversial move to label NPR as state-affiliated media, and we'll also talk about how Barbie has built so much hype around this upcoming movie. Excited for that. And then we're also talking about the layoffs hitting McDonald's in some burrito bowl drama between Sweetgreen and Chipotle. Burrito brawls. Burrito brawls. Say that five times fast. But before we jump into our stories, I want to take a moment and apologize for an egregious error I made on yesterday's show. we strive to bring you the best most accurate content so whenever that isn't the case i want to own up to it and the incident i'm talking about is yesterday when describing a story about the bay area i uttered the words san fran which is a huge no-no apparently which i actually i should have called you out for it right away so instead of calling it sf i called it san fran so i now realize the error of my ways and i will never disappoint our bay area listeners again got so many.

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1:49SF. All right, let's get into it with our top story. Twitter made another controversial decision around a media outlet Tuesday when it labeled NPR, National Public Radio, as state-affiliated media. Now, this has drawn an outcry from NPR and other folks in the U.S. media industry for being a false characterization and one that dangerously lumps NPR in with actual state-run media outlets in places like China and Russia. So whatever you think of NPR, it is a massive stretch to consider state-affiliated media under the definition that Twitter itself provides. So that definition is outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and or control over production and distribution.

2:36And the crazy thing was as recently as Tuesday, Twitter said that NPR would not be included. So it had this carve out said that state financed media organizations with editorial independence like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US, for example, are not to find a state affiliated media for the purposes of this policy. So NPR was removed from the statement. Yeah, they literally went back on their own word. And so this is why people are saying this is kind kind of crazy because the financial part isn't even that big. So the NPR gets less than 1 % of its annual budget on average from federal sources.

3:10So it's not like it's getting 50 % or it's not getting this huge financial help from the federal government. And then, yeah, the key point is it has editorial independence. Like there is no influence from the U.S. government on their editorial board. So it's a weird decision from Twitter. So it gets less than, just want to clarify, It's less than 1 % of its budget directly from federal government. It receives about 10 % of its budget from the corporation through public broadcasting. NPR has all of these member stations all over. They pay fees to NPR corporate, and those regional outlets get funding from state, federal grants through the corporation of public broadcasting.

3:53But yeah, the biggest issue here is the topic of editorial independence. and the White House press secretary was actually asked about this yesterday. And here's how she responded. There's no doubt of the independence of NPR's journalists. And it has been, if you've ever been on the receiving end of their questions, you know this, you know that they have their independence in journalism. So the people are, the reason people are kind of upset about this and think it's a really dangerous move is because that kind of creates a false equivalency between NPR and these other outlets from China and Russia.

4:30I'm talking about Russia's RT and China's People's Daily that are actual mouthpieces for the government. So when you see something from them, it's just straight up propaganda. Yeah. If we just want to take a zoom out picture into like, what is Elon doing really? Again, it feels like he keeps shooting himself in the own foot because remember, one of the reasons why people go to Twitter is for news. And a big part of getting news from Twitter is knowing that that news is coming from a reputable source. And once he'd done in the past two weeks, he removed New York Times checkmark because they wouldn't pay the $10 ,000 for the organization.

5:05And then he labeled NPR as state affiliate media. So he seems like he's undermining one of the key use cases of Twitter and letting this narrative that false news and that misinformation can spread grow because he keeps undermining himself. It's bizarre. The policies are not consistent. I think that's the biggest problem. PBS, which receives federal funding, is not affiliated state, affiliated media. The Washington Post, which is not paying for verification, is still verified. Meanwhile, the New York Times is not. So this has not been consistently applied, and no one really knows what's going on over there.

5:44For sure. We always talk. He's still in the news. We can't get rid of him. Okay, let's move on to our next story. It's another layoff story, unfortunately, but this one's a little bit different from the normal big tech ones that we've been talking about recently. This time, it's McDonald's that is laying off an unknown amount of corporate workers. And there's a few interesting aspects to this story that I want to touch on. First of all, McDonald's is overall doing generally pretty well. So global sales rose 11 % worldwide last year, 6 % in the U.S. And then second of all, McDonald's did this really kind of sus, kind of polarizing thing where they closed all their corporate offices and conducted these layoffs virtually.

6:27And so, Neil, this is a hot button issue for a lot of people. What are your thoughts on virtual layoffs? Well, you said it was sus. And I think some people don't think it's sus. Some people think it's the right way to do it. But, yes, over the pandemic, this has been a growing trend. And we've had Google deliver its layouts via email. Twitter also did this. So it's divided the HR community a little bit. Some people think it's actually the better move because, you know, you don't have this awkward conversation where people have to go into the office and come back to their desks and kind of like shamefully grab all of their stuff.

7:04But the other hand says it's kind of disrespectful to people to not have the conversation face to face. I see it both ways. I mean, I came to the job market in the time where we worked virtually, and I can't imagine telling someone to come into the office just to fire them. That seems like the cruelest thing in the world to do, especially if you've been a remote worker. So I'm on team, yeah, just rip the bandaid off. It's much easier to deal with that in the privacy of your own home. So yeah, even though it doesn't have that interpersonal aspect, I'm non-confrontational. So, yeah, fire me via Zoom if we have to.

7:42It does seem like over remote things can go way more wrong. Like remember the Better.com guy? So he did these mass layoffs via Zoom, which is the absolute wrong way to do it. He fired 900 people in a mass Zoom call. That's not the right way to do it at all. Yeah. And then just to zoom out and go back to McDonald's for a second, one of the reasons why they may be conducting these layoffs is food costs are rising. It's just getting more expensive to run a fast food because of inflation. Everything kind of funnels into making things more expensive. And then also this is a white collar layoff story.

8:16Like McDonald's is seeing increased demand, increased foot traffic. So they need the people in the restaurants making the food. So this is mostly going to affect like the corporate white collar workers from corporate and McDonald's. Really interesting stat that McDonald's has more than 150 ,000 employees in corporate roles and in its restaurants around the world. About 70 % of those employees are not in the U.S. Wow. This is a truly global corporation. Yeah, it's big. Golden arches. We have another food story up. We mentioned at the top of the show this burrito bowl drama. So there's a court case brewing that we need to cover again.

8:52And this one is the highest stake game of chicken we've seen so far. So Chipotle is taking on the salad chain Sweetgreen to federal court over its new Chipotle chicken burrito bowl. So basically, Chipotle has gone Will Smith on Sweetgreen and wants it to keep Chipotle's name out of its damn mouth. The lawsuit alleges that Sweetgreen's new burrito bowl constitutes trademark infringement and argues that Sweetgreen attempts to profit off of Chipotle's near-identical and well-known product. What do you think, Neil? Do they have a point? Well, there's a few aspects to this. In the branding for this particular bowl, they wrote Chipotle and kind of made it look like the Chipotle.

9:35Yeah, the font is similar. The font is similar. And then they also are alleged to have put it in this adobo red that Chipotle's branding is based on. And they also had this big-time oops moment where they kind of gave away their shtick. Because on Instagram, a commenter wrote Chipotle who on a post of Sweetgreen's new bowl. and the brand responded, you said it, not us, with the zipped lips emoji. I know. That poor social media manager, now they're going to court and that's going to be used as evidence. I don't know. We're looking at a picture of the bowl behind us. It doesn't really look alike.

10:09The ingredients aren't the exact same. Also, the container that Sweet Greens is in is a rectangle. I didn't know that was a thing. Does that have to come into play in this? This is an interesting, like, it actually, the market did react to this news, though, so it's not insignificant. So Sweetgreen stock was down 11 % on this news coming out because I guess Sweetgreen investors want to see them expanding their offerings, expanding just beyond the salads they typically offer. And if their foray into burrito bowls gets shot down before it can get off the ground, I could see how that's concerning.

10:41Sweetgreen did not do a good job about rolling this out because Chipotle is not just the restaurant. It's a pepper. I know. You should be able to offer a Chipotle chicken bowl. Chipotle is actually a jalapeno that has been left on the vine to ripen until red, and then it's smoked and then dried. I did not know that. That's a good fact. We also have to talk about Chipotle, though. It is crushing. It's up 22 % this year. Its market cap is now$46.8 billion. I had no clue. It's bigger than Capital One, Electronic Arts, Kroger, Prudential, and eBay. Wow. And it's hiring 25 ,000 more workers. Chipotle, so hot right now.

11:18Wait, before we go, National Burrito Day is today. So you should Google whether there are burrito deals around you because I think a lot of burrito chains are giving out free burritos. News you can use. God's work today. Thank you for that, Neil. I will do that. Okay, that's the first half of our show. Before we jump into the next half, we're going to take a quick break. Jack Daniels has proudly served in fine establishments, questionable joints, and everywhere in between. so no matter where you go in every bar you'll always know someone by name jack jack and coke shot a jack jack daniels please right away that's what makes jack jack please drink responsibly responsibility.org jack daniels and old number seven are registered trademarks tennessee whiskey 40 alcohol by volume jack daniel distillery lynchburg tennessee john legend cheryl crow Elvis Costello and Alanis Morissette star in the MGM Plus original series, Words and Music.

12:19Iconic artists share intimate performances and the stories behind the songs. New episodes Sundays on MGM Plus.

12:31All right, let's go to Neil's Numbers, our Thursday segment. Let's go! Toby gets hyped for it. It's three interesting stats that I've read in the news that will make your jaw drop or do other things. Our first one, Toby, if you're selling a house and you've rigged your kitchen into an Iron Chef arena, you should definitely make note of that in the listing. So New Zillow researches out and it finds that listings touting chef friendly amenities such as steam ovens, which I don't know what that is, pizza ovens and professional grade appliances can sell for as much as 5.3 percent more than similar homes without them.

13:05And that adds about$17 ,400 to a typical U.S. home. You know, when I saw this stat, I thought people are so over-optimistic on their cooking abilities. They're like, oh, we got to get this house. It's got a pizza oven. We're going to be making pizzas like every night for dinner. They probably, I would love to see the usage stats of those high quality appliances that they paid extra for. But yeah, that is interesting. It like preys on this unique like human psychology moment. I invested my most fancy kitchen appliance I have is a lock crew set Dutch oven. Yeah. And you use it a lot, right? I use it all the time.

13:40Okay. Maybe I would not use a pizza oven. Yeah. Let's move on to our second number. It has to do with baseball. The changes MLB made to speed up games and generate more offense so far, I think we're less than a week into the season, appear to be working really significantly. Through Sunday, games averaged two hours and 38 minutes, which is down a whole half hour from the.308 average from the first couple of games last year. Stolen bases have doubled. The batting average has jumped 16 percentage points. So these changes appear to be working and maybe delivering a more compelling product and doing what baseball wants to do.

14:16Yeah, the offensive increase was something that was super surprising to me. I guess the shift rule also is playing a part in this, but the fact that batting average jumped because I guess pitchers are maybe a little bit more rushed. We went to a game. We were like, oh, my gosh, it's the fifth inning already. It was fun. So I'm all for sports leagues changing rules. Like we talked about, remember, the NBA used to not have a three-point line. They used to not have a shot clock. So, like, sports can evolve and the rules can evolve. And if it looks like it's improving the product, then, yeah, I'm all for it.

14:51Right. There was, speaking of the shot clock, in 1950, there was the lowest scoring NBA game on record. It was 19 to 18 Fort Wayne Pistons defeated the Minneapolis Lakers. And then 1954, this is when the NBA introduced the shot clock and delivered this product that we, we know and love today. I love it. So big changes. That's our, don't be afraid to make changes. People don't care. After the first few games, they just forget what happened last year. All right. Final number is about Atlanta's airport. Hartsfield Jackson international airport retained its title as the world's busiest airport last year, welcoming 93.7 million passengers.

15:27That is a 24 % increase from the prior year, but still 15 % less than 2019. Yeah. Post pandemic bump. Right. I'm from Florida and I have flown through Atlanta more times than I can count. You were telling me about everyone has a core memory of like sprinting while sweating, trying to catch a delay or connecting flight in Atlanta. It's huge. It's a big one. Rounding out the list are number two, Dallas-Fort Worth. Number three, Denver International. Big United hub over there. Chicago O 'Hare is fourth. Then LAX comes in at number six. What's your favorite airport in the U.S.? Tampa. Tampa's the best airport.

16:07It's my home airport. It is the quickest airport on record. It's a hidden gem in the South. I've only been there once, but RDU, Raleigh-Durham. Oh, yeah. It's nice, right? Just like nice, small, modern. Southern airports are nice. LaGuardia just got this$9 billion renovation. Everyone cannot stop talking about it. It's got a good facelift, yeah. Okay, I teased this at the beginning, but we're going to talk about Barbie. So I don't know about you, but 95 % of my social media feed this week has been completely drenched in bubblegum pink. And that's because all anyone seems to be talking about is the upcoming Barbie movie.

16:44they dropped a new trailer and also did some other marketing gags that we're going to talk about to build hype for this film film it's directed by Greta Gerwig and it's coming out July 21st I have some thoughts on this movie for sure so first of all I have thoughts on why it kind of took over social media is one they released these very memeable pictures and the reason why I think they're so memeable is because people were allowed to create their own like Barbie posters right and that handmade feel goes so far on the internet as opposed to barbie releasing like these very polished materials if as soon as you let people participate in it it's obviously going to send it into like meme culture so they they crush that number two there's this huge nostalgia factor with barbie a lot of people have that core memory of their sister or themselves playing with barbie growing up so there's this nostalgia but i think the biggest thing and this is indicative of a wider cultural moment is we are living in a stuck culture right now so that's a term that i don't know what that means that a writer a subsac writer the lindy man coined it basically means that we haven't we can't move on from the mid-2000s and uh and later some examples of this are the fact that these old artists like fleetwood mac neil young bob dylan they're all selling their catalogs because their music is so popular right now that's not mid-2000s i know mid-2000s in backwards and backwards and backwards um and then of course the biggest example of stuck culture is obviously hollywood where sequels and reboots have just been crushing the box office i mean we have top gun obviously all these superhero movies that are just right it was john i was just looking at last week's box office it was john wick for creed 3 scream 6 they're right exactly like we're in the double we're almost to the double digits we just saw news that shrek 5 is in the works so there's has been very little new there's been this looking past and so there's this narrative that we're living in a stuck culture and i think the barbie movie is an example of but i feel like it's kind of pushing us forward in certain ways again you can definitely think that this this movie in particular yeah what's interesting about this is the cast i mean that's what's really getting people hyped because there's all these different variations of barbie uh you know barbie cowboy Barbie mermaid and so they've invited just every you know big actor to come in and play all these various uh types of Barbie yeah uh so it's coming out July 21st and I think their marketing game is just exceptional right and we saw we just flashed a chart on our YouTube channel of Barbie sales had actually dropped in the last year I would venture to guess that we're going to see a big uptick after this because it's just started dominating the cultural narrative again so yeah Okay, Neil, our final kicker of the day, it's the Masters kickoff today, the first golf event of the year.

19:33And we're both huge golf fans. Everyone in the studio is big golf fans as well. So this is a big deal for us. But maybe you're not a golf fan. Maybe you don't like watching the... I've heard from people that they don't love watching golf. Right. So we're just going to give you a few tidbits, a few little nuggets that you can take to Masters week. And it might change your mind a little bit. It might make you like the event a little more. So I'll go first, Neil. My first tidbit I want to share is that the merch tent at the Masters is legendary. So the reason it's legendary is because you can't get Masters merch except for on-premises during Masters week.

20:08So there's this really, really high supply and demand thing going on. And when I say the demand is there, listen to these numbers. The merch tent allegedly does$850 ,000 an hour. That is crazy. That's over 50 million over the whole week. Those are insane numbers. What kind of merch? Like polos? Polos, towels, walnuts. They're selling them for like 200 bucks. They sell them for a pretty penny. But the most impressive thing is how quickly the line moves because they're just funneling. It's like a logistics masterpiece. It truly is. Like it's amazing. It's a sight to behold. And then on the other end of the spectrum, people love to talk about the concession prices, which are dirt cheap.

20:49inflation does not seem to apply in augusta georgia the beer is five dollars the chicken sandwich is three dollars pimento cheese sandwiches is the classic is only a dollar and 50 cents you can buy all 25 items on this menu for 66 dollars the problem is getting there because it is impossible to get a ticket which is crazy because that's two sweet green burrito bowls i think but the but the big picture here is this is the first masters since this schism this civil war in golf. There is a Saudi-backed league called Live Golf that drew a lot of the best players by paying them upwards of$200 million to come play on this tour.

21:29So those Live Golfers, for the first time, are being allowed back to the Masters. So it's kind of this moment where you see in these war movies where the both sides lay down their arms and come together for a Christmas meal or to play soccer on a holiday. That's kind of what's happening at this Masters, And that's kind of narrated the larger conversation around what's been happening in golf, this huge schism that's been going on. Yeah. I'm so excited. Like, I love it. The weather's not so great. Hopefully we talk about it. Who do you got? Who do you have winning? I have Scottie Scheffler. You can't bet against him.

22:027-1. I think Bryce in our control room has... Brooks Koepka? No, I think he has Tiger. Oh, yeah, Tiger. Tiger. It's the emotional pick. Yeah, there you go. All right. That's our show. You can always reach us at Morning Brew Daily at MorningBrew.com. And we'd love to hear from you. Let's roll these credits. The show's producer and editor is Emily Milliron. Our technical director is Justin Orlando. Michaela Heck is the show's associate producer. Our supervising producer is Bryce Beloff. Dan Bauza is our master of sound. Hair and makeup is at the Masters and didn't invite us. What the hell? I hate them.

22:37Devin Emery is our chief content officer. Our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Oh, cruel.

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