Posts by John Lippman
The COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping the workplace for both employers and employees by upending what has been a daily ritual among white-collar workers dating back to tie clasps and stocking garters — going into an office — into a dispersed, off-site model where people work remotely from any place they wish.
Under the program, the organizers enlisted 40 Hartford-area businesses that agreed to accept “Hartford Dollars” coupons that shoppers purchased online in $15 and $25 increments. The coupons are worth twice their value when exchanged at participating business, giving them a purchasing power of $30 to $50 each that can be applied toward merchandise or a meal.
Dirt Cowboy is not doing the level of business it was before COVID-19 erupted earlier this year — few restaurants or bars are — but, thanks to a large jump in online sales of its signature roasted coffee beans, Dirt Cowboy has swung back into the black after a long period of losing money, according to Guerra.
But then beating benchmarks is not unusual for Gerngross, a professor at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering and an entrepreneur who has birthed a string of successful biotech startups, including protein drugmaker GlycoFi, co-founded with Thayer colleague Charles Hutchinson in 2000 and acquired by pharma giant Merck in 2006 for $400 million.
Many of the 29 members of The Sharon Academy’s class of 2016, who graduated from college four years later in 2020 — widely dubbed now “Class of COVID-19” — have found their post-college plans disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic in ways they could never have foreseen as they entered their final semester of college.
Indeed, gun sales have been so strong that Ruger couldn’t make guns fast enough, according to Christopher Killoy, Ruger’s chief executive.
The shift in public acceptance over shopping while masked in this time of COVID-19 could be due in part to recent corporate decision-making – last week Walmart was the first of several national chains to announce that masks would be required for shoppers. That was quickly followed by a growing number of major retailers, such as CVS, Target, Kohl’s and Starbucks, as well as local grocery stores.