Pokémon Go has become a global phenomenon. It gained popularity immediately and businesses have creatively determined ways to capitalize on that. Individuals are becoming entrepreneurs by advertising personal assistance in playing the game. If your business wants to get in on the Pokémon Go craze and profit from it, there are a few suggestions here to help you get started.
Create a Pokémon Go Pop-Up Shop
If your business does not want to apply to be a Pokestop, you can take the business to the nearest Pokestop. Create a pop-up shop in close proximity to a popular Pokestop to sell products, food, or tech accessories to get the attention of Pokémon Go players. Advertise a small discount for Pokémon Go players that prove to be playing in real-time.
Just by being part of the trend, you can get new customers now thanks to Pokémon Go. Connecting with the local community, showing approachability, and showing that you adapt to trends helps draw in an expanded consumer group that can end up permanently increasing your annual revenue. Pokestop Window Advertisements
Place an advertisement poster in your window of your business advertising it as a Gym Pokestop location, once you are approved as a Pokestop. Offer those that come in a promotion, such as a discount or free item, for playing the game and coming by your business. This is just one way that businesses are trying to cash in on the Pokémon Go craze.
You can also advertise your business as a "Pokémon Go Safe Place" where game players can come into your business to determine their path to the next Pokeball. While taking a break, gamers are more likely to make a purchase, especially if you are a food industry business like a coffee shop or restaurant.
Make Your Business Known on Google Places
If your business does not have a Google Places page, it should. Google already provides general information about your business for search purposes, but a Google Places page is different. Here you control what information is displayed and can customize your page with trending hashtags that help your business be more recognized locally. You can list your business as a #Pokestop and offer a promotion to Pokémon Go players for stopping by while catching their Pokémon. Optimizing SEO for Google Places with proper hashtags and a tag line that draws Pokémon Go players in will help increase your revenues.
Advertise Player Services
Become an entrepreneur from your experience playing Pokémon Go. A creative way to start earning money from Pokémon Go is to become a Safe Pokémon Chauffer or offer your services as a trainer. Some individuals have gone so far as to sell off advanced accounts, start over, and repeat the cycle. Other player services that have gained attention are the $20-per hour rate to hatch eggs in the game for players who do not have time.
Offer a Pokémon Go-Specific Service
Several heavy hitters, like T-Mobile and Uber, have created Pokémon Go-specific services to generate additional revenue. Uber has created a Pokémon Go bus in New York in an attempt to help users play the game safely and make money themselves by transporting players to Pokestops. T-Mobile created an "all you can eat data plan" for players of Pokémon Go to boost contract sign-ups. These two industry leaders have learned how to cash in on the Pokémon Go craze rather well.
Buy and Cast Lures
Usually, Pokémon Go players purchase lures with Pokecoins via the app. You can cast those lures and draw immediate attention to your business. A pizzeria in New York cast a lure and their sales rose by 75-percent the weekend following the lure casting. Lures trigger the spawning of Pokémon in short intervals. It is important to post the casting of a lure on your business' social media pages, to email subscribers, and to text subscribers immediately upon casting the lure to get people rushing to your business. For example, Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia did a lure-a-thon to attract people to their theme park one Sunday.
Final Thoughts
Your business can profit from Pokémon Go, without infracting on any copyright or trademark laws. It is a good idea to create a themed special or promotion because although it is at a slight discount it still turns a profit as you make more sales. If Pokémon Go is a craze in your local area, consider holding a Pokémon Go player workshop. Hire a trainer, and charge a workshop attendance fee with discounts on refreshments, gear, or items associated with your business. Promoting safe gameplay while making money helps increase your positive reputation.
How will you or your company make money from the Pokémon Go craze?
Ride-hailing services want to make sure Grandma Betty can get to bridge club just as easily as her 22-year-old grandson travels to and from ... whatever it is young folks are doing these days.
Once the domain of 20-somethings who might have a drink or two and need a safe ride home, companies like Lyft and Uber have set their sights on a different age range entirely: senior citizens.
Lyft announced Tuesday it has partnered with GreatCall, a mobile phone company that specializes in providing cell phones to seniors, to extend its ride-hailing services to those who ― like the elderly ― may not have a smartphone, much less want to learn how to use an app on one to hail a ride.
Instead of an app, GreatCall customers dial “0” to talk to an operator, who can provide a cost estimate and book a ride. The fare is tacked onto the customer’s monthly cell phone bill.
The L.A. Times notes Uber struck up a similar arrangement with a company called 24Hr HomeCare last week.
Several third-party ride-hailing services also specialize in giving lifts to older adults who don’t have smartphones, including GoGoGrandparent, a newer entrant that adds additional features like meal and grocery delivery options.
As people age, one thing to go is the ability to drive. That means losing your freedom to get to doctor’s appointments and to stay social with friends.
This is far from either company’s first foray into the senior market, which, judging by recent moves from both Uber and Lyft, seems ripe for disruption.
And it couldn’t come at a better time. The first wave of the so-called “baby boomer” generation turned 65 in 2011, with the number of Americans aged 65 and older projected to keep growing until 2030, when it’s expected to peak at around 71 million people.
Earlier this year, both Uber and Lyft began offering non-emergency medical transport services, specifically targeting customers whose rides would be reimbursed by Medicaid.
And in the Denver suburb of Centennial, where 15 years from now at least 30 percent of the population is projected to be over the age of 65, city officials are exploring replacing current dial-a-ride services with less expensive, more efficient rides via Lyft.
Starting Aug. 17, the city has embarked on a first-of-its-kind, six-month long pilot project, paying for Lyft rides to and from the area’s major light-rail station in a bid to increase mobility.
“We call Centennial the Silver Tsunami,” Centennial Mayor Cathy Noon told The Atlantic blog CityLab. “As people age, one thing to go is the ability to drive. That means losing your freedom to get to doctor’s appointments and to stay social with friends. We really want to help keep the people who started Centennial engaged in it.”
Note: The Huffington Post’s editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington is a member of Uber’s board of directors and has recused herself from any involvement in the site’s coverage of the company.
Starbucks said Thursday it will accelerate plans to give all its stores’ unsold ready-to-eat meals to food banks.
The chain launched a pilot program six months ago for select Starbucks stores to donate extra food at the end of each day and said it would expand the effort over the next five years across its 7,600 company-operated locations. Now, it says the rollout of the Starbucks FoodShare program will be complete by 2019, two years ahead of schedule.
Since March, the $84 billion company has contributed 300,000 meals to charity. The chain partnered with nonprofits Feeding America and Food Donation Connection to scale FoodShare nationally.
Restaurants are among the biggest sources of food waste in the United States, where up to 40 percent of food goes uneaten. Much of that food ends up in landfills, where it rots and spews about 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. At the same time, nearly 15.3 million children in the U.S. lack regular access to nutritious meals.
While some chains, such as Pret-A-Manger and Whole Foods, bake donations into their business models, other food companies have been slow to catch on, due in part to concerns about liability if someone gets sick eating their food.
Starbucks credited its staff ― “partners” in its corporate lingo ― for pushing the company to widen the FoodShare program’s reach more quickly.
“Partners take great pride in being the catalyst for this program, they know food that couldn’t be sold in our stores the next day, yet was still safe to consume, could serve a higher purpose,” Alyssa Edelen, a Starbucks district manager in San Diego, California, said in a press release. “They are reminded of their impact every time they work a closing shift and put salads and sandwiches in the refrigerator instead of the trash for people who are hungry.”
Staffers working those closing shifts may need more co-workers just to manage end-of-day donations, however. For months, Starbucks employees across the country have complained that apparent cutbacks in hours have left stores understaffed. Workers say the situation is responsible for long lines at many locations.
Starbucks vowed two years ago to overhaul its scheduling policies in hopes of easing the burden on workers struggling to balance their lives with the chain’s erratic hours and shifts. Labor advocates at the time told The Huffington Post the change was insufficient, noting that workers needed enough hours to guarantee a livable income, too.
The company denied slashing the number of hours its staff work, but a two-month-old petition arguing otherwise had garnered more than 17,000 signatures by Friday morning.
“The labor situation has gone from tight to infuriating,” Jaime Prater, the employee who started the petition, wrote on its Coworker.org page. “Labor has been cut so much in corporate stores, that one call-off (an employee calling in sick) impacts the entire day, as managers are directed to cut shifts to save on labor costs.”
More stories like this:
Restaurants Officially Have No Excuse Not To Donate Leftover Food
A Whole New Kind Of Grocery Store Is Coming To The U.S.
This Guy Spends $2.75 A Year On Food And Eats Like A King
Genius Solid Shampoos Use No Plastic Packaging By Leaving Out Water
Meat Eaters Should Have Been Listening To Vegetarians All Along
Farmer Forced To Dump Insane Amount Of Gorgeous Cherries
Al Capone’s Brother May Have Invented Date Labels For Milk
Image Source Having worked with several clients on developing and executing content marketing strategies for their business, one of the questions most business owners want answers to is why it isn't working for their business. This often leads to content marketers spending on content marketing without seeing any significant results in their bottom line.
If your content marketing efforts haven't been yielding the desired results for your business, you might need to look deep into the structure of your strategy and to discover why content marketing isn't working for you.
The following are reasons most marketers don't see results with content marketing.
You're Ignoring Documentation
Documentation is critical to content marketing, and this very essential strategy has been neglected by many content marketers. Your marketing documentation is what will help you identify the missing link between what is working and what you're doing.
In a CMI research that studied B2B marketers, 53 percent who reported that their content marketing was highly effective had a documentation strategy, while the 40 percent with the least result had no strategy at all. If you're not paying attention to content marketing documentation, you might be finding it hard to validate your content marketing strategy.
Targeting Customers with Irrelevant Content
Targeting your customers with highly relevant content is necessary for content marketing effectiveness. A lot of content marketers confuse meeting content demands with actually meeting the needs of their readers. For your customers to engage with your content, it's very necessary that the content you're pushing to them carries a message that will be valuable to them.
To effectively create content that connects with your customers, you need to evaluate your content marketing plan and come up with your audience persona. This means you have to evaluate your different audiences, identify their pain points and create content that will meet their needs in their journey through your purchase cycle.
Inefficient Distribution Strategy
Overcoming the content distribution hurdle is where a lot of content marketers are usually held back. Without the right distribution strategy, your content marketing is bound to fail. To tackle your content distribution challenges and reach your customers with your content, an effective approach would be to combine the three distribution channels.
There are three forms of distribution: owned media, earned media and paid media. While focusing on a single channel can help you take advantage of concentration, leading digital marketers advise to exploit the potentials of combined channels by getting more creative with your outreach and distribution strategy.
"An efficient distribution strategy combines available distribution channels, helping the target asset acquire more attention through a streamlined effort," says Ali Pourvasei, the founder of a Los Angeles SEO Company.
Your Content Strategy Lacks Credibility
Credibility is a valuable currency in content marketing, and indeed in the entire digital sphere. Brands have learned that their content can help establish credibility and are pushing to see that their content marketing efforts portray their best image to consumers.
If your content marketing lacks credibility, your customers will not trust your brand. There are a lot of factors that can help strengthen the credibility of your content marketing efforts. The following are some:
Addressing real concerns
Discuss a fresh message
Easily solves customer issues
Carries brand signals
By utilizing these factors in your content, consumers will engage with your content and you'll find that content marketing easily works for you.
You're Measuring the Wrong Signals
To understand the impact of content marketing efforts, it's necessary to take measurement into consideration. However, content marketers are still struggling with identifying the right signals to measure.
Measuring the wrong signals will give a false representation of your content marketing results -- which will eventually lead to implementing inefficient strategies.
Three years ago, Fishkill Farms owner and operator Joshua Morgenthau found himself facing a situation that is every farmer’s nightmare.
It was time to prepare his 100-acre fruit and vegetable farm’s cherries and strawberries for harvest, but the workers he’d hired for the job weren’t there to help. His employees were many miles away in Jamaica, waiting for the green light to enter the U.S. and get to work.
Without enough hands to weed and prune the delicate crop, Morgenthau’s berries were at risk of rotting on the vine. Worse, he knew there was little he could do but wait and hope he didn’t lose his whole crop in the meantime.
Each year, Morgenthau employs eight seasonal migrant workers who travel to his farm in New York’s Hudson Valley through the labor department’s H-2A temporary agricultural worker program. The process of obtaining their H-2A visas had been relatively painless for the previous five years. But this time, he says the department changed the file number of his application without any warning.
That meant he had to refile all the applications, creating “hours and hours and hours of more paperwork and hassle for us” and delaying the workers’ arrival by more than a month.
As a result, the farm’s cherry and strawberry production took a hit that season. His team of migrant and domestic workers were unable to make up for the decreased harvest preparation time.
“We managed to get it picked, but it was still kind of a mess,” he told The Huffington Post.
Despite setbacks like this one, the visa program is essential to Morgenthau’s farm. He works with the same employees each year and described them as “part of the farm family.” He credits them with being experts at operating the machinery specific to the crops he grows.
The H-2A program was created in the 1990s to help agricultural employers bring temporary foreign workers into the U.S. to do seasonal work that domestic workers cannot or are not willing to do. As part of the program, employers are required to offer certain wages, plus transportation and housing when necessary. The H-2A visa holders live and work in the U.S. for several months at a time but are not considered immigrants, and the program is not seen as a pathway to citizenship.
This so-called guest farm worker program is far from perfect. It has been criticized for being easy to abuse, with some employers neglecting worker safety and stealing wages while facing little recourse. However, those familiar with the visa program describe it as the industry’s sole legal option for getting temporary farm work done.
The farming industry still relies heavily on undocumented workers, who are estimated to make up about half of the country’s 2.5 million hired farm hands, according to the Labor Department. The temporary visa program is responsible for just a fraction of the overall agricultural workforce.
Yet the program is growing increasingly popular ― due to the domestic labor shortages ― forcing more farmers to contend with a chaotic and heavily bureaucratic system that puts their crops in jeopardy. At the same time, calls to improve the program are being sounded by farmers and immigration reform advocates alike.
Credit: Gosia Wozniacka/APIn this Oct. 12, 2011, file photo, a crew of farmworkers harvest and package cantaloupes near Firebaugh, California.
The U.S. has cracked down on the use of undocumented laborers coming into the country, resulting in a widespread labor shortage in agriculture and ballooning demand for H-2A visas. This has also meant more administrative delays in processing visa applications.
Delays of even a week can result in major crop losses for farmers. Delays of a month or more can be devastating.
Morgenthau was able to save his harvest in 2013, the year his workers were delayed, but he knows just how easily things can fall apart. “We’re lucky to have never lost an entire crop,” he said.
Others aren’t so fortunate.
A number of farmers in Georgia reported six-digit losses this year due to delays in visa processing. Another farmer, in California, watched as one-third of his Napa cabbage rotted in the field while he waited for the H-2A workers to arrive.
Last year, a State Department computer glitch delayed workers on the West Coast, causing millions of dollars of lost revenue. Elise Bauman, executive director at Salem Harvest, a food recovery group that partners with dozens of farms in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, saw the fallout of this glitch firsthand. She and her team worked with just three strawberry farms in 2015, but she estimated seeing some 100 acres of the wasted berries with her own eyes.
“They have to be handled and harvested at exactly the right time, otherwise you get a pile of mush,” Bauman said. “Very delicious-tasting mush, but it’s not attractive.”
These issues will only compound as the visa program continues to grow. Visa applications increased by 40 percent over the past five years, according to NPR. Last year, 140,000 H-2A visas were granted. In the first half of this year, visa issuance is up another 17 percent over 2015.
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The H-2A program’s issues have sent the farming industry into crisis mode, vocally criticizing the program’s backlog of visa applications and emerging as a somewhat surprising proponent of immigration reform.
In an April news release, the American Farm Bureau Federation warned of rotting fields of crops resulting from H-2A delays. Those delays, the organization says, could be avoided if the program were revamped.
So far, there hasn’t been much action on that advice.
In June, a bipartisan group of Congress members calling for H-2A reform sent a letter to the Labor Department and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services leaders, asking them to streamline the guest worker visa process. Their effort has yet to gain traction.
In a media call organized by the pro-immigration reform Partnership for a New American Economy earlier this month, AFB president Zippy Duvall called for a more flexible and efficient visa program for migrant farmworkers. One solution Duvall has offered would be filing paperwork for the program electronically. Currently, paperwork must be processed through standard mail.
Failure to act, Duvall warned, would threaten the nation’s food supply.
“We’re coming to a point where the American people need to make up their mind if they want to import their food or import their labor,” Duvall said.
Other voices are calling for bigger changes.
Tom Nassif, president and CEO of Western Growers, which represents farmers in California, Arizona and Colorado, took his call for reform a step further. Beyond streamlining the H-2A program, he would like to find a way to keep some of these temporary farm workers in the U.S., instead of sending them back to their home countries when their visas expire.
“We want to take care of the workers who are with us,” Nassif said. “They have experience, families and roots here. We want to keep those people [here] and protect them. We want some sort of legal status for them.”
In 2013, Nassif backed legislation sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that proposed a new “blue card” program that would make temporary workers in good legal standing eligible for a legal status, allowing them to stay in the country and granting them a path to citizenship. The bill passed in the Senate but did not come up for a vote in the House after being blocked by Speaker John Boehner.
In the absence of action in Washington, some believe employers in the industry should be doing more to offer better wages and conditions to their farmworkers, Bruce Goldstein, president of the Farmworker Justice advocacy group, argues.
“If employers want to retain their workforce and attract workers to their jobs, they collectively need to improve their reputation,” Goldstein told HuffPost.
Due to many farmworkers’ undocumented status, Goldstein argues, they silently endure subpar working conditions and pay, fearing that they’ll be reported or fired if they complain.
The average seasonal migrant farmworker is paid between $12,500 and $14,999 a year. Most lack health insurance and many work far more than 40 hours a week. (By contrast, someone working full time for the federal minimum wage earns $15,080 a year.)
Guest farm workers are supposed to earn more under the temporary work program. H-2A wages are set by the Labor Department and vary from state to state ― between $10.59 and $13.80 an hour ― based on state minimums and typical wages for domestic farm workers in the region. In Washington state, for example, the minimum wage for H-2A workers is $12.69 an hour. That’s significantly more than the state’s minimum wage of $9.47.
Some research has raised questions about whether visa-holding guest workers fare much better than unauthorized workers, however. An Economic Policy Institute study released last year found no significant difference in pay or conditions between the two groups.
As of now, farmers are able to get away with this. While advocates like Goldstein believe some employers are treating their workers fairly, the ones who aren’t continue to hinder their progress. And they need to be held accountable.
“There are many employers that comply with the law, but they are being undermined by the companies that want to reduce their cost and increase their profitability by cheating workers,” Goldstein said. “We need to create a law-abiding agricultural sector to benefit both the farmworkers and the employers that comply with the law.”
BuzzFeed has reported that the H-2A visa program and its sister program for short-term non-farm workers (H-2B) suffer from a host of other abuse problems. The Labor Department found that between 2010 and 2014 almost 1,000 companies had violated H-2 laws; however, fewer than 150 employers were banned from hiring guest workers through the program.
Still, some farmers believe the H-2A program is overburdened with regulations and expenses.
Dan Fazio, president of the Washington Farm Labor Association, connects farmers with migrant workers. He, too, described the H-2A program as flawed, but said he’s seen its popularity with participating farmworkers firsthand.
“Is it ideal to take a person from one country and bring them to another country to work? I don’t know,” Fazio said. “But I do know that the people coming to Washington state love the program and when their six months here are done and they go back, they make sure they’re on the list to come back next year.”
A lack of alternatives might have something to do with this popularity — and there’s no sign of that changing anytime soon.
But the lack of progress doesn’t mean the industry has to start from scratch to arrive at a solution, said Luawanna Halstrom, an agriculture consultant who previously served as president of the National Council of Agricultural Employers and has worked with a number of national and state organizations.
She’s hopeful that a fix is on the horizon — and it may not be as complex as it might initially seem.
“People are working with this old horse because it’s all they’ve got,” Halstrom said. “It can be a good program if we could reformulate it and figure out how to make it work.”
A revamped program would be welcomed by Morgenthau, too. Another delay like 2013’s might not turn out as well next time.
“The system should be streamlined,” he said. “When you have the whims of a bureaucracy and a heated political debate that could determine pretty quickly a positive or negative outcome in terms of being able to work with the qualified employees you have been working with, it’s just one too many variables to stomach.”
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Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food and water. In addition, Erbentraut explores the evolving ways Americans are identifying and defining themselves. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.
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A Whole New Kind Of Grocery Store Is Coming To The U.S.
This Guy Spends $2.75 A Year On Food And Eats Like A King
Genius Solid Shampoos Use No Plastic Packaging By Leaving Out Water
Meat Eaters Should Have Been Listening To Vegetarians All Along
Farmer Forced To Dump Insane Amount Of Gorgeous Cherries
Al Capone’s Brother May Have Invented Date Labels For Milk
CLARIFICATION: The headline on this story has been amended to better reflect the systemic problems with the H-2A program.
It was one year ago, August 25, 2015, when my one-year-old daughter Cecelia almost died of anaphylaxis. She had asked for a banana but we wanted her to eat more than just fruit. My wife served her a peanut butter substitute and jam on bread. We were cooking dinner for ourselves when we first saw the tell-tale red blotches and hives.
In thirty seconds, a rash of angry red hives had covered her body. She was uncomfortable but unaware of what was happening. There was a look of extreme fear in her eyes. Another minute passed and her airway began to close as her body fought the allergic reaction. I quickly laid my daughter down and plunged an EpiPen into her left thigh as my wife called 911. The symptoms continued to get worse as she struggled to breathe in my arms, before the epinephrine kicked in and she finally was able to open her throat enough to draw in air. Within ten minutes of the first signs of anaphylaxis, she was shaken but excited to see the emergency vehicles and the firemen who had come to save her.
A trip to the hospital confirmed that she had a near-fatal anaphylactic reaction. To what? We suspect it might have been sesame or sunflower ingredients in either the bread or the “safe” peanut butter substitute. We’ll never know for sure what almost took our daughter’s life.
This is the reality for the fifteen million people living with food allergies and their families. Cecelia has life threatening food allergies to milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, garlic, sesame, sunflower, coconut, and kiwi. She is two years old.
Mylan’s EpiPen saved her life just one year ago. I will forever be grateful for the people who have developed the life-saving drug and accompanying technology that are the reason that my daughter is alive and well today.
The EpiPen’s only legitimate U.S. competitor, Sanofi’s Auvi-Q, was voluntarily recalled nationwide in October 2015 after dangerous issues of inaccurate dosage delivery arose that could include a failure to administer the life-saving epinephrine. Immediately, millions of families with life threatening allergies turned to Mylan to secure EpiPens.
The result was a de facto monopoly for Mylan. Since Mylan secured the rights to the EpiPen in 2007, they have steadily raised prices over 460 percent (from an average wholesale of $56.64 to $317.82). CEO Heather Bresch – daughter of U.S. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia – increased her own compensation by more than 670 percent from $2.5M to $18.9M during the same time.
With no other competitors in the United States, families are forced to pay extortionate rates for what amounts to $1.00 worth of epinephrine per EpiPen.
I cringe every time I go to pick up Cecelia’s EpiPens at the pharmacy. To say this medicine is expensive is an understatement. Yet, we are lucky to have great insurance and have never had to think twice about paying whatever it costs to keep our daughter safe. This is our privilege.
Jim Bourg / ReutersEpiPen auto-injection epinephrine pens manufactured by Mylan NV pharmaceutical company for use by severe allergy sufferers are seen in Washington, U.S. August 24, 2016.
I cannot stop thinking about the families of other children with food allergies – who love their children just as much as we love Cecelia – who are forced to go without this life-saving drug. Putting aside Mylan’s massive price hikes, there are families that go hungry and skip monthly bills just so they can provide safe food for their children with food allergies. These families cannot begin to consider paying for an EpiPen. Their children deserve to be just as safe as my children. They deserve to live healthy lives just as much as Heather Bresch’s four children do.
Heather Bresch has cut corners before. She received her first job at Mylan when her father, a West Virginia state senator at the time, personally reached out to Mylan’s then-CEO in 1992. In 2008, West Virginia University’s president – a family friend and former business associate of Bresch – resigned in disgrace after granting the Mylan CEO an MBA, despite the fact that she had only achieved half of the required credits.
I know that the world is not fair. I understand that rich children with powerful politicians for parents will continue to be born on second base thinking that they hit a double. I hold no illusions that large pharmaceutical companies will shift their primary focus from profits to public good. While all of this is true, Mylan’s reckless and selfish price hikes under CEO Heather Bresch have crossed a line that she cannot return from.
Heather Bresch has enriched herself and her fellow Mylan executives at the risk of hard-working American families who are already saddled with great economic and health concerns. They don’t need or deserve a rich narcissist kicking them while they are down.
On behalf of these families and all families living with life-threatening allergies, I ask that Mylan CEO Heather Bresch immediately reduce the price of Mylan’s EpiPen and then resign as CEO. While Bresch may not worry about my family or the millions of others like us in this country, I hope she will consider her own family and the example that she is setting for her children.
The educational community was rocked by the recent filing of class action complaints against Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Yale University, Duke University, Vanderbilt University and Johns Hopkins University. These suits generally allege the retirement plans sponsored by these institutions paid unreasonable and excessive fees for record keeping, administrative and investment services. They also allege the investment options offered to plan participants underperformed benchmarks and charged excessive fees. All of these allegations remain to be proven at trial.
I'm going to focus on the allegations in the complaint against Yale University (which I obtained from Pacer), because of the prominence of David Swensen, who is the Chief Investment Officer of Yale's $22 billion in Endowment assets. I could find no indication that Mr. Swensen is involved in any way with the retirement plan that is the subject of the lawsuit.
Mr. Swensen's achievements in managing Yale's endowment are the stuff of legend. During the past 30 years under his stewardship, the Yale Endowment generated returns of 14.1 percent per annum.
Swensen's investing advice
Swensen is a strong advocate for index-based investing. His advice to individual investors is unequivocal: "There are two sensible approaches to investing -- either 100 percent active or 100 percent passive, he noted. Unless an investor has access to "incredibly high-qualified professionals," they "should be 100 percent passive -- that includes almost all individual investors and most institutional investors," he stated.
Swensen takes a dim view of actively managed mutual funds. He has observed that most active mutual funds are more interested in collecting fees than in boosting returns for investors.
According to the Complaint, Swensen's sage advice has not been followed, to the detriment of the 16,487 participants in its $3.6 billion retirement plan.
Allegations of breach of fiduciary duty
It wouldn't be difficult for the sponsors of Yale's retirement plan to follow the recommendations of its Chief Investment Officer. All it would have to do is limit the investment options in its Plan (other than annuities that must be included in the Plan) to risk-adjusted portfolios of low management fee index funds. The portfolios would range in risk from conservative to aggressive. It would take no more that five portfolios, each consisting of three to five index funds, to give participants all the options they require. These funds are readily available from prominent fund families like Vanguard and Fidelity, among others.
According to the complaint, the Plan has 115 investment options, including retail and institutional share class mutual funds, insurance separate accounts, variable annuity options and fixed annuity options. It would be hard to defend the inclusion of retail share classes in the investment options of a plan this size, since it would qualify for lower cost institutional shares that are identical in all other respects.
All these choices are overwhelming to participants. The complaint alleges: "Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are given too many choices of anything, they lose confidence or make no decision."
The complaint notes that the Plan continues to offer higher cost share classes of identical mutual funds available at a much lower cost. It alleges this conduct "demonstrates that Defendants failed to consider the size and purchasing power of this Plan when selecting share classes."
The combination of duplicative index funds and the inclusion of actively managed funds, allegedly serve to prejudice Plan participants. The complaint states: "As generally understood in the investment community, passively managed investment options should be used or, at a minimum, thoroughly analyzed and considered in efficient markets such as large capitalization U.S. stocks. This is because it is unheard of, or extremely unlikely, to find actively managed mutual funds that outperform a passive index, net of fees, particularly on a persistent basis..."
The takeaway
Retirement plans will continue to face scrutiny as the number of class action complaints increase. It's surprisingly easy to protect a plan from these lawsuits. Here are my suggestions:
1. Retain an advisor who accepts " ERISA 3(38)" fiduciary responsibility for selection and monitoring of investment options in the Plan. Such an advisor has full legal responsibility to select and monitor investments in the Plan.
2. Limit plan investment options (if permitted to do so) to globally diversified portfolios of low management fee index funds, passively managed funds or exchange-traded-funds, at different levels of risk. Don't include any actively managed funds as investment options.
3. Monitor plan expenses to insure they are as low as possible based on current market data.
4. Never include more expensive institutional share classes of a fund when lower cost share classes are available;
5. Don't permit "revenue sharing" payments by providers of investment options in the plan.
6. Engage in a continuous monitoring process to insure that investment options are the best available for plan participants.
If you are a participant in a plan, you have the right to insist your plan is operated solely in your best interest. A plan that deviates from these recommendations is arguably not doing so.
Dan Solin is a New York Times bestselling author of the Smartest series of books, including The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read, The Smartest Retirement Book You'll Ever Read and his latest, The Smartest Sales Book You'll Ever Read.
The views of the author are his alone. He is not affiliated with any broker or advisory firm. Any data, information and content on this blog is for information purposes only and should not be construed as an offer of advisory services.
