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You dont have to be an avid reader of restaurant industry trade publicationsthough I can attest that they are oddly fascinatingto realize that everythings getting more expensive. The good news is that theres an easy way to counteract those rising menu prices. By purchasing discounted gift cards, you can defray the cost of fast-food, fast-casual, and sit-down chains, and maybe even some other retailers that have nothing to do with stuffing your face. All you need is a place to find authentic, cheap gift cards and a little foresight on when to buy them. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! Gift cards for less? Yes, please! To buy gift cards for less than their actual cash value, head to CardCash.com. It presently only handles orders from within the United States. CardCash connects people who want to sell their unused gift cards with those who want to buy them. It takes just a few seconds to see what gift cards are available, though youll need an account to make a purchase. Most of CardCashs gift cards are digital and arrive via email, so you can start using them instantly. When you search for a retailer on CardCash, youll see a list of available gift cards, with the biggest percentage discounts appearing at the top. You can also sort the list by value and cost. The discounts on CardCash range from pennies to several dollarsor sometimes even moreper card. If youre not looking for anything specific, you can also check out CardCashs Epic 20% Discounts and Deals pages. There youll find cards with greater-than-usual percentage discounts. You can save yourself time and see only cards with especially significant discounts. When looking at discount percentages, keep in mind any cash-back offers youd normally get at the store by paying with your credit card. If your card offers 3% back at restaurants, for instance, a gift card with a 3.5% discount probably isnt worth the trouble. After buying a gift card, youll get a couple of emails from CardCash: One is your order receipt, while the other contains your digital gift card as a PDF attachment. The PDF will show the gift card number, PIN (if necessary), and barcode to scan in-store. All the info you need for any purchased cards comes to you via email. Waitis CardCash actually legit? Ive used CardCash on four occasions over the past few weeks, and on three out of those four occasions, everything went smoothly. A problem arose, though, after purchasing a Five Guys gift card immediately before eating there. The card, which cost $57.65, had an advertised value of $65.29but when I tried to pay, it only showed a value of $11.57. Using that amount drew the balance down to $0. After getting home, I contacted CardCashs customer service and did not identify myself as a journalist so as to avoid getting special treatment. I received a response and a refund for the difference in balance the next day. As CardCash notes on its website, this is an inherent risk with buying gift cards on its platform, which merely serves as a marketplace between buyers and sellers. Theres nothing to inherently stop a seller from using a gift card after selling it, or from selling a stolen gift card that later gets deactivated. For these kinds of situations, CardCash says it guarantees the value of gift cards for 45 days, so you can contact them and get a refund. But it also suggests confirming gift card balances yourself immediately after the purchase, which Ill absolutely be doing in the future. Either way, my experience underscores an important caveat with CardCash: Dont spend more on gift cards than you expect to spend in a 45-day period. For one thing, you might end up accruing so many cards that itll be hard to keep track of them allbut more importantly, youll be out of luck if something happens to the cards value. While Ill keep using CardCash personally, Ill be sure not to stockpile more gift card credit than I need. CardCash is completely web-based. Itll work in any browser, on any deviceno downloads or installations required. Its free to use as a buyer, with the only cost being whatever price you pay for a card. The person doing the selling pays the sites fees. You do have to create an account in order to make a purchase. You can either sign in with your Google account or with any valid email address. The sites privacy policy is clear that no personal info is ever sold or shared in any shady-seeming wa. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
Category:
E-Commerce
Google Flights is one of the most popular flight aggregators on the web. The site lets users search millions of flights to find the best routes and prices that meet their needs. Unsurprisingly, millions of people use Google Flights to find the best deals on holiday tickets. And the search for cheap flights has also led to many nuggets of so-called conventional wisdom that, if followed, will supposedly help you find the cheapest fares. But with the holidays rapidly approaching and finding the best deals on flights at the top of mind for millions of Americans, I wanted to find out if these bits of conventional wisdom were actually trueparticularly when it comes to Google Flights. So, I went straight to the source and asked James Byers, group product manager at Google Search, who leads the Google Flights team and the development of the companys other travel products in search. Claim #1: Clearing cookies or using incognito mode will help you find cheaper fares The idea behind this claim is that airlines and flight aggregators use cookies on your computer to track how many times youve visited a site to search for tickets. Frequent returns by the same user to a site suggest they may be preparing to buy tickets, so airlines or site operators raise prices. To get around this supposed tactic, conventional wisdom says to clear your browser’s cookies or just use incognito mode when shopping for tickets. But Byers says that, when it comes to Google Flights, this is a myth. Whether you have cookies set or incognito, it doesn’t make any difference on Google Flights. You see the same results as anyone else, says Byers. But he also understands why people believe this one. He notes that due to the networked nature of the flight ecosystemthere are trillions (yes, with a T) of possible flight combinations a person could take, and a price change in just one flight, say, departing from Paris, can result in price changes in seemingly unrelated flights. These price changes can happen stunningly rapidly, Byers sayswithin secondsand the rapid nature of these price changes can make people believe the price changes they see when returning to a ticketing site even a few minutes after their first visit are being done to purposely target them, when, in fact, it isn’t. Claim #2: Using a VPN will help you find cheaper fares Another bit of conventional wisdom is that, depending on your actual location, you should use a VPN when shopping for flights. This is because airlines sometimes offer the same flight at different prices depending on where in the world you are located. If you are in a country with a relatively high GDP, the flight you want may be listed at $1,000. But those in countries with lower GDPs may see cheaper fares for the same flight. In short, airlines think people in wealthier countries will be able to pay more for the same flight than people in developing countries. Byers says this isnt exactly a mythbut a VPN may do little good in the end. He notes that airlines do tend to offer different prices based on the country youre purchasing the ticket from, so setting your VPN to show youre in a different country may help you see lower fares initially. However, this tactic often fails because usually, when you go to book that flight, you also need a billing address and a payment instrument, a credit card, or some other means of payment in that country. If you dont use a payment method native to that country, youre unlikely to get the local fare. In the end, Byers says the VPN hack is not a strategy we recommend. Claim #3: Book your flight tickets on a Tuesday to get the cheapest fares This is probably the oldest bit of conventional wisdom. The idea is that airlines generally have the lowest fares on Tuesdays, so if you buy your tickets on that day of the week, they will be cheaper than if you buy them on any of the other six days. Surprisingly, Byers says Googles data backs this up. But theres a catch. Tuesdays are a little bit cheaper, Byers says, but it’s 1.3% [less], compared to Sunday, which is the most expensive day. What that means is that if you find the perfect flight on a Sunday, you can wait until Tuesday to see if the price declinesbut even if it does, expect to see savings of only around 1.3%, at most. Thats less than seven bucks on a $500 ticket. And if you do wait until Tuesday to get that possible discount, the ticket you want could be gone by then. The difference is so small that we recommend that once you see a price [you like] . . . you should [grab] it regardless of what day you happen to book on, advises Byers. When you can actually find the best prices on holiday flights, according to Google Flights Conventional wisdom examined, I asked Byers if he had any tips for finding cheap holiday fares, based on Google Flights rich trove of data. Surprisingly, he told me that despite the holidays being little more than just two months away, now is a good time to buy your tickets. We’ve got about 40 days until Thanksgiving, Byers noted when I interviewed him on October 17. I think we have about something like 70 days until Christmas. Believe it or not, we’re just about at the point where prices historically are the lowest. Byers says that, for Thanksgiving, the sweet spot for finding the lowest fares is 35 days before the holiday, which puts the prime buying date at October 24 this year. But he notes that there is some latitude there, which includes between about 24 to 59 days before Thanksgiving. Once you get past that window, prices can go up quickly, he says. As for Christmas and the end-of-year holidays, Byers says the peak time to buy your tickets is about 50 days before. That’s the lowest, based on our data. Googles head of flights had two other suggestions for finding great flight prices throughout the year. The first is to set Google Flight price alerts. When we tell you it’s a great price,” he says, grab it. “We have some pretty great data and AI behind that to give you confidence that it’s time to book. The second: be flexible. The more wiggle room you have with your dates, times, and destinations, the better deals youll likely find. “Flexibility is always the name of the game, if you have it.”
Category:
E-Commerce
By noon on a recent Tuesday, my calendar had already decided what kind of manager I would be. Back-to-back 1:1 meetings until the end of the day. Nothing was on fire, yet nothing was moving either. That might be fine in a slow cycle. It is not fine when you are releasing new features in real time and your best engineer has three recruiters in her inbox. In this market, teams dont just compete on comp alone. They compete on how much freedom they have to actually create and build. We ran a simple test at my company. We canceled the standing 1:1. We kept space for new hires and anything sensitive, like a performance review. Everything else moved to an as needed basis. The first worry was trust. Would people feel like they lost access to their manager? They did not. Access improved because help arrived at the right moment: in the middle of a decision, during a roadblock, or on a draft that needed real feedback. Not next Tuesday at 2:30. Leaders I admire do this already. Jensen Huang. Marc Andreessen. Doug Leone. The weekly 1:1 is a relic of calendar-driven management The weekly check-in is a habit from an office-first, synchronous work environment. In a remote, product-driven organization, the cost of context switching is high, and most collaboration starts in writing. Recurring 1:1s often slide into status updates or meandering chats. This can be useful at times, yes, but its a poor default. I want conversations that are tied to goals, decisions, and growth, within the project timeline. What replaced the weekly 1:1 We switched to a shared doc and a few well-named Slack channels. Now we use short notes that say what changed, what is blocked, what needs a decision, and tag the right people. Because it is written, we skip the catch-up meeting and we have a record of how and why choices were made. When we need to make a decision in the moment we jump into a quick huddle. These are small and focused. We leave with one owner and one date. If the topic is fuzzy, we pause and write a brief doc or build a tiny prototype first. Better to spend five minutes getting clear than 30 minutes wandering. We show work instead of describing it. Rough prototypes carry more information than long explanations. A two-minute screen recording usually gets sharper feedback than a half hour of narration. I hold open office hours every week for growth, feedback, and sticky problems. People come when they need it instead of me trying to guess who might benefit from the time. It works like a help desk for humans. Some topics do need group discussion, so we have small group sessions for things like what to prioritize or writing cleaner product requirement documents. We record them so the advice becomes reusable, and people can learn from one another instead of hearing me repeat the same paragraph 10 times. We also created a simple rubric so everyone knows what kind of communication to use: async for status updates and FYIs, huddle for a decision, office hours for coaching, immediate 1:1 for anything sensitive. What actually improved Focus came back first. With fewer standing meetings people had real blocks of time to build. Writing forced clarity and huddles only happened when a live discussion would change the outcome, which meant we got faster at making decisions. Coaching got better. Instead of delivering the same guidance across 10 separate 1:1s I deliver it once at higher quality and make it accessible to all. Documentation improved because conversations start in writing and end with visible decisions. You can feel these gains. The calendar is lighter. The work moves. There is a talent angle, too. People choose environments where progress beats ceremony. Protect attention and show up at the right moments, and you keep great teammates. Waste it, and you teach them to take recruiter calls. Guardrails that keep it human This only works if its humane. New hires keep a weekly 1:1 for the first month or two, then we taper as they find their footing. Anything personal goes straight to a private conversation: performance, compensation, and hard sensitive feedback. The cadence is variable because the work is variable. Sometimes I need to meet someone three times in two days. Other times, we are on separate tracks, and a check-in every few months is enough, or we cover it in a larger group. We rotate huddle times across time zones and publish response expectations so access is not personality-based. And the managers job does not shrink. You still watch for quiet voices, stuck work, and moments to recognize people. If you miss hallway moments, create them on purpose. Light coffee chats. Demo open houses. The occasional in-person day. Serendipity scales better with a little planning. This isnt about being contrarian or cutting meetings for sport. Its about building a system that gives people time to do meaningful work and gives managers better ways to support them. Run the 30-day test with your team. Protect the obvious exceptions. Hold yourself to the same standards you set for others. If your calendar feels lighter, your writing is sharper, and decisions arent stalling, keep going. If not, bring the weekly 1:1 back. The point isnt the ritual. The point is building a way of working where smart people can do their best work and feel supported while they do it.
Category:
E-Commerce
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