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Those who work a 9-to-5 know nabbing one of the few available weekend slots with your hairdresser or nail technician requires a huge amount of forethought. Or how time-consuming it can be to get your oil changed, buy your groceries, or wait in line at the post office. The two-day weekend is simply too short to squeeze in all the errands and life admin that builds up throughout the week. So rather than wasting precious leisure timeor worse, PTOsome workers are going ahead and scheduling their appointments on company time. A little reminder to everyone who works in corporate that no one at work actually needs to know what your appointments are for, one viral TikTok post suggests. I booked a haircut and blowdry, and then felt like getting my nails done. So now I’m on my way to do that, but they didnt have to know that. In the caption, she tactfully caveats: for legal reasons this is bad advice. Those in the comments backed up the sentiment: I just put leaving early for an appointment. Doesnt matter if its therapy or my hair. None of their business. I said I had an appointment and asked to leave at 3:30 . . . it was for Botox, another added. Just block it in the calendar, another suggested, saying of beauty appointments: Its essential work. As companies efforts to force staff back into the office drag on, many employees are finding more and more creative ways to cling to the flexibility they enjoyed during the remote-work era. That might look like scheduling personal appointments during the day or trialing microshifting (breaking up the work shift into shorter bursts based on productivity levels). How transparent you can be about your midweek blowout or personal training session depends on your relationship with your boss, as well as company policy. If youre leaving work early, coming in late, or leaving for an appointment in the middle of the day, your employer might have policies around this, Marta Říhová, HR expert at Kickresume, tells Fast Company. In some companies, it might be acceptable, especially if you and your colleagues work flexible hours. You might just be asked to make up the time later on. Those hoping their bosses will enact a relaxed, blind-eye policy, however, should be cautious. Bear in mind that if you say you have an appointment without specifying what kindhoping your boss will assume its medicalthey might ask you for proof of a doctor’s appointment, Říhová says. Your employer cant ask about the nature of your illness. But they can ask for proof that youll be at the doctor during this time. Recent research from video conferencing company Owl Labs found that employees are prepared to give up 9% of their annual salary for flexible working hours (and 8% for a four-day workweek). Flexibility is no longer just a perk; for many, its a requirement. Workplaces that expect their employees to use precious PTO for personal appointments (or email proof that they were where they said they were) may find themselves fighting a losing battle. Many workers may just keep scheduling errands on the clock anyway. And companies could also risk losing their employees altogether. As one commenter on the viral TikTok wrote: I have an appointment (another interview).
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E-Commerce
Commuting in New York City can be a relentless sensory overloadthe hustling, the pushing, the yelling, the ads whirling from every side. Getting to work can feel like a frantic race of people trying to escape the train station all at once. While the city hurtles past in a blur, Brandon Stanton has stopped to write it a love letteron the walls of Grand Central itself. For the first time, the terminal and its subway station have been completely cleared of flashing advertisements and replaced with art. Brandon Stanton More than 150 digital screens now display thousands of portraits and stories from Stantons Humans of New Yorkthe largest and most diverse collection of New York City portraits ever created by a single artist, featuring over 10,000 photographs and interviews with people all around the world. Running through October 19, Dear New York is a first-of-its-kind immersive experience that vividly celebrates the people of New York. Located in a landmark through which more than 750,000 people pass daily, the station serves as a crossroads for locals, commuters, and tourists alike, allowing the art to reach and touch people from all walks of life. [Photo: courtesy Brandon Stanton] The process of clearing out the space and replacing it with art, Stanton explains, was monumental. I would say it took 1,000 yeses to make this happen. One no could have completely made it fall apart, he says. [Photo: courtesy Brandon Stanton] In a six-month sprint, Stanton had to align a tangle of stakeholdersfrom the MTA and Metro-North Railroad to Outfront Media and the State Historic Preservation Office. It was a mix between a commercial and a political negotiation, he says. [Photo: courtesy Brandon Stanton] Outfront Media owns 80% of the screen time in Grand Central Station and is driven solely by profit, leaving Stanton with no choice but to negotiate pricing to gain access. The remaining 20% of display space is controlled by the MTA and usually used for public service announcements. I had to persuade this bureaucracy that what I was doing was philanthropic for the city, and worthy of this unprecedented space, Stanton says. Nobody had ever spent this kind of money on something completely unsponsored before. [Photo: courtesy Brandon Stanton] Without disclosing exact figures, Brandon noted that he funded the installation entirely from the savings he had built over 15 years from his Humans of New York photo blog and bookwith no sponsors involved. Negotiations alone took three to four months, he recalls, but throughout the arduous process, There were some early believers in the MTA. I ran into so many dead ends and walls while I was trying to make this. But at each point, there would be a person who really believed in it, who gave me energy and strength when I needed it most. [Photo: courtesy Brandon Stanton] He singled out Dorit Phinizy, director of events t Grand Central, as the first person to see him not as a potential revenue source, but as an artist trying to achieve a visionand thinking about how, within the confines of my job, I can help and contribute to this vision. Phinizy’s name appears fourth in the credits as “chief creative consultant,” for her shepherding the project through the layers and layers of MTA approvals. [Photo: courtesy Brandon Stanton] What began as a solo effort quickly expanded into a major collaboration. Stanton later brought in Broadway designer David Korins, who donated his time, and the design firm Pentagram, which contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars in design services, including 3D mapping of the subway. The Juilliard collaboration for the musical component was put together in just a week. [Photo: courtesy Brandon Stanton] The art now stretches across every corner of Grand Central. In the main concourse, 50-foot projections wrap around soaring arches and marble columns, immersing passersby in the citys stories. Subway tunnels, stairwells, and side corridors come alive with hundreds of digital screens, each capturing faces, expressions, and snippets of daily life. [Photo: courtesy Brandon Stanton] Vanderbilt Hall hosts a community gallery featuring work from more than 600 public school students alongside emerging local artists. The crowning touch comes from 100-plus hours of live music, as 50 Juilliard students and alumni perform classical, jazz, and collaborative piano pieces on a Steinway grand. In the surge of commuters, Stanton explains: Many of my quotes on Instagram are much longer, but I distilled hour-long interviews into quick, digestible moments that anyone can absorb even while walking by. He adds: And watching people walk through this busy, crowded place and actually stop to readits very gratifying.
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E-Commerce
How many female entrepreneurs, bankers, and industrialists from the past can you name? You could be forgiven for thinking that, until relatively recently, there were none at all. Women are commonly assumed to have spent most of history as housewives. But in my new book, Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power, I present a revised economic history of the worldone that places women at the heart of the development of the global economy. Here are just five of the (many) ways that women have powered the global economy from the Stone Age to the present day. 1. Creators of global money Before electronic payments, banknotes, and silver coins, it was clothwoven by womenthat was the most popular form of currency. It was lightweight, nonperishable, and easier to judge in terms of quality than a lump of precious metal. Cloth therefore underpinned the first trade boom in history, connecting economiesand peopleacross the world during the Bronze Age. Four thousand years ago, it was packaged up into the side packs of donkeys that journeyed across the peaks and plains of Eurasia in the quest for tin. When mixed with copper, this tin created a far harder and more workable metalbronzedriving one of earliest economic revolutions in human history (akin to the steam engine, electricity, and even AI today). By providing the cloth that paid for tin, women were at the heart of the economic revolution. 2. Builders of Ancient cities While ancient Athens might have been the birthplace of democracyand the home of many a great playwright, philosopher, and poetit was ancient Rome that had the far more successful economy. And this was in large part because the Romans had a far more favorable attitude to both business and to women. Not only did Roman women own ships and shopsand trade their wine and olive oil across the Mediterraneanthey also helped to build the ancient city itself. A third of the clay beds that supplied the capitals bricks were owned by women and, in percentage terms, the proportion of Roman plumbers who were women was four times that of the U.S. today. 3. Merchants of International Trade As Europe disintegrated after the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Middle East was moving in the opposite direction, in no small part thanks to a businesswoman called Khadija. In the sixth century, Khadija was one of the wealthiest merchants operating out of the oasis town of Mecca. Her trading caravana fleet of pack animalsmoved cloth, leather, and animal skins through the deserts of Arabia and, to help look after it, she employed a young man by the name of Muhammad, who was known for his honesty and hard work. After developing a business relationship, Khadija proposed marriage to the Prophet-to-be. Not only was Khadijas financial support crucial to the subsequent spread of Islam, but the couples background in business meant that trade and merchant activity were revered within the early Islamic Empire, fuelling a Golden Age that made the Middle East the richest part of the world in the eighth to the eleventh centuries. 4. Technological Innovators From Henry Ford to Bill Gates, men are typically seen as the heroic geniuses who drove the technological innovations that have allowed our economies to prosper. However, in preindustrial China, women led the way in innovation, and no more so than Huang Dao Po. Aged only 10, Dao Po ran away from home to escape an arranged marriage, boarding a boat for Hainan Island, where she met the women spinners and weavers of the Li people who took her under their wing and taught her the secrets of their trade. Later returning to her hometown of Songjiang (near Shanghai), she set up a cotton cloth-making business and passed on her knowledge of the most advanced spinning and weaving techniques to local women. The technologies she introduced included a treadle-operated spinning wheel that enabled multiple threads to be spun at the same time, which more than quadrupled productivity and so made China the centre of global cloth production. 5. Inventors of consumer banking By the eighteenth century, Europe was catching up with China and London was in the midst of a financial revolution. But while men were serving the financial needs of the wealthy elite, women had their eyes on a much wider market. In 1798, a woman by the name of Priscilla Wakefield set up Englands first bank for women and children. Rather than operating her bank from plush offices, she simply set up a desk at a local school, where she opened her ledger to deposits as small as a penny. Driven by the belief that pennies make pounds, and that saving was the best form of self-help, Wakefield saw banking not just as a form of business but also as a means of helping people to help themselves. Like Wakefield in England, Maggie L. Walker extended banking services to underserved groups in America. The daughter of a former slave, Walker was troubled by the way in which banks ignored the needs of African Americans and so rolled up her sleeves to fill the gaping hole. In 1903, she set up St. Lukes Penny Savings Bank, making her the first American woman to charter a bank. Between them, Wakefield and Walker made banking accessible to millions of ordinary peopleand so created the modern consumer banking world.Wherever you look across history, women have supercharged the most successful economies of their day, including in the Bronze Age, the Roman world, the Islamic Empire and preindustrial China. It was also by embracing womens economic freedom that the West was able to transition from poverty to prosperity and deliver the standards of living that we enjoy today. And it is by maintaining itrather than beating a retreatthat we can avoid the types of civilizational collapses suffered by our predecessors.
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E-Commerce
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