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Throughout Harvard Square, there are many bookshop brimming with the latest literary fiction and intellectual memoirs, patronized by scholarly types. But in January, a new bookshop popped up in the neighborhood that is nothing like the others. Lovestruck Books is a romance bookstore. It’s Instagrammable entrance is adorned with pink and purple flowers. There’s a coffee shop that transforms into a wine bar for evening events. Besides an enormous selection of romance novels, you can also purchase sex toys and tote bags emblazoned with I read smut. We want to toe the lie a little bit with being provocative and edgy, says Rachel Kanter, the store’s founder. But the most important thing is that everything is done in a way that feels safe and welcoming. Her plan seems to be working. The store has been packed since launch and Kanter has blown through all of her sales targets. Customers don’t just visit the store to discover new books; they come to gather with one another. On a recent Tuesday, I sat on a plush velvet sofa in the corner of the store with a cup of tea. Next to me, a woman was tearfully confiding to an older friend about her divorce. When they left, two women sat down and pondered whether Mark Zuckerberg’s newfound embrace of masculine energy would break up his marriage. Rachel Kanter [Photo: Reagan Byrne/Lovestruck] The Ripped Bodice in Ventura, California, was the first romance bookstore to open in the United States back in 2016. It was so successful that it went on to open another location in Brooklyn, and has paved the way for dozens more to open. There are now 30 romance bookstores around the country, including A Novel Romance in Louisville, Kentucky, and Blush Bookstore in Wichita, Kansas. Most of these bookstores are founded by women, and they’ve become safe spaces for their predominantly female and queer customers to gather and create community. This is abundantly clear on Valentine’s Day. While the holiday is purportedly about celebrating romance, these bookstores are choosing to focus on friendship. Lovestruck is hosting a conversation with best-selling novelist Ashley Poston about female friendships. Sweeter Than Fiction, a bookstore in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, has organized an outing for customers who love sports romance novels to attend a hockey game. [Photo: Sweeter Than Fiction] Romance goes mainstream Callie Lamb opened Sweeter than Fiction in Charleston last October. On opening day, a line of customers snaked around the block. I exceeded my three month sales target on day one of being open, she says. Even now, I can’t keep books in stock. Lamb had spent her career as a buyer for large retailers like Belk and Dollar Tree, but during the pandemic, she decided it was time to strike out on her own. In 2023, she came up with the idea of opening a romance bookstore. She found a prime location on King Street, Charleston’s shopping district, and poured her savings into transforming it into an aesthetically pleasing venue, with a plant wall, pink bookcases, and marble topped tables to display books. Romance, as a genre, exploded during the pandemic. This coincided with the rise of TikTok. Book lovers took to the platform to promote their favorite titles, driving sales. Today, romance is both a top-selling and fast-growing genre in fiction. In 2023, romance novels sold 39 million copies, more than double the number from 2020. Publishers are now flooding the market with even more titles across many sub-genres, including LGBTQ+ romance, paranormal romance, and romantasy (a blending of romance and fantasy). Romance is a huge category, but most bookstores have a small section devoted to it, Lamb says. There’s a clear demand for a store that specializes in romance. One reason that some bookstores don’t have more romance books is that the genre has has been stigmatized for decades. This taboo goes back centuries, scholars say, as the male-dominated literary establishment dismissed these books because they were primarily written by and for women. But while previous generations of women felt the need to hide their Harlequin romances, today’s readers are reading romances unapologetically. Indeed, some women want to reclaim the word smut as a form of female empowerment, since romance novels have done a great deal to center women’s desires, sexuality, and experiences. There is a tendency to dismiss things that are geared towards women, Kanter says. Romance is a powerful way for women to reclaim something that belongs to them. [Photo: Reagan Byrne/Lovestruck] A Feminine Energy While there’s are some men who feel comfortable admitting they read love stories, the vast majority of romance readersand romance bookstore customersare women. So it makes sense that romance bookstores are unapologetically feminine. The interior design tends to be saturated in shades of pink, red, and purple. They sell jewelry, throw cushions, and candles. Flowers are often part of the decor. /p> For many of these romance bookstores, part of the business model is hosting events and talks. In just one month in business, Lovestruck has already hosted more than 3,400 people at in-store events. The talks tackle a wide range of topics, from discussions with best-selling authors to learning how to play mahjong to unpacking steamy love scenes in LGBTQ+ love stories. The community in Harvard Square has come in out droves to support us, Kanter says. It’s clear they were hungry for this kind of gathering space. For many people, romance bookstores have become a place to escape from current politics, which have increasingly restricted women’s rights as well as the LGBTQ+ community. Indeed, Lamb points out that part of the reason that romance took off during the pandemic is because readers wanted an escape from the harsh realities of life. By definition, you get a happily ever after, she says. Kanter concurs. Her store and events are deliberately designed to be fun and lighthearted. But at the same time, creating a place where women and queer folks can find joy in one another’s presence also feels like an act of resistance in this political climate. Our customers are choosing to put their dollars towards supporting a woman-owned business that celebrates the female experience, Kanter says.
Category:
E-Commerce
Eric Migicovsky has barely started working on a successor to the Pebble smartwatch, and hes already talking about being finished with it.Eight years ago, Migicovsky shut down the smartwatch startup he founded, having sold its software assets to Fitbit, which later became part of Google. But all this time, he and thousands of Pebble die-hards have continued to wear their watches, aided in part by a community thats kept Pebbles app store and core services alive. Last month, Migicovsky persuaded Google to make Pebbles software open source, and now hes started a company to build new watches. (They wont be called Pebbles, though, since Google still owns the name.)While theres plenty to do before new watches can ship, the longevity of current Pebbles taught Migicovsky a lesson: Not every gadget needs an annual release cycle, a steady cadence of software launches, and a change-the-world mindset. Instead, its possible to release a finished product that stays in its lane. This is an atypical approach to consumer tech, but it will be a defining trait for Pebbles successor.Pebble has not had a firmware update in eight years, and it still isfor me, at least, for the features I wantthe best option on the market, which is crazy, Migicovsky says. Before that, we were updating every month . . . and I never once realized, or thought, or even considered: What if we were done?Why Pebble is specialAs one of those last remaining active Pebble users, I understand where Migicovsky is coming from. Ive worn a Pebble Time Steel on and off ever since it launched in 2015, and I even bought a couple more as backups in case of hardware failure (both of which I eventually had to start using).[Photo: Jared Newman]While Ive dabbled in Apple Watches and Androids WearOS models, I always drift back to Pebble. Im not big into quantified health, so the increasing fitness focus of other watches doesnt resonate with me. A watch that delivers notifications, music controls, and timers is good enough, and Pebble arguably does those things better than any modern smartwatch. The battery lasts for a week, so I can leave the charger at home on weekend outings, and side buttons let me control music or dismiss notifications without even looking at the screen.Meanwhile, Pebbles lo-fi design has become part of its allure. The Game Boy aesthetic, fun animations, and thousands of installable watch faces give Pebble a geeky charm, made all the more novel by how many people wear identical Apple Watches on their wrists. Migicovsky says the aesthetics help explain why Pebble has maintained its enthusiastic community of users.[Photo: Jared Newman]It was retro when it started, because of the black-and-white feel, and so I think it didnt become dated because it was already dated, Migicovsky says. That stuck around in peoples memories, and on a lot of peoples wrists.Bringing Pebble backYou can still find Pebble watches on sites like eBay, but getting them to work is a challenge. Pebbles iPhone app departed the App Store in 2021 because no one kept up its Apple Developer account, so you have to sideload it using work-arounds like AltStore. On Android 15 and above, new security requirements make direct sideloading impossible, so you have to push the app to your phone from a computer.Even if you get the app installed, it wont do much on its own because Pebbles servers shut down in 2018. Fully reviving the watch requires a tool called Rebble Web Services, which hijacks the setup process to provide its own version of Pebbles app store and online features, such as weather and voice dictation. Its a miracle that any of this works, but the end result is a product that still fulfills its original purpose.[Screenshot: Rebble Store]All of which means that Migicovskys work is largely about delivering a functional product rather than a reimagined one. Existing Pebble owners will get a new app that works without any rigmarole, and newcomers will get modern hardware that preserves Pebbles apps, watch faces, and core features, including an always-on e-paper screen and physical buttons.As for new functions, Migicovskys plans are surprisingly low-key. His to-do list includes things like adding more notification icons for apps that didnt exist a decade ago and providing a standard weather API for watch face makers. He expresses some admiration for the complications features of Apple Watches but is noncommittal about bringing the idea to a Pebble successor.Meanwhile, Migicovsky flatly rejects some more ambitious concepts for Pebble that never came to fruition, like wristbands with extra features built in. (Pebbles original attempt at that idea, called SmartStraps, went nowhere.) In a blog post following up on the original announcement, he warned people to temper their expectations.Please dont get your hopes up that the new watch will have X/Y/Z new featre, he wrote, noting that Pebble will be almost exactly as users remember it, except now with open-source software that can be modified and improved.The open-source doorPebble was always amenable to tinkering by outside developers. Even before adding its own health features, Pebble allowed apps like Misfit to track steps and sleep in the background. And when Katharine Berry, a third-party developer, built a web-based tool for making watch apps, Pebble hired her and started recommending the tool itself. (Berry, who now works at Google, later became instrumental in developing Rebble Web Services and getting Google to open-source the Pebble operating system.)Now that anyone can use and modify Pebbles source code, the door is open to even wilder modifications. While Migicovsky will stick to what sounds mostly like a Pebble rerelease, hes content to let outside developers experiment.We were an amazingly hackable smartwatch then. Now that the OS is open source, theres nothing you cant hack on it, he says. You can build new hardware. You can add new features. You can write a new mobile app.Regardless of how much hacking actually happens, the approach at least gives Pebbles successor a clearer identity. By Migicovskys admission, one reason Pebble failed is that it never settled on who it was for. The watch began as a geeky gadget, but later pitched itself as a productivity tool, then pivoted toward fitness features in a last-ditch attempt to compete with Fitbit and the Apple Watch.This time, Migicovsky wont make that mistake. If you had to take one of those three, he says, Ill take geek every day.
Category:
E-Commerce
During the Great Resignation, employers offered signing bonuses at unprecedented rates and, while the labor market has since cooled, the cash incentive remains popular, especially among in-person roles. According to a recent study by Indeeds Hiring Lab, the one-time bonus was included in less than 2% of job postings on the platform before the pandemic, and skyrocketed to a peak of 5.6% in September of 2022. Though the labor market is largely back to pre-pandemic norms, signing bonus offers remain nearly twice as common as they were in 2019, and are now attached to 3.7% of U.S. job postings. In the last couple years, the trend line has actually diverged, explains the reports author and Indeed economist Cory Stahle. In other words, we saw wage growth start slowing down really fast, and signing bonuses started slowing down too, but not nearly as fast. According to the study, the jobs that are most likely to come with a signing bonus require a physical presence and tend to be in a medical field. Veterinarians, for example, have seen a nearly 50% spike in signing bonus frequency since February of 2020, with 12.1% of roles now offering one. The nursing profession also offers signing bonuses at similar rates, while the physician and surgeon, beauty and wellness, and medical technician fields round out the top five, with the bonus offered with roughly 10% of jobs in each. Signing bonuses are most prevalent in jobs where employers are still actively recruiting people at really high levels, and if we look at where those jobs are, we see that those tend to be in healthcare, with a lot of in-person, skilled labor, hands-on jobs, Stahle says. On the flip side, signing bonuses are much less common in traditional white-collar, knowledge-work roles. A Substitute for Flexibility? The elevated frequency of signing bonuses in roles that require a physical presence may suggest that in the age of remote work, employers that are unable to offer location flexibility need to find other ways to sweeten the pot. (The Indeed report did not collect data on the average size of signing bonus, but it varies depending on the role and industry.) According to a study conducted by Owl Labs, more than half of American workers prefer hybrid work, and more than 38% would not accept a role that required them to be in the office full time. The data suggests that many employees value a work-life balance and are willing, in certain instances, to draw lower salaries if they are allowed the option to work remotely or hybrid, says Owl Labs CEO Frank Weishaupt. If employers want their employees to work in person, they will need to offer new and improved benefits. Weishaupt adds that in-person requirements come with real financial costs to employees. According to the study, workers spend an average of $61 each day on commuting, food, and other expenses related to coming into the officea 20% increase from 2023and save about $42 each day they work from home. We found that, on average, U.S. workers would sacrifice 8.3% of their annual salary for a flexible or remote working location, Weishaupt says. Since our report found that coming into the office can be more costly than working from home, a signing bonus, more than ever, is an acknowledgment that an extra incentive may be needed to fill those in-person roles. Why Employers Should Proceed with Caution While the added upfront cash might help lure candidates, Weishaupt warns that a one-time payment may not be effective at retaining them over the long run. Signing bonuses are short-term solutions for issues that will arise again; namely the desire by employees for work-life balance, he says. Society for Human Resource Management CHRO Jim Link agreed that its risky to use a one-time payment to secure a long-time commitment. That is why he recommends attaching a few conditions to the increasingly popular perk. If the employer is intending to pay those [bonuses] upon the start date, we encourage them to have a fallback agreement that says if that employee leaves after a specified period of time, they are due to pay back all or part of it, he says. Thats option one; option two, if you dont want a claw back agreement, is to make that lump sum payment go into effect at a specified time, like after 90 days or 120 days, assuming certain conditions are met. Skills Gaps and Economic Uncertainty The widespread desire for hybrid or remote work among employees may help explain why more companies are leaning on the signing bonus to lure workers into less flexible roles, but that doesnt tell the whole story. After all, the bonus is just one of many tools employers could use to attract employees, and not a historically popular one in mostmore sectors. The signing bonus, however, is unique for presenting employers with a one-time cost, rather than an ongoing commitment, which may be particularly appealing in the current economic climate. Employers in 2024 were very cautionary in their overall financial management, particularly as it relates to things that they would have to pay again and again, like substantial pay raises, explains Link, pointing to both economic and political uncertainty. Furthermore, while the labor market has cooled, Link suggests certain roles remain in extremely high demand. There’s a significant gap between what employers are looking forwhether it be in healthcare or other industriesversus what’s immediately available out there on the market, he says. We don’t see in the short-term anything coming that’s going to lessen that gap. While those gaps remain, and with lingering uncertainty in the long-range economic forecast, Link believes employers will continue to choose the lump sum bonus over other employee perks for the foreseeable future. My best guess is that this current rate overall that we’re seeing of employers across industries utilizing it, there’s nothing that I see forthcoming that would make me think that that number is going to either substantially increase or decrease, he says. This is the new normal.
Category:
E-Commerce
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