NEW YORK (AP) — After reporting disappointing quarterly sales Thursday, Starbucks said it will offer a delivery option on its mobile app in select areas of the U.S starting next year.
The Seattle-based company declined to provide more details, but has been pushing to get people to use its app as a way to build customer loyalty. It also previously said it plans to let customers across the country place orders ahead of time on their smartphone by next year, an option intended to get people in and out of stores quicker.
"We are playing offense," CEO Howard Schultz said in explaining the various steps the company is taking to adapt to changing customer habits, including their move toward online shopping and away from brick-and-mortar stores.
The delivery plans for the second half of 2015 were announced by Schultz during a conference call Thursday discussing the company's fiscal fourth quarter results. For the period ended Sept. 28, Starbucks reported sales that rose but fell short of Wall Street expectations. Global sales at established locations rose 5 percent, including in the Americas and Asia.
Starbucks Corp. is pushing aggressively into different areas as it faces more competition from fast-food chains serving specialty coffees. To boost sales of food in the afternoon, for instance, it has been revamping its sandwiches and adding new offerings like a grilled cheese sandwich that's warmed up in an oven.
This summer, Starbucks also launched its Fizzio soda drinks in the Sunbelt. But Wells Fargo analysts said in a note this week that their checks at a dozen stores in six states suggested the drinks aren't performing up to expectations so far.
In a phone interview, Chief Operating Officer Troy Alstead said the soda drinks are doing "exactly what we expected it to do," but that a national launch isn't planned for 2015. In a previous interview, Alstead had said he expected the drinks to be in much of the U.S. by the upcoming summer.
Alstead said Starbucks is instead focusing on growing its tea business. He said tea accounted for a "high single digit" percentage of sales last year, and that the company expects it to reach "well into the teens" over time.
For the quarter, Starbuckst earned $587.9 million, or 77 cents per share. Not including one-time item, it earned 74 cents per share, which was in line with Wall Street expectations, according to FactSet.
Revenue came in at $4.18 billion, short of the $4.24 billion analysts expected.
For the current quarter ending in December, Starbucks expects its per-share earnings to range from 79 cents to 81 cents. Analysts expected 83 cents per share. The company expects full-year earnings in the range of $3.08 to $3.13 per share.
Shares of Starbucks were down 4 percent at $74.04.
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Follow Candice Choi at www.twitter.com/candicechoi
Pop quiz: Which high-profile official faulted the Obama administration for the following botched responses to the financial crisis?
1) Policing bad banks: "The enforcement response we sought came way more slowly than would have been ideal ... and (inevitably) fell far short of what people thought would be appropriate ...
2) A mortgage task force Obama announced in his 2012 State of the Union speech "was not about the average individual victims, but more the fights among the consenting adults that had sold and bought mortgage securities that performed badly."
3) The government's $25 billion National Mortgage Settlement to fix botched foreclosures "was ridiculously protracted and ultimately unsatisfying in the penalties imposed and relief sought."
Outspoken progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.?
Libertarian firebrand Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.?
Sorry, no. The answer is actually Timothy Geithner, the former Treasury secretary, architect of the crisis rescue packages and, more typically, the Obama administration's stalwart defender.
The criticisms all come from a cache of previously unreleased documents prepared for Geithner's recent memoir, "Stress Test," that are part of one of the biggest legal fights from the financial crisis, a case against the government by shareholders of insurance giant AIG.
The 500-plus pages of private papers obtained by ProPublica show a different side of Geithner – one more candidly critical of the administration's policies and of his own shortcomings. In some instances, they express views he watered down or left out of the book, particularly when it comes to the administration's efforts to police Wall Street and get relief to homeowners.
Geithner declined to comment, spokeswoman Jenni LeCompte said.
In the book's chief analogy, Geithner and the administration are firefighters battling a cataclysmic financial arson. They can punish the arsonists by letting the big banks burn down, but the greater good is to save them, though not necessarily their shareholders, and prevent the collapse of the whole financial system.
That theme is echoed in the private papers, but they also make clear that Geithner believed the rescue came up short on multiple fronts.
"We sought a very powerful enforcement response by competent authorities," he writes in a May 2013 memo titled "On the Politics of the Crisis Response" and slugged "TFG draft." "This didn't turn out as we'd hoped, in part because we didn't give it enough attention."
The memo, written after Geithner left the Treasury job, seeks to explain why the government rescues were not politically popular and tilted toward Wall Street rather than Main Street.
Enforcement was slow "in part because the illegal stuff was very hard to prove," Geithner writes, but also because of expectations "given the prevailing view that the crisis was caused by criminals [sic] behavior of a few bankers and mortgage brokers and investors."
Attempts to shake up supervision fizzled. "We changed part of the leadership of the financial oversight system, but not in a way that signaled a new team of sheriffs," he says. "The bank supervisors got tougher, but we had no high-profile firings."
Obama's regulatory picks, he goes on, were not initially seen as "likely to be tough enforcers." He cites his own background as "a former sort of bank supervisor" during his prior job as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before and during the crash. (The New York Fed supervised giant Wall Street banks; Geithner's book acknowledges that he missed troubles at Citigroup and didn't push hard enough for bank safeguards.)
Some of the administration's enforcement efforts were misplaced, Geithner adds, singling out the Securities and Exchange Commission. "A huge part of the SEC's attention was on insider trading," he says, "which though offensive and damaging played no role in causing the crisis."
In "Stress Test," Geithner argued that the amount of mortgage fraud "deserved a more forceful enforcement response than the government delivered." At the same time, he said it would be "inaccurate" to say "Wall Street paid no price for its misbehavior," given that big banks paid more than $100 billion in fines related to the crisis.
The 2013 memo is less evenhanded. Besides criticizing the national mortgage settlement, which was mostly meant to help foreclosed borrowers, Geithner faults a Justice Department mortgage fraud task force as a "good idea, (that) delivered little."
"We put in place innovative and quite expensive programs to help homeowners refinance and restructure mortgages and to support small business lending," he writes. "Here, too, the programs seemed small, and limited, and late relative to the magnitude of the damage done by the crisis."
ProPublica has reported extensively on the failings of government mortgage relief programs and the failure to prosecute corporate wrongdoers.
The Geithner papers, portions of which are redacted, were produced in the ongoing AIG case in the Federal Court of Claims in Washington, D.C., and have not been widely available.
In the lawsuit, former AIG chief Maurice Greenberg and other shareholders are seeking $40 billion to resolve claims the government's 2008 bailout imposed more onerous terms on the insurer than banks. Geithner defended the government in testimony earlier this month.
Besides several memos like the one from 2013, the papers include transcripts of informal conversations Geithner had with his collaborators while working on the book. In some of this material, a visceral distrust of populists, business groups, labor leaders, politicians and the media emerges, as does a sense of being unfairly under siege.
"We took a pragmatic course focusing on things that were central to the crisis — wars of necessity not wars of choice," Geithner writes. "This put us in no man's land, as we found ourselves on so many policy issues, with reforms that enraged the right, but did not really satisfy the left."
"I had deep distrust and scorn for the prevailing populist impulse" and didn't expect "broader public acclaim for the shit we had to do," the 2013 memo says. In other musings, he declares himself no fan of the Tea Party or what he called "professional progressives."
In an accounting from his book, Geithner estimates that the various government rescue efforts, as of the end of 2013, resulted in a $166 billion surplus for taxpayers. That is the net difference between almost $200 billion in positive results from programs adopted in 2008 minus losses of more than $30 billion from Obama's auto and housing rescues.
But the media, in Geithner's view, didn't give enough credit to the administration's successes, which quickly became "old news," and were slow to correct mistakes.
In one transcript, Geithner calls a prominent news anchor who'd interviewed him a "super dick," though he also admits, "I kind of deserved it." Another widely followed business columnist, who he asked to correct a mistake, was a "crazy person," he says.
All the same, Geithner was willing to cooperate with writers who took a more humanistic or favorable approach; he mentions a 2010 article in Vogue as well as a 2009 interview with a prominent editorial columnist Geithner said didn't "really know anything about this stuff."
Geithner faults himself and the Obama administration for not doing a better job in communicating good news, especially the positive results from TARP, the $700 billion program to buy troubled assets and equity from banks.
The TARP was organized by Hank Paulson, Geithner's predecessor at Treasury under the Bush administration. President Obama "was not going to go out and say 'I just want to remind you of this stuff that Paulson and Geithner did that I supported' as a senator, Geithner says in one transcript. Obama could not trumpet the returns because unemployment remained too high, he adds.
In his book, Geithner took Washington's political culture to task for "backbiting and posturing and political gamesmanship." He is even more critical in private.
Labor leaders wasted their time on fighting regulation of derivatives – the complex financial securities that helped inflame the crisis – because "it was not going to have any measurable effect on the fortunes of organized labor," he wrote in the 2103 memo.
The business community, too, had its "share of extortion or protection rackets like the Chamber of Commerce," Geithner writes, though "it was often hard to tell who was corrupting whom. The politicians did all sorts of things to raise money, some of them extortion-like."
As for the "smart, old, global businesses," they were "stunningly naive about how easily they were played" and how their money was spent "in all sorts of dumb ways."
"I really had no idea of the limits of executive and president power on economic issues," he writes in the 2013 memo. "I had no idea how little leverage we had over individual members of Congress." Geithner says he made a "very good prop" at hearings because "I attracted so much attention. No questions were really ever asked with the purpose of being answered."
"Nothing with Congress was on the up and up," he writes. "Only the slimmest pretense of seriousness."
At one point Geithner admits to sounding "kind of whiney."
One misconception that troubled him was a persistent belief that he had once worked on Wall Street. That was not true; most of his career was in the government.
Once he left the administration, that changed. In late 2013, Geithner went to work in New York at the private equity firm Warburg Pincus, where he is president and managing director.
Do you have thoughts to share about Tim Geithner or the government's response to the financial crisis? Email Jeff.Gerth@propublica.org
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Gas prices always go down in the fall, but usually not this much.
At 56 percent of the nation’s gas stations, the price of gas is now under $3 per gallon, according to Michael Green, a spokesman for AAA, an auto club federation. AAA collects information on gas prices from consumers who use between 80,000 - 100,000 different U.S. gas stations every day, Green said.
This is a huge change from a year ago, Green said, when only 11 percent of stations were selling unleaded fuel for less than $3. Gas hasn't been this cheap in nearly four years, AAA said in a statement on Monday.
Gas prices always fall in the autumn, as colder temperatures mean fewer people go on road and boat trips, said Patrick DeHaan, a senior petroleum analyst at GasBuddy, a website that lets people share information about gas prices.
Yet today's prices are way down even when compared with previous seasonal lows, as this graphic shows:
(Chart courtesy of AAA)
The low cost of gas could be a boon for the U.S. economy: spending less to fill up their tanks means Americans have more disposable income going into the holiday season. U.S. households save $120 for every 10 cent drop in the price of gas, the New York Times reported earlier this month, citing GasBuddy's Tom Kloza.
There are a few reasons why gas is cheaper this fall than in previous years. For one thing, crude-oil prices have tumbled recently as investors fear that a global economic slowdown could weaken demand.
When the price of oil falls, the price of gasoline falls, too. Experts say the price of oil makes up about two-thirds of the price of gas. Other factors, such as taxes and refining and distribution costs, also play a role in determining the cost of a gallon of gas.
In many places in America, gas is even cheaper than $3 a gallon:
(U.S. gas price heat map courtesy of GasBuddy)
Oil prices are also falling because major OPEC oil producers Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran chose to slash prices earlier this fall, DeHaan told The Huffington Post.
Analysts have speculated that Saudi Arabia, which produces more oil than any other OPEC member, wants to increase its share of the market.
“If there’s a landlord who sells all his houses for greatly under value, it causes the whole market to tank,” DeHaan said. “That’s what’s happening with oil. The Saudis are basically flooding the market with cheaper oil, and that’s putting a huge amount of downward pressure on oil prices.”
One more reason gas is so cheap, according to DeHaan: The U.S. is sucking more and more oil out of the ground than at any time since the 1980s. “So we have all these sources of new crude oil in the U.S., and that’s adding to the global oil supply, which naturally pushes prices down,” he said.
Some states are making a topical Halloween choice this year, opting for Frozen costumes or dressing as the mythical Slenderman. Others will keep it classic, dressing as doctors or cheerleaders.
This map, made by SumoCoupon, a website that offers discounts at various stores, shows which Halloween costumes are the most "trending" in each state. Their team analyzed Google search volumes to determine which costumes were the most Googled in various parts of the country.
Americans love to emulate their favorite film characters... and apparently three states have a banana obsession.
Lululemon can't even donate to charity without miring itself in controversy.
The yoga-wear retailer is getting slammed after announcing a partnership this week with the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education. Lululemon will contribute $750,000 to the Tibetan spiritual leader's nonprofit organization over the next three years to expand education initiatives and for "researching the connection between mind-body-heart," according to the company's press release.
Some critics say the alliance is hogwash. They don't think the Dalai Lama's name should be associated with a money-making enterprise and complain he's been "hijacked" and turned into a mere corporate marketing tool.
A mob flocked to Lululemon's official blog, lighting up the comments section with accusations of hypocrisy.
"As he believes that luxuries are not necessities, you believe in $100 yoga pants," one commenter pointed out.
"It is offensive that you have sunk so low as to use the Dalai Lama and his image as part of your branding," another wrote.
"I am put-off by Lululemon’s bizarre effort to hijack the Dalai Lama for brand-building and commercial gain," a third added.
A few who spoke out against the partnership claimed not to like the Dalai Lama, with one calling him "cruel" and another calling him "greedy."
Lululemon appears to disagree. "Both organizations share a common vision for developing the next generation of compassionate leaders in the world and are committed to engaging and empowering healthy communities," the company said in its press release.
Lululemon and the Dalai Lama Center did not respond to requests for additional comment.
Lululemon has a lot on its plate. Last spring, quality control issues sparked a recall of too-sheer yoga pants. Then, last fall, co-founder Chip Wilson irked many customers when he said Lululemon's pants "don't work" for some women's bodies. Earlier this month, Lululemon managed to offend the entire city of Buffalo, New York, by making fun of its NFL team.
One commenter summarized: "Dear Lulu, your product is still in question, don’t get me wrong. Great marketing, done! Now get back to improving your product and winning clients back."
As a woman gets heavier, her chances of working in a low-paying, physically taxing job grow, according to a new study from Jennifer Shinall, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. But weight doesn’t have nearly as much bearing on the type of job a man lands.
Though obese men are more likely than men of average weight to work in lower-paying, physical jobs, the effect isn't nearly as strong as it is for women. As a result, obese women make $7 less than their average-weight counterparts, while obese men make just $2 less.
“It absolutely suggests that weight is much more of a consideration in the labor market for women than it is for men,” Shinall told The Huffington Post in an interview.
Shinall’s findings add to the growing body of evidence that physical attributes play a depressingly large role in the lives of working women, no matter how they look. Very skinny women tend to get paid more. Hiring committees penalize attractive women by not calling them for interviews.
Such factors typically add to the broader discrimination women already face at work. Research shows women earn less than men in the same roles and are also more likely to work in low-paying fields.
Many female-dominated, low-wage jobs, such as home health care and child care, are where obese and morbidly obese women are most likely to end up, Shinall’s study found.
"Those are the only jobs that are available for the heaviest women in the labor market," she said.
For her study, Shinall analyzed occupation, health and population data for 10,007 women and 8,928 men. She found that, the heavier women get, the more likely they'll end up working in jobs that require more physical activity.
The opposite is true for women seeking jobs in fields that involve a lot of personal interaction, such as sales. Women become less likely to land those roles the more overweight they are. Morbidly obese women who do get jobs in such fields are paid about 5 percent less, on average, than other women, even controlling for factors like education, the study found.
For men, on the other hand, being heavier can actually boost earnings in some jobs. Overweight men working in more physical jobs make about 4 percent more, on average, than their average-weight colleagues, according to the study.
Shinall said she suspects that one of the main reasons obese and morbidly obese women tend to cluster in low-paying, strenuous jobs is because of discrimination in hiring for white-collar roles. Companies may not want an overweight woman representing them to customers, she said, and it's also possible that the person doing the hiring may not want to work with an obese woman.
As sales and profits have crumbled at McDonald's recently, some observers have blamed low-income Americans, saying they must not be able to afford Big Macs any more.
But that's wrong. If anything, Big Macs have gotten more affordable lately. The real problem is that the iconic chain needs to win back its true base: middle-class Americans looking for a cheap, quick meal.
For the past 11 months, sales at U.S. McDonald's restaurants open at least a year -- a key measure of an eatery's health -- have fallen or remained flat. The company announced earlier this week that U.S. same-store sales fell 4.1 percent in September, the worst monthly drop in more than a decade, and that profits plunged 30 percent in its latest quarter. The company's stock price has tumbled about 11 percent over the past six months.
One common explanation for McDonald's woes is that low-income Americans are suffering from a sluggish recovery and unable to afford eating out at McDonald's any more.
But the numbers don't back up that take. For one thing, McDonald's has actually become more of a bargain relative to other food options in recent years: McDonald’s prices haven’t risen as quickly as prices at fast-casual eateries like Panera Bread, according to data from Technomic, a food research firm. Nor have they risen as quickly as broader food inflation, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data:
McDonald's menu prices grew more slowly than prices at fast-casual chains and food inflation overall between 2009 and 2014.
And yet diners are still flocking to other chains despite their typically higher costs. When Chipotle raised menu prices earlier this year, customers didn’t bat an eye -- the chain reported a profit jump of 25 percent the following quarter. That suggests McDonald's problem isn't so much pricing, but a perception that its food isn't worth any price -- unlike, say, Chipotle, which has positioned itself as offering fast, fresh and quality food for which customers are willing to pay more.
Unlike Walmart, whose fortunes have largely mirrored that of the poor, McDonald’s doesn’t take food stamps. That makes it an unlikely regular destination for low-income Americans, according to Joel Berg, the author of “All You Can Eat? How Hungry Is America?”
In fact, a 2011 study from the University of California-Davis found that fast-food consumption actually rises with income, until incomes reach about $60,000.
“That conventional wisdom is wrong,” Berg said of the notion that poor people are more likely to eat at places like McDonald’s.
Given the strength of that conventional wisdom, it's likely going to take a full revamp of McDonald's image to convince the middle-class customers who have fled the chain that it offers more than just cheap burgers for people who can’t afford anything better. What has been the quintessential McDonald’s experience for decades -- inexpensive food that tastes the same everywhere -- just isn’t as appealing any more.
To fix this, the company is working to convince diners it sells “fresh, quality food” at a reasonable price, partly through "transparency initiatives" like a campaign last week asking people to submit questions about its food, according to Heidi Barker, a McDonald's spokeswoman.
"McDonald’s appeals to customers of many diverse backgrounds and lifestyles," Barker wrote in an e-mail statement. "There’s value at every level of the menu, from our Dollar Menu and More to our premium sandwiches and salads, and McCafe beverages."
It could be a hard sell, as McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson acknowledged on a conference call with analysts Tuesday.
“The question is whether or not our value and our food options are resonating as strongly," he said. "I believe that that is the fundamental basis of some of the challenges that we are having.”
Police may soon start using electronic guns that can track how, when and where the weapons are used, which could lead to greater accountability in investigations of police shootings.
The firearms technology company Yardarm Technologies has developed a new product that can record crucial information about when, where and how police officers use their firearms. This technology could be a welcome tool amid growing criticism of heavy-handed police tactics in the U.S., which were exemplified by the controversy around the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August.
Yardarm’s new system can recognize and record things such as when the weapon is unholstered, when a magazine is inserted, when the first bullet enters the chamber and when and (roughly) where the weapon is fired, company spokesman Jim Schaff told The Huffington Post. Soon, Yardarm plans to give the gun the ability to know the direction and angle of each shot, Schaff said.
Why is it important to know this information? The system can provide an objective record of an incident in which a police officer used his weapon, Schaff said, which could be helpful in an investigation. He added that it "goes both ways" -- the data could also be used to exonerate an officer accused of misconduct, or to prosecute a criminal in a court of law.
“We’re there to show what happened, to make an accurate reporting of the event, so that it can be used as necessary after the fact,” Schaff said.
Earlier this month, the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department and the Carrollton, Texas, Police Department began equipping some of their officers’ Glocks with the new technology, Yardarm stated in a press release Friday.
“We’re looking forward to what we believe law enforcement is heading towards,” Carrollton Police Sgt. Wes Rutherford told HuffPost. “We thought we might be interested in purchasing this in the future.”
Schaff added that the technology can be also be used to keep police officers safer. When an officer draws his weapon, for example, the gun will send an alert to the police command center and to nearby officers, alerting them to a potentially dangerous situation.
Yardarm does not manufacture an actual gun, but a two-inch long device that fits into the grip of an existing gun. That device detects the gun’s every movement through high-powered motion sensors known as accelerometers.
“It’s the same kind of sensor your iPhone uses to change the screen from vertical to horizontal when you turn the phone to the side,” Schaff said. “But ours is way more powerful.”
Currently, for the sensor to work, an officer must be carrying a smartphone. That’s because the device sends a signal through the officer’s phone and then on to Yardarm’s data servers in Washington and Texas, where the information is stored for future use.
The SENSOR can also detect, to a limited extent, where each shot is fired in relation to the shots that were previously fired. “If you fire a shot and then moved laterally ten feet and fired another, we’d know that you moved,” Schaff said. “But three feet? Maybe not.”
Rutherford noted that the sensor could be helpful in an event where an officer uses his gun on a civilian. “Whenever we investigate an officer-involved shooting, we look for every particular avenue that we can, to obtain the objective information, in order to piece together the whole puzzle of what happened,” he said. “So it could absolutely help, yes.”
One of the most recent major development in police officer accountability is the use of body-worn cameras by officers in several states across the country, a practice that has received greater attention after Brown’s killing. Studies have shown that when officers wear video cameras on their uniforms, they’re significantly less likely to use force in their interactions with civilians. Civilian complaints against officers have also been shown to drop when officers wear the cameras, suggesting that this kind of technology could save cities money by reducing litigation fees.
Dashboard cameras, which became popular in the 1990s, have also proven useful for providing an objective record of problematic encounters between civilians and police: Camera footage often helps cut through the he-said-she-said chatter that inevitably accompanies allegations of police misconduct.
But there is a welter of issues with police recording themselves on the job, including privacy concerns and the nation’s complicated patchwork of consent laws. Another problem is that video footage isn’t always as reliable as we think. “Sometimes there can be multiple gunshots and it will sound like one, because they cover each other up,” said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a police accountability expert.
And even though dashboard cameras have been around for years, they still aren’t used in some places in the United States. Body-worn cameras, a much newer concept, are hardly used at all, though more cities are starting to consider them.
For as long as police officers have carried guns, advocates have bemoaned the lack of data and accountability regarding police shootings. To date, there is still no official data on how many people are shot by cops in the United States every year.
Gun tracking technology like Yardarm's would add to the amount of data available to law enforcement officers and courts about controversial officer-involved shootings. Knowing where and when each shot is fired could bring greater transparency to investigations of these episodes.
In Brown's case, the version of events recounted by Darren Wilson, the officer who shot him, has at times been at odds with accounts from witnesses. But it’s not clear that the sequence of events would be any less hazy if Wilson had been using Yardarm’s technology.
“Cameras and sensors on weapons would represent a quantum leap forward in policing and accountability,” said Kirsten John Foy, a civil rights advocate who is also the Northeast Regional Director of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. “But technology has its limitations as well. You can’t understand a person’s intent, a person’s mindset, or the circumstances which that officer felt made it necessary to use deadly force. It won’t record those things."
"So I think we have to be mindful that policing is not just a science, it’s also an art form," he added. "And there are other factors that have to be taken into account.”
This isn't the first time Yardarm Technologies has attempted to develop a firearm to help address public safety issues. After the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Yardarm set out to create a consumer "smart gun" that could be remotely disabled using an app. But the company abandoned that plan when it realized how politically controversial the idea was. Compared to the consumer market, Yardarm encountered much less resistance marketing its technologies to law enforcement, Schaff told HuffPost earlier this year.
CORRECTION: This article originally suggested that Yardarm manufactures its own firearm. Rather it makes a small sensor that fits into an existing gun.
It's as if a robber were to break into a bank today and stay there until Christmas before someone noticed.
That's how long hackers had access to JPMorgan Chase's computer system, The New York Times reported this week. If two months seems like an eternity for cyberthieves to wander through the computers of the country's largest bank, consider that hackers have had free rein for even longer at several major retailers this past year.
Hackers resided on the computers of Neiman Marcus for five months, Home Depot for five months, arts and crafts store Michaels for eight months and Goodwill, the thrift store, for a year and a half.
That hackers were able to roam through JPMorgan's computer network for two months is another sign that companies are struggling not only with keeping cybercriminals out, but with spotting them once they get in.
A spokesman for JPMorgan did not respond to a request for comment. The bank said earlier this month that hackers had compromised the data of 76 million households, but that no money or Social Security numbers were stolen and the bank hadn't seen any unusual customer fraud.
The length of time that hackers reside on a computer system doesn't always correlate to the number of people affected. The size of the company's customer base also makes a difference. Target, for example, said 40 million customers had their payment card data compromised during an attack last fall that lasted just two weeks, while Michaels said that a much smaller number -- 3 million people -- were affected during its eight-month attack.
Still, the length of time of a data breach matters. Unlike real-life bank robbers who escape in minutes, digital bank robbers can take weeks or months before they gain access to the data they're after.
"A lot of people think hacking happens overnight and the the bad guys break into the network and they're done," said Aleksandr Yampolskiy, chief executive officer of SecurityScorecard, a cybersecurity firm. "The reality is it takes a long time."
Hackers are able to go undetected for so long because they use numerous techniques to disguise their activities. For one, they often attack computers using malicious software that doesn't set off alarms with anti-virus programs. And once inside, they route the data they steal through a series of intermediary computers, for example at a church or a public school, according to Yampolskiy. Such computers seem innocent to security teams and avoid raising red flags by communicating directly with computers in Russia, where many hackers are based, he said.
Some cybercriminals even fix the security flaws that allowed them to gain access to a computer network in the first place, like a burglar breaking a window and then replacing it before he leaves so nothing appears amiss.
But Yampolskiy said perhaps the biggest reason that hackers go unnoticed is that security teams are often overwhelmed with data. Companies will spend millions of dollars on sophisticated intrusion detection systems and vulnerability scanners that set off numerous alarms, many of which aren't serious. A security engineer at a company with 4,000 employees might get an alert every time an employee visits a suspicious website on the network, for example.
While those security tools are supposed to help keep hackers out, they create an avalanche of alerts that allow hackers to blend in.
"You get so much information that the event that matters is buried in those security logs," Yampolskiy said. "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack."
The Freedom Socialist Party has right-wing bloggers seeing red over a job listing that paid less than the group advocates for a minimum wage.
Earlier this month, the nonprofit posted listings on Craigslist and Indeed to advertise an opening for a part-time web designer. It offered to pay $13 an hour or more, depending on the designer's experience. That's well below the $20 minimum wage the party pushes for in its platform, and lower than the $15 wage it helped pass this year in Seattle. Right-leaning sites promptly seized on what they saw as hypocrisy.
But Doug Barnes, the party's national secretary, told The Huffington Post on Saturday that the group relies heavily on donations from low-wage workers and could not afford to pay much to an inexperienced designer.
"We're practicing what we're preaching in terms of continuing to fight for the minimum wage," Barnes said, making his first public comment on the controversy. "But we can't pay a lot more than $13."
He said the party's revenues would increase if the minimum wage were raised to $20 -- and he'd even prefer $22, at least in Seattle. The city will begin phasing in a $15 minimum wage in April.
"Our donor base would all be affected, and the low-wage workers who support us with $5 to $6 a month would be able to give more," he said. "That would affect our ability to pay higher wages as well."
But Barnes said he removed the $13 starting wage from the Craigslist ad on Friday in response to the online criticism.
"The right-wing attack is very hypocritical," he said. "These are the same people who fought against the minimum wage and support companies like Walmart."
He said the Freedom Socialist Party, which was formed in 1966 as a revolutionary feminist breakaway group from the United States Socialist Workers Party, does not accept donations from corporations.
Raising the federal minimum wage would save the government billions and have sweeping benefits for low-income families, according to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank focused on labor issues.
EPI's report found that if the minimum wage were boosted from its current level of $7.25 per hour to $10.10, as proposed by the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2014, more than 1.7 million Americans would no longer have to rely on public assistance programs. This would produce $7.6 billion per year or more in savings for the federal government, according to the study.
Millions of Americans, known as the "working poor," are unable to lift themselves above the poverty line despite working full-time, minimum-wage jobs. Increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 would mean that many of these people wouldn't have to rely on additional public subsidies to make ends meet.
Currently, half of all people earning under $10.10 per hour, roughly 11.9 million Americans, receive some form of means-tested benefits from the government, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps and others.
Last year, EPI researchers estimated that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would likely boost wages for 27 million American workers.
The federal minimum wage has not been raised since July 2009. The Fair Minimum Wage Act, which would gradually bump the federal minimum wage up to $10.10 over three years and peg future increases to the consumer price index, is currently stalled in Congress.
If the minimum wage had been pegged to the overall productivity rate of the U.S. economy since 1968, workers would be earning about $18.42 per hour today, according to the study.
EPI argues that the savings produced from a minimum wage hike should be reallocated to other underfunded social safety net programs that reduce poverty, rather than just reducing the budgets of the programs that saved money.
"Raising the minimum wage is one simple and long-overdue step toward rebalancing the social contract so that the private and public sectors are more equal participants in improving living standards for American workers," the report states.
