Aerie posted this to its Instagram with the caption "How do you get a perfect bikini body? Put a bikini on your body. #AerieREAL"

Instagram: @aerie

American Eagle's Aerie just had a gangbusters sales year — and the decade-old lingerie brand said it's thanks to its promotion of body-positivity to young women.

"The core of what's happening here in Aerie is really this marketing campaign that's really starting to take hold," Aerie head Jen Foyle said on an earnings call last week when asked about the brand's growth. "The #AerieReal campaign is so authentic and it's really resonating with this young woman today."

Aerie's success stands out in a brutal year for clothing chains from Gap to J.Crew, caused by what Urban Outfitters' CEO said was an absence of fashion trends. The brand's comparable sales, which excludes boosts from new store openings, soared 20% last year and 26% in the fourth quarter. American Eagle saw sales rise 7% last year.

The bra-and-underwear brand has made headlines in the past two years for its advertising, which builds off the phrase "the real you is sexy." It stopped retouching photos and has showcased different body types with models like Barbie Ferreira and Iskra Lawrence, while lending its support to the National Eating Disorders Association. The chain has also encouraged customers to share authentic pictures of themselves with the #aerieREAL hashtag.

Iskra Lawrence is Aerie's new "#aeriereal Role Model"

Instagram: @aerie

While its efforts have been met with some skepticism, it's still a departure from teen retail a decade ago, when Abercrombie's exclusive vibe and endless supply of chiseled abs reigned dominant in high schools, and Instagram didn't exist. It's also different from rival brand Pink, which is modeled by the Victoria's Secret Angels.

Aerie "simply listened to what our customer was telling us —they wanted to see 'models' they could relate to and understand," Foyle said in an email to BuzzFeed News. "Our customers want honesty and they want to be heard— social media has allowed us to engage with our girls in a whole new way...we don't believe in flaws and believe real beauty should be shown in a natural unaltered way."

Aerie's marketing fits into a larger trend that includes Dove's "Real Beauty" ads and the "Like A Girl" commercials from Always, said Pam Grossman, Getty Images' director of visual trends.

"The real changing factor is here is social media has changed the visual dialogue," she said in an interview. "We see statistics that it really is more females than males who are using image-sharing sites like Facebook and Tumblr and Pinterest, so that means for the first time in history, we have primarily females who are leading a mass conversation...That to me is really why there's such a hunger now for authenticity and for representing the female experience in a more genuine way."

Indeed, when Aerie posts photos of models that show rolls or love handles, it receives a flood of praise and appreciation from its followers. Foyle said on last week's earnings call that media impressions related to the #AerieReal campaign rose to four billion in 2015, a dramatic increase from the previous year. In her email to BuzzFeed News, she said Aerie sees the best engagement on Twitter and Instagram, and "potential" in Snapchat with its younger demo.

American Eagle didn't report Aerie's 2015 revenue separately last week, but the previous year the brand made up 8%, or roughly $260 million, of the company's $3.2 billion in annual revenue. In the past 12 months, Aerie has seen a 13% jump in new customers, Foyle said in an email.

Rebecca Duval, a retail equity analyst at BlueFin Research, said that part of Aerie's success can be attributed to its marketing, but that the chain is also benefiting from the trend of teens and 20-somethings wearing bras, bralettes and bandeau tops as part of their outfits. (Just Google "bralette outfits" if this confuses you, or imagine Coachella.)

Bras that are meant to be shown.

Aerie / Via Facebook: Aerie

"All these girls are going to festivals, and they're wearing see-through t-shirts or something open or something with scooped sleeves, and so it's really part of their outfits," she said in an interview. "That's another reason why we're seeing even more momentum, because it's such a massive trend right now."

To that point, the Pink brand out of Victoria's Secret has also been firing on all cylinders in recent years, even though the Angels' bodies could hardly be considered average. Parent company L Brands said in filings that they "market products to the college-aged woman with PINK and then transition her into glamorous and sexy product lines, such as Body by Victoria, Angels and Very Sexy."

Victoria's Secret PINK brand.

Victoria's Secret / Via Facebook: vspink

Similarly, Aerie's Foyle said that its core customer base is 18- to 25-year-olds.

Each brand ends up drawing in high schoolers and even middle schoolers with such positioning, as consumers typically aspire to clothes marketed to the age bracket above them.

Still, Duval said that Aerie's "real body" marketing is unique.

"There were other companies doing it for older women or the 'missy' consumer if you will, but I think it's more new for the teen and millennial consumer, especially in this category," she said. "It's speaking volumes and resonating with these women."

LINK: Lingerie Brand Aerie Isn’t Retouching Its Models With Photoshop For Its New Ad Campaign

Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images

The United States has two so-called minimum wages, and one is more minimum than the other. Last week, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for the elimination of the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers — such as waiters, car washers, and manicurists — which remains as low as $2.13 an hour in more than a dozen states. By contrast, the federal minimum wage for non-tipped workers is $7.25.

“It is time we end the so-called tipped minimum wage,” Clinton said Wednesday at a rally at the Javits Center with New York state governor Andrew Cuomo. “We are the only industrialized country in the world that requires tipped workers to take their income in tips instead of wages.”

The federal tipped wage is a calcified piece of labor law — frozen at $2.13 for more than two decades — little-known outside of the restaurant industry, but acutely known by servers at chain restaurants, including large ones like IHOP, Applebee's, and Olive Garden. Clinton called the lower wage floor, which varies by state, "shameful." Advocates and law-makers have pointed to its roots in slavery.

Though the tipped wage has gotten little political attention in the recent past, it's bubbling up this election season with the help of some famous restaurant owners like Danny Meyer who are voluntarily eliminating tips at their businesses, while raising base wages for workers. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is also in favor of eliminating the tipped wage.

Clinton has previously spoken out against the tipped minimum. At an event last September, she said, "The idea is, you’re supposed to make up the rest in tips. And you know what happens? That money doesn’t get to the people who earned it. Wages are actually stolen. So we’re going to end that."

By law, employers may pay tipped workers a wage lower than the federal minimum as long as workers take home enough in tips to make up the difference. If they don't, employers are required to make them whole — but a White House study and the Department of Labor have found that this doesn't reliably take place.

As a result, workers who live off tips face an unpredictable source of income.

Christin Fernandez, spokesperson for the National Restaurant Association, the largest industry trade group, disputes this account. "[U]nder the Fair Labor Standards Act, no one in the restaurant industry should be making a 'sub-minimum' wage," she said, citing research from the NRA finding that average servers make $16 to $22 an hour. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the mean wage at $10.40 and the median at $9.01.)

A spokesperson for the International Franchise Association, another major trade group that has opposed minimum wage increases, had no comment on the tipped wage.

Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton stands with a group of New York leaders including New York governor Andrew Cuomo after a rally last week.

Andrew Renneisen / Getty Images

New York State Governor Cuomo has vocally supported raising the minimum wage for workers to $15 an hour in New York, but his proposal, which may be amended until this Friday, leaves the tipped sub-minimum untouched. In New York, the tipped minimum is $7.50.

Worker advocate Saru Jayaraman, co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center, says Cuomo could amend the proposal to include tipped workers in the raise, as seven states, including California, have previously done.

"By being the first state on the east coast to eliminate the two-tiered wage system and phase it out completely, as Hillary Clinton and the White House and Democrats in Congress are calling for, New York could be a progressive leader," she said.

In January, a group of 100 anonymous restaurant owners signed a letter to Cuomo asking him to exclude tipped workers from any proposed raise in New York. He hasn't commented publicly on any plan to amend the proposal. The governor's office did not respond to a request for comment on the exclusion of tipped workers from the raise.

Jayaraman said the two-tier wage system disproportionately affects women and people of color. "The calculus since the New Deal has been, 'let's leave out the tipped workers' [from wage increases]," she said. "Our point is that that's the same calculation that's been made for a hundred years. Maybe there's an assumption that this will be taken care of at a later date, but that's never happened."

In recent years, support for eliminating the tipped minimum wage has grown, with legislators in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C. advocating to raise or abolish it, as well as some employers.

"With over 1 million restaurants nationwide, all with varying concepts, restaurateurs should continue to have the freedom to choose what works best for their business and their workforce," said the NRA's Fernandez. "[W]hether that's keeping with the current tipped model or trying something new."

April Moore-Harris / Via Flickr: cali2okie

A Group Of Restaurant Owners And Worker Advocates Want To End Tipping.

Shake Shack Founder Says In-N-Out “Way, Way Upped The Fast Food Game”

Gov. Cuomo Backs $15 Minimum Wage For New York, Biden By His Side

Tom Pennington / Getty Images

Chicken sandwich chain Chick-fil-A has experienced a tremendous surge in growth in the last few years, which has translated to extremely busy stores.

Chain-wide sales exceeded $6 billion in 2015, the Atlanta-based company told BuzzFeed News, nearly double what it made in 2009. The growth hasn't just come from opening new locations; the restaurants are doing more business too. The average store made more than $3 million in 2014, according to data from QSR magazine, compared with just $2 million in 2009.

Today, Chick-fil-A's more than 1,900 restaurants are some of the biggest moneymakers in fast food: The average stand-alone outlet (a store that's not in a food court) makes about $4.2 million per year — more than the average McDonald's or Chipotle.

The increased traffic has created epically long lines, especially at the drive-thru, where the chain still makes a majority of its money. They're the kind of lines that attract the attention of zoning commissioners when site plans are submitted and require police to direct cars when a new store opens. Then, at most Chick-fil-As, these lines just continue to be long during peak hours. On average, a Chick-fil-A drive-thru will serve 95 cars during from just noon to 1 p.m. Such problems are a blessing for any restaurant, but only up to a point. Eventually, some customers decide it's no longer worth their time.

Now the fried chicken chain is trying to design better ways to deal with growing volumes both inside and in the drive-thru.

Venessa Wong / BuzzFeed News

Venessa Wong / BuzzFeed News

Venessa Wong / BuzzFeed News

This critical task has fallen on Chick-fil-A's 100-plus-person innovation-and-design team.

In January, Chick-fil-A opened its third building in a little over three years dedicated to innovation and design, dubbed the "Innovation Center."

The chain opened its first design center, a 80,000-square-foot warehouse facility called "Hatch" in December 2012. The second building, called "The Kitchen," a 30,000-square-foot facility that opened in 2014, is where Chick-fil-A does most of its food development.

When Hatch opened, it was a space for exploring new store layouts, services, and kitchen operations. In addition to having a test restaurant with a functioning kitchen, designers also constructed life-size Chick-fil-A restaurants in the roomy warehouse made not of brick and tile but entirely of white foam board and fully equipped with foam board registers, foam board counters, and foam board lemonade dispensers.

The idea behind using foam board was to encourage people to pick up and move parts around during design walk-throughs before a new store is constructed to eventually arrive at a setup with better, quicker flow both in the kitchen and for customers. Models with actual equipment or sturdier walls, Chick-fil-A found, make store owners reluctant to make any tweaks. But "once you get those [foam] pieces made, it's like Legos," said Dwain Cox, Chick-fil-A's senior director of design. “We want them to be able to temporarily step outside of what they know and move into a world of ‘what could be.'"

"It's a cool space where you can do wacky things," said Stafford Green, an entrepreneur who visited Hatch in his former role as a Coca-Cola marketer. "It has the feeling of a true incubator, which a lot of companies are trying to have."

Chick-fil-A's promotional food truck.

Chick-fil-A

With plans to open nearly 100 new locations in 2016, Chick-fil-A is doing an increasing amount of modeling work around the store and drive-thru, especially as it enters more densely populated areas where cramped real estate is demanding different store designs from what the chain normally uses. The difference of a few feet here and there could help it lease out smaller, cheaper sites.

"Every foot does matter. If we eat up three feet here, we have to find three feet somewhere else. That could be a row of parking spaces that just got sacrificed," said Eric Stogner, Chick-fil-A's manager of kitchen design.

The Hatch center was sufficient for a short while, but as Chick-fil-A opened more than 200 new locations in recent years, the design team found it was "not as big as we need anymore," said Elizabeth Snively, Chick-fil-A's senior coordinator of innovation. With too many tests in the pipeline, the chain needed more space.

This was particularly true for drive-thru work. Testers at Hatch used to ride through a fake drive-thru on bicycles, but the experience did not accurately reflect how things would operate when SUVs and trucks were pulling in and crowding the lanes.

In the new "Innovation Center," the chain has an additional 35,000 square feet to set up model stores and test new service models that will be either rolled out in new outlets or retrofitted into existing locations. (The first center, Hatch, will now be used primarily for training.) It also has room for another unusual kind of new testing: the drive-thru.

As the drive-thru is responsible for 60% of sales every year at Chick-fil-A, "this is a good one to spend money on," said Tré Musco, CEO of the San Francisco restaurant design firm Tesser (it does not work with Chick-fil-A).

Venessa Wong / BuzzFeed News

One January afternoon, a caravan of Nissan Leafs lined up inside Chick-fil-A's new Innovation Center alongside a fake indoor drive-thru that had been set up to test a new drive-thru design. The main question at hand: How narrow could the drive-thru lanes get to save space? There is also the lingering but essential question of how to move cars through more quickly, to shorten those epic lines.

To speed up service, the chain is proposing two main changes: The first is to have a team of four to six servers walk up to cars in the drive-thru to take orders via tablet, rather than having drivers wait to reach the usual pair of speakers. This is already being tested in roughly 200 locations, and is continually refined at the Innovation Center. This includes, for instance, how to add a roof, heaters, and misters over the walking area to shield servers from bad weather.

The second is to have another set of servers walk to cars with their orders when they are ready. "The idea is to deliver food to cars even before they get to the window," said Stogner. Questions include how many feet the servers need for a walkway, and where to position the delivery window. This service is being tested in Lexington, Kentucky, and will expand this year and next.

The chain said it hopes these changes will shave minutes off of a drive-thru customer's wait time, a huge operational improvement.

With each round, the lanes got progressively narrower and narrower. Two white drones on a counter sat ready to take off and record the process.

Following each round of pulling in, placing a fake order, and driving around in a loop to the pickup area, all test participants — both the drivers and the restaurant servers — gathered in a circle to provide feedback on whether the narrowing dimensions were still manageable or whether it had gotten too chaotic to maneuver.

The system Chick-fil-A is testing will doubtless add cost as it increases the number of people needed for the drive-thru. But as long as traffic to restaurants is also increasing, speedier service means Chick-fil-A can serve more customers to make up for the increased labor cost.

Venessa Wong / BuzzFeed News

In addition to new stores, Chick-fil-A told BuzzFeed News it is also developing food trucks.

As it experiments with new ways to boost capacity, Chick-fil-A is also looking at food trucks, perhaps the most space-efficient businesses. The chain already has two giant trucks for promotional events, but they hand out only one thing: free chicken sandwiches.

This year, it plans to start testing two commercial food trucks that will offer a variety of items and charge money for them, with the dates and locations still to be determined.

Venessa Wong / BuzzFeed News

The development starts, of course, with a foam model truck in the Innovation Center. It's not on wheels, but the box has been built in the dimensions Chick-fil-A imagines it will need for a truck — roughly 9' by 12' — with foam versions of all the counters, sinks, and fridges that a real truck would require. A smaller "food van" version is being tested as well.

Designers and operators can easily reconfigure or replace the foam parts to see how many pieces of equipment it can squeeze in (for instance, whether there's space to squeeze in an ice cream machine to add dessert sales, explained Alan McKenzie, kitchen design manager), and to create the right cooking layout before building the real thing.

Epic lines.

Venessa Wong / BuzzFeed News

Chick-fil-A isn't the only chain with such meticulous development processes.

Design firm Tesser, which has worked with chains such as Domino's and Wendy's, describes four tiers of prototyping that typically happen during store design. The first tier is doing a digital model (which is the lowest cost); the second is a full-scale foam board model; then a wood model; then a full store. For more than half of projects, the firm gets at past the foam board stage.

"It depends on what the client wants to learn," said CEO Musco. For simple layout projects, a low-cost foam model often will do, but for completely new designs, a restaurant will probably want to see a higher-resolution build-out.

Fast food giant McDonald's also has an innovation center in Romeoville, Illinois, located in an industrial center about a half hour from its headquarters.

A promotional food truck in New York.

Chick-fil-A

McDonald's first opened an innovation center, a 5,000 square-foot-kitchen, in 1995. It has since expanded it four times to the current 38,000-square-foot facility with three kitchens that can be set up like any McDonald’s kitchen in the world. McDonald's engineers, who develop and patent new technology, are also based in the center.

Unlike Chick-fil-A's foam approach in the Innovation Center, however, McDonald's uses real equipment so it can cook food in the center. It also does not test the drive-thru with real cars.

"We have the ability with our equipment and layout to mock up any restaurant we have today, or what we want it to look like in the future, and run tests," said Laurie Gilbert, McDonald's vice president of restaurant innovation. It can also test operations for large conventions and events like the Olympics, where a kitchen may need to function differently from how it normally does — for instance, with a smaller menu and faster output.

McDonald's also trials different service models here, such as kiosk ordering or table service that are now at locations with the build-your-own burger menu, before they roll out at restaurants. Such additions — for example, making room in the restaurant for a row of kiosks — often affect the layout. The center is now working on mobile ordering in the U.S.

Teams from McDonald's around the globe travel to the innovation center to test out new technology or layouts before launching them. In late 2015, a team from Poland was at the center testing a new design for the future, as well as new menu items and how to efficiently add them. Partners in France visited McDonald's center to experiment with drive-thru improvements.

The chains have similar ambitions. "Our goal with the Innovation Center is to create the best experience possible inside the restaurant," said Chick-fil-A's Cox. "Through our prototype process, our designers and developers can push things farther than they might otherwise be comfortable with."

As Chick-fil-A tries to shorten the drive-thru line, other projects loom too. Restaurants in urban locations with no parking places or drive-thru windows "are becoming more of the norm," Cox said, and "require us to design and innovate the restaurant like never before."

Urban Outfitters / Via Facebook: urbanoutfitters

Urban Outfitters' CEO blamed a tough year in clothing sales on a dearth of fashion trends, saying the industry has finally cycled through all the skinny pant has to offer.

"The last major fashion shift was 10 years ago when the skinny bottom returned to popularity," CEO Richard Hayne said on an earnings call Monday. "Since then we've had all varieties of skinny: the skinny, high-rise, low-rise, color, black, white and print. Washed, sanded, sliced and destroyed. Yoga and active, leggings, jeggings and stretch."

"Today, the customer has a closet full of various skinny bottoms and she has many many long tops and sweaters to go over them," he continued. "Without a fashion need to drive her purchases, the customer can easily defer her apparel spend. Surely a major fashion shift is the cure for the current apparel malaise. I'm not predicting exactly when that change will come but I'm certain it will."

Urban Outfitters, which also owns Anthropologie and Free People, saw sales increase in the fourth quarter for non-apparel merchandise like home and beauty. That reinforced Hayne's belief that retailers are grappling with a fashion issue, rather than challenges related to the rise of online shopping or increased competition from cheaper destinations.

"Obviously all these categories faced the same headwinds so why then was apparel the outlier?" Hayne asked. "To me, the answer is simple. Fashion, or more accurately, the lack thereof."

Urban Outfitters / Via urbanoutfitters.com

Executives at Gap and J.Crew have expressed similar woes in the past year, which has been challenging for apparel sales. It's been a particular slog for retailers that fall between H&M at one end and high-end designer names at the other.

Urban Outfitters reported sales of $3.4 billion for the year ended Jan. 31 across its brands, a 4% increase from the previous year. Anthropologie is its biggest brand with $1.44 billion in sales, followed by Urban Outfitters with $1.39 billion and Free People with just over $600 million.

The company has been working to expand its offerings in home, especially at Anthropologie, and acquired a group of Italian restaurants last year, making it less vulnerable to the whims of fashion "newness."

"We've been with 'big over little' now for the better part of 10 years, and I think it's nearing the end of its lifecycle," Hayne said. "How long it's going to take to get through that cycle, I really can't tell you. I do see an awful lot of signs out there that would suggest to me that cycle has begun and certainly we all here hope it's sooner rather than later."

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Getty Images / Ian Waldie

One day in September 2014, a college student in Duluth, Minnesota, sent out a simple tweet, alluding to a sense of weariness no doubt felt by thousands of other hardworking students across the country: “Today was a grind. #College #Homework.”

The student then received a courteous reply from a Twitter account named @PrestoExperts:

Twitter / Via Twitter: @PrestoExperts

The link led to a page filled with academic expert profiles, with names like “The Mentor,” “Mentor Guru,” and “Caring Tutor.” A banner atop the page said: "We offer online homework help of the highest quality…Get your assignments completed accurately and on time. Achieve the grades you need to pass that class!"

PrestoExperts is an online expert marketplace. The site has more than 30,000 independent freelancers who provide 24/7 advice in a variety of categories beyond just education: There are registered experts in counseling, health, law, technology, and finance.

The site launched in 2014 and is owned by LivePerson, Inc., a public New York–based technology company that specializes in “online engagement solutions.” (If you ever visit a retail website and a chat box pops up asking if you need help, that’s probably a LivePerson innovation.) LivePerson generated about $239 million in revenue from its combined businesses in 2015. Roughly 8% of revenue in 2014 came from a segment called consumer services that includes sites like PrestoExperts.

There are plenty of freelancers on PrestoExperts — in particular the health counselors — who provide a valuable service. But much of the site’s online marketing is directed toward an audience of stressed-out college students, many of whom seem to be using it to engage in academic fraud.

The site’s Facebook page contains messages like “The end is near. Make sure you pass all of your classes with our certified experts." Another says: “When coffee stops working for you, we’re here to take over.”

How exactly does a tutor “take over” your work?

One promotional page for science tutors featured some recently asked questions, including the following plea: “HEEELLPPPP I'm in the middle of a physics course and I just don't have time to do the work. Can someone do it for me?”

Upon visiting the PrestoExperts homepage, visitors are asked to enter their request into a blank box. “When you need help with a chemistry paper, you just type in: ‘I need help with my chemistry paper,’” a tutorial says. “You then pick category ‘Education,’ then subcategory ‘Chemistry,’ then fill in the details when prompted. Before you know it, Experts are competing to help you. Presto!”

PrestoExperts

These requests are sent to a public board, at which point the experts offer competing bids in the hope of being selected for the assignment. Many will take a job for a $20 to $50 fee.

Every public board request is assigned a unique URL, and these posts can be viewed by anyone who types in the URL. For instance, on March 11, 2015, a client posted the following request regarding the midterm exam from an engineering class at San Francisco State University:

“Hello, I need someone to solve this assignment for me asap and it's due in 1.5 hrs at 4:30pm PST/7:30pmEST. I am willing to pay $200. The class is linear systems analysis. The expert should be comfortable in circuits and physics and differential equations… There are 5 problems total.”

The ID number for that request was 958155. The client received 23 eager offers from registered experts.

Just because someone uploaded a midterm and offered $200 for answers doesn’t prove cheating occurred in this instance; there’s no way to tell if the prospective client wound up paying any of the experts. However, a manual review of more than 1,000 public board postings gives the impression that many students are visiting PrestoExperts to engage in "contract cheating."

The term "contract cheating" was coined by Birmingham City University lecturer Thomas Lancaster and his colleague Robert Clarke. They define it as “the form of academic dishonesty where students get academic work completed on their behalf, which they then submit for academic credit as if they had created it themselves. Often contract cheating involves the payment of a fee to a third party, who then creates the work for the student.”

It might mean paying for a custom-written essay — often from an online essay mill — or paying someone to solve an online exam. Between 2005 and 2015, Lancaster and Clarke compiled a database of over 19,000 attempts at contract cheating.

Moodboard / Getty Images

This problem has existed for decades. In 1972, the State of New York dissolved an entity called Termpapers Inc., which produced custom-written essays for $3.85 per page. Termpapers Inc. defended its practice by claiming it provided a similar service as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The court disagreed. “The business defendants are conducting is morally wrong,” the ruling read. “It subverts the learning process and encourages intellectual dishonesty and cheating. It is directly opposed to the declared public policy of our State.”

The internet has brought along a flood of websites that operate similar to Termpapers Inc. In 2010, a veteran of the essay-mill industry named David Tomar described how he earned roughly $66,000 a year cranking out essays on every subject imaginable — from sociology to nursing to business ethics. In a follow-up piece, Tomar compiled a list of 325 operational ghostwriting services and paper mills. He also explained how essay mills typically avoid legal repercussions with a disclaimer stating any assignments produced by ghostwriters are “homework aids” or “study guides,” and are not meant to be submitted to a class.

A lot of the major essay mills and auction sites are located outside the United States. EssayBay, one of the sites studied in depth by Lancaster and Clarke, is based in the U.K. So is All Answers, an organization that allegedly produced 11,470 custom essays in 2012 alone. CustomEssay.com is based in Toronto. AffordablePapers.com is based in London. UnemployedProfessors.com is based in Montreal. Auction site Rentacoder.com — the subject of a 2008 Guardian article — was purchased by the New Zealand–based company Freelancer.com. In a sweeping essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Bartlett sought out the location of a paper mill called Essay Writers; the trail led to offices in Ukraine and the Philippines.

In the U.S., many states have codes or statutes to prevent plagiarism and academic fraud. Section 213-b of the New York Education Law states: "No person shall, for financial consideration, or the promise of financial consideration, prepare, offer to prepare, cause to be prepared, sell or offer for sale to any person any written material which the seller knows, is informed or has reason to believe is intended for submission as a dissertation, thesis, term paper, essay, report or other written assignment by a student in a university, college, academy, school or other educational institution."

When I reached out to some experts at PrestoExperts.com, they told me the site underwent some changes during the spring, apparently in response to concerns about contract cheating. On March 16, 2015, one of the commenters in the members-only Experts Forum shared the following email from Service & Support:

Dear Experts,

It has come to our attention that some expert profiles include offers of custom or pre-written essays, term papers, and dissertations, as well as other academic papers…According to our policy it is forbidden to suggest these services in your profile, brief description, or expert screen name!...Please verify that your profile, brief description, or expert screen name doesn't clearly state you will do homework or school work of any kind…. Any profile that violates these guidelines will be rejected by 6pm (IST) Sunday, March 22nd.

Using snapshots of old pages preserved at Archive.org, it’s possible to see how profiles changed in the wake of that email. For example, an expert named Pinky Malukani used to say on her profile, “I am well aware of the plagiarism rules and can do proper refrencing while writing professional as well as college papers. You can contact me to write thesis, essay, school papers, research papers.”

Her current profile says: “I offer effective and professional guidance and mentoring services.”

A business expert named Business_Papers once proclaimed, “Special Dissertation Packages Available! Get your Academic Papers authored by the expert, APA/Harvard Format, Original with Academic References.” He later switched his screenname to “Business Expert Advice” and removed any mention of papers or dissertations.

PrestoExperts / Via web.archive.org

Lots of user reviews and feedback were erased, too. A longtime tutor named Enggvicky used to have 3,887 reviews, showing mixed reactions. A client on March 13 said, “He finished the assignment earlier :):)” while another client wrote on March 11th, “I GOT 83% FOR THIS , THIS IS QUITE DISSAPOINTING.” That same profile page now has 1,726 reviews, and many comments are one-word reactions, like “great!” and “good.”

While scrubbing profiles of the more blatant cheating offers is a good first step, there are indications that students have still been coming to PrestoExperts to cheat.

I took a sample of 1,000 public board requests from this past spring, going sequentially from #969000 to #969999. In total, there were 263 requests bearing signs of contract cheating. The sequence started on April 3 at 12:18 a.m., and ended on April 5 at 3:08 p.m., which worked out to roughly 100 homework requests per day.

Often, clients would simply upload or paste their assignment, and not make a blatant request for cheating — for instance, post #969312 says, “Mini project for statistics class” and contains an attachment with lab instructions. Many of the attached documents bore the names of colleges, such as the University of Toledo (#969854), Boise State University (#969856), Texas Wesleyan University (#969970), and Oregon State University (#104815).

Then there are the blatant requests, in which it’s near impossible to doubt the clients were trying to cheat (unless, of course, they were taking part in sting operations). Post #1047790 asks for answers to a Fresno State engineering assignment. Post #1047879 wants an expert to write a civil engineering report for a Texas Southern University class. Post #969283 wants somebody to take an online marketing exam at the University of South Alabama, while #969914 contains a midterm from California State University, Northridge.

It keeps going on like that, with requests by students at schools including Southern New Hampshire University, Weber State, Arizona State, North Dakota State, and Thompson Rivers University. Post #1048720 asks for solutions to an exam on Managerial Engineering Economic, which sounds like a class at the Catholic University of America.

It wasn’t just college kids. One client requested a 500-word essay to be presented to a judge, about how he’d learned his lesson from a class on drinking and driving.

PrestoExperts / Via prestoexperts.com

Each of the requests listed above was met with eager and willing responses from experts. The number of replies in this sample varied, from 10 offers up to 72. (The drunk-driving essay got 65 offers.)

In theory, this shouldn’t be happening. According to the PrestoExperts Terms and Conditions, experts are forbidden from violating any “local, state, national or international law, statute, ordinance, rule, regulation or ethical code,” and cannot engage in “conduct that is harmful, unethical, fraudulent, deceptive or offensive.” Furthermore, a PrestoExperts support page says: "If for any reason PrestoExperts finds that an Expert is advertising or engaging in unethical, deceptive or fraudulent activity, such as plagiarism, online test-taking, aiding students in cheating, etc., that Expert's account may be subject to suspension, termination, and/or a fine."

Some experts I spoke to said the cheating requests had been occurring for years, dating back to the days of LivePerson experts, which was the precursor to PrestoExperts. (A video from 2012 showed how LivePerson experts could help with tax advice, tutoring, and professional counseling.) And while the site’s terms forbid experts from helping students cheat, no one I spoke to recalled an Expert getting booted from the site for such an offense.

youtube.com

When I called LivePerson’s headquarters in New York, the receptionist emphasized that business operations for PrestoExperts are based in Israel. Later, a member of the LivePerson/PrestoExperts communications team sent an email welcoming any questions for this article. I asked whether PrestoExperts was aware of the multiple cheating requests being posted on the public board, and I have yet to receive a reply.

For now, PrestoExperts does claim to disavow cheating — a small step, but one still not taken by many in the market.

Consider UnemployedProfessors.com, an unrelated site. One frequently asked question on the site is “Isn’t it really unethical for you to be writing these essays for cash?”

“Incredibly so,” reads UnemployedProfessors' response. “And because the academic system is already so corrupt, we're totally cool with that. We even all have matching tweed t-shirts.”

Mike Mozart / Via Flickr: jeepersmedia

Americans have a conflicted relationship with Arby's, the Georgia-based chain of 3,300 sandwich restaurants. The company, known best for its meaty sandwiches (especially roast beef), has been closing U.S. stores since 2008, and is the occasional target of gross-food jokes, like when Jon Stewart called its product "the only food classified as a war crime."

And yet there's nothing else quite like Arby's, which may be one of its great advantages. Only here can you get a spongy pile of paper-thin, warm roast beef on the kind of soft sesame seed roll normally reserved for a hamburger. Unlike sandwich chains like Subway that tout a huge variety of fresh veggies to add on, Arby's classic roast beef sandwich comes unadorned. Just meat and bread, with the option of Arby's sauce or zesty "Horsey" (horseradish) sauce only if you want it — and you can even order it in a drive-thru. The chain is clearly not concerned with vegetables; one of its mottos is "We have the meats."

The lack of abundant fresh veggies doesn't seem to be a problem: Despite struggles in many corners of the fast food business, Arby's has grown same store sales for 21 consecutive quarters — more than five straight years.

In 2015, comparable sales grew by 8.1%, and the average store now makes just over $1 million dollars per year, "the highest in the history of the brand," Arby's CEO Paul Brown told BuzzFeed News.

Behold, Arby's classic roast beef sandwich.

Venessa Wong / BuzzFeed News

In fact, despite closing more than 400 stores since 2008 (mostly in the U.S.), chain-wide sales still increased to $3.5 billion in 2015 from $3.38 billion seven years prior, as surviving stores rang up higher sales thanks to increased traffic and price increases, according to figures from the company.

Which means Arby's did really well in the face of jokes like this.

WAYWARD-ELF.TUMBLR.COM / Via giphy.com

And this.

REBLOGGY.COM / Via giphy.com

"You have to have a sense of humor," said Brown. "I really miss the show, to be honest."

Arby's recent struggles began during the recession, after its parent company Triarc merged with Wendy's. Arby's didn't have enough low-price offerings when customers were trying to save money, and it suffered from "an unfocused and expensive menu, poor marketing, and inconsistent store performance," reported QSR magazine.

By 2010, the average check for Arby's was about $7.50, compared to $5 for fast food overall. Arby’s operating losses were a drag on the company. In 2011, Wendy's sold Arby's to Atlanta-based private equity firm Roark Capital Group.

Brown, who has been CEO since 2013, said one of his priorities has been to address what he describes as a "perception reality gap" in terms of product quality and menu variety. He rallied the chain around the vision of "deli inspired delicious" food. Sales began outperforming fast food competitors in late 2013.

A major turning point came when Arby's launched brisket in late 2014, Brown said.

Arby's

Arby's declared brisket its most successful product ever. The sandwich featured "sliced smoked beef brisket, topped with smoked Gouda cheese, crispy onions and smoky BBQ sauce and mayo, served on a toasted, bakery-style bun."

What magic made the brisket sandwich soar? "It is a protein in a sandwich you can't get anywhere else in a fast food environment, and it was priced at a very effective price of $5.49 in most places," Brown explained.

In 2014, the chain started adding some new menu items that ended up being popular with customers and kicked off a large advertising campaign. It's comparable sales growth last year exceeded Wendy's.

The jokes may continue, but "We're very proud to be Arby's," said Brown. "We have a lot of fun and we're afraid to make fun of ourselves where it makes sense and we know other people will as well. But the number speak for themselves."

Miguel Schincariol / AFP / Getty Images

The Brazilian federal prosecutor's office has begun an investigation into McDonald's, the country's Justice Department confirmed on Friday.

The investigation will consider allegations that McDonald's operations in Brazil "may have disrespected franchise and antitrust laws as well as possibly committed infractions against the country’s economic and tax laws," according to a statement from the prosecutor's office dated February 29.

McDonald's has not yet been formally notified of the investigation, a Justice Department spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, saying prosecutors will reach out to the company in the coming days.

A spokesperson for Arcos Dorados, the master McDonald's franchise operator in Latin America, said the company has not received word of the investigation.

"We have not been officially notified of this issue," Daniel Schleiniger, Senior Director of Communications & Investor Relations, told BuzzFeed News. "As soon as we receive notification, we will present the pertinent information and clarification to the ‘Ministério Público Federal.' Importantly, the Company provides every assurance that it complies with all the laws in all of the markets in which it does business.”

Schleiniger noted he was speaking on behalf of the franchise operator, not McDonald's corporate. McDonald's did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The company is facing increasing scrutiny of its business practices around the world, as worker advocates in the U.S. campaign to improve pay and conditions at its restaurants. U.S. minimum wage protesters under the banner of the Fight for 15 movement have joined forces with unions and worker groups around the world, including in Brazil, to encourage authorities to investigate the company.

In December, the European Commission announced an investigation into the tax treatment of a McDonald's unit in Luxembourg that collects fees from franchisees across Europe, saying "a tax ruling that agrees to McDonald's paying no tax on their European royalties either in Luxembourg or in the US has to be looked at very carefully."

In January, a coalition of Italian consumer groups filed an antitrust complaint with the European Union, alleging the company abuses its market position in dealings with franchisees. The complaint was supported by unions in the U.S. and Europe.

Allesandro Vietri, the attorney for the Brazilian union that filed the original complaint against McDonald's in Brazil, said that the Fight for 15 campaign has "compelled a global solidarity of unions."

Once the U.S. fast food workers raised awareness about their working conditions, labor groups from different countries first began looking into the burger chain's labor practices in their own countries — then into other kinds of irregularities, such as in tax and real estate practices, according to Vietri.

"Several different unions, not just the complainants in this particular case, became interested and joined in," he told BuzzFeed News. "And so a more narrow problem of labor relations was broadened both in terms of the subject and in terms of the countries."

Last August Scott Courtney, an organizer with the Service Employees International Union and a major architect of the U.S. Fight For 15 campaign, testified against McDonald's at a Brazilian senate hearing attended by workers and labor leaders from more than 20 countries. The SEIU flew many of the attendees to Brazil for the hearing, which ended with some senators calling for an investigation into the company.

“I am ecstatic about the outcomes," Courtney told BuzzFeed News after the hearing. "We more than accomplished everything we hoped for."

High school juniors will take the new and improved SAT for the first time this Saturday.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

The new test gets rid of the iconic SAT vocabulary questions, which involve mostly obscure, little-used words that have long dominated test-takers' studying time. Vocabulary in the new test is much simpler and tested as part of reading passages.

Butz.2013 / Via Flickr: 61508583@N02

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The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will have far-reaching implications for working people, especially public sector, home care, and undocumented workers. Here's a look at upcoming cases before the court, cases making their way through lower courts — which may now be dropped — and cases that could be open to re-examination if the court's balance of power shifts.

Public Sector Unions: Friedrichs v. CTA

The case with the most potentially devastating repercussions for organized labor is Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, for which oral arguments have already been heard by the Supreme Court.

The case will determine whether public-sector unions have a right to collect fees from non-members for costs related to bargaining contracts, and the court had been poised to rule against the California Teachers Association in a 5-4 decision, effectively gutting unions financially. Without Scalia, the justices are likely split 4-4, and the tie could send the case back to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The circuit previously ruled to maintain the status quo, which would be a reprieve for unions.

Cases in the works

The conservative National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation has been backing cases moving through the lower courts with a plan to build on the presumed victory in the Friedrichs case. Some of those cases, which had been headed for Supreme Court, may now struggle to win over a court evenly split between liberal and conservative judges, according to labor law scholars.

Home Care Workers: D'Agnostino v. Baker

At issue in D’Agnostino v. Baker, now on its way to the second circuit, is the question of whether healthcare worker unions can bargain on behalf of home-care workers who aren't members, who would otherwise benefit from union-negotiated contracts. Because so many home care workers are publicly employed by government-run Medicare and Medicaid programs, the case runs along similar lines of arguments as Friedrichs, dealing with First Amendment rights to free speech. (The Court previously decided, in Harris v. Quinn, that home care workers cannot be required to pay agency fees.)

Without Scalia, whose vote would likely have decided against the union's right to represent non-members, conservative backers may choose not to waste resources appealing all to the Supreme Court, writes labor lawyer and Century Foundation analyst Moshe Marvit.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Marvit says that other cases addressing the membership structures of unions, such as Bain v. CTA, could also be dropped by their conservative backers, unless the court regains a conservative majority with the next appointee.

"Businesses and conservative groups are hesitating to appeal their cases to the Supreme Court,” Marvit told BuzzFeed News, citing Dow Chemical and a guns rights group that have so far chosen not to appeal major cases. And Marvit said he "can imagine right-to-work and other conservative labor/employment groups taking this tack.”

Cases that could be re-examined

Scalia and the conservative majority have also had a profound affect on labor law in a large number of 5-4 decisions that progressive groups will likely want re-examined, should the balance of the court shift, as Catherine Fisk, Professor of Law at UC Irvine School of Law, has noted.

Who is a supervisor?

Two Supreme Court decisions dealing with the definition of supervisors were decided 5-4, with Justice Scalia in the majority, both of which restricted the category of workers eligible to unionize. A third reduced the liability of employers for harassment by workers who may have some supervisory duties.

The National Labor Relations Board

A 2010 case held that the NLRB cannot act without three members. Since board positions require Senate confirmation, the ruling had the effect of putting the board's powers at the mercy of the Senate majority — or a Senate minority willing to block appointments.

Rights for undocumented workers

A 2002 case decided, 5-4, that undocumented workers are not entitled to full protections and rights under the National Labor Relations Act.

Orlando Sierra / AFP / Getty Images

Arbitration clauses

With Scalia in the majority, the court also ruled in 2001 to enforce mandatory arbitration agreements for workers, a process that can prevent workers from seeking a hearing before a court. In a series of decisions since then, the Court expanded its support for these types of contracts, despite the fact that scholars have "almost uniformly condemned" these mandatory agreements, according to Fisk.

Academics have found "the Court’s interpretation of the Federal Arbitration Act is inconsistent with the language and history of the statute and that enforcing arbitration agreements that effectively preclude vindication of claims is a perversion of arbitration," she wrote for On Labor.

The New York Times recently ran a series on the spread and consequences of arbitration agreements, citing Scalia's role in determining that arbitration clauses could forbid class action lawsuits "even if a class action was the only realistic way to bring a case."

Class action lawsuits

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Justice Scalia was also instrumental in making it more difficult for employees and consumers to bring class action suits against companies. In a 2011 class action suit by female Walmart workers, he wrote in an opinion that the employees in question did not have sufficient "questions of law or fact common to the class" to proceed in a suit dealing with pay and promotional gender disparities, because they could not show “a common answer to the crucial question, why was I disfavored?”

The case didn't proceed far enough to look at whether the group of women, representing Walmart's 1.5 million female employees, experienced discrimination by the retailer — merely that they could not proceed as a class, setting precedent for similar cases by workers suing for redress from employers.

Here's everything you need to know about that nomination process for Scalia's replacement.

Sean Gardner / Reuters

Aubrey McClendon, a major figure in the oil and gas industry, died in a car accident Wednesday, one day after the Justice Department charged him with conspiring to rig the price of oil and natural gas leases in his home state of Oklahoma.

McClendon, 56, "crashed into an embankment while driving at a 'high rate of speed' in Oklahoma City on Wednesday morning," Capt. Paco Balderrama of the Oklahoma City Police Department said at a news conference.

The billionaire former CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corp. and part-owner of the NBA's Oklahoma City Thunder "pretty much drove straight into the wall,” Balderrama said. “There was plenty of opportunity for him to correct and get back on the roadway and that didn’t occur.” McClendon was due to appear in court today.

His death comes the day after a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of orchestrating "a conspiracy between two large oil and gas companies to not bid against each other for the purchase of certain oil and natural gas leases in northwest Oklahoma" between December 2007 and March 2012.

The Justice Department alleged that a winner would be determined ahead of time, and then that winner would allocate an interest in the leases to the other party, effectively holding down prices paid to leaseholders. The indictment didn't name anyone else who was allegedly involved, and arose from an "ongoing federal antitrust investigation into price fixing, bid rigging and other anticompetitive conduct in the oil and natural gas industry," it said.

McClendon issued a statement late Tuesday, vehemently denying the allegations.

“The charge that has been filed against me today is wrong and unprecedented," he said yesterday. "I have been singled out as the only person in the oil and gas industry in over 110 years since the Sherman Act became law to have been accused of this crime in relation to joint bidding on leasehold."

McClendon placed a central role in the U.S. oil and gas boom of the last two decades, which transformed American energy production and reshaped the global oil market. As CEO of Chesapeake Energy, which he co-founded in 1989, McClendon led an aggressive search for oil and natural gas deposits locked within shale rock formations, becoming a pioneer of the fracking industry.

McClendon built a vast empire of drilling leases, and by 2011 the company controlled as much land as West Virginia and employed 12,000 people. By the end of 2015, Chesapeake was the country’s second-largest natural gas producer and a major player in oil production, with estimated reserves equivalent to about 1.5 billion barrels of oil.

But the boom in U.S. energy production also contributed to plunging prices for oil and gas, which hit Chesapeake hard. The company is now struggling to deal with $11.6 billion in debt racked up during its expansion spree, and hired restructuring advisers late last year, the Wall Street Journal reported.

McClendon left Chesapeake in early 2013 after shareholders voted in a board that committed to reining in the company’s aggressive and often risky spending.

By then, the CEO had become a big-spending fixture in Oklahoma City, where the company is based. Along with his stake in the Thunder, he was a big donor to the University of Oklahoma. He was also politically active, donating $250,000 to Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, the group whose controversial TV ads help sink John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.

Tuesday’s indictment was not the first time authorities took aim at Chesapeake’s business practices under McClendon. In 2015, the company settled antitrust, fraud and racketeering charges brought against it by the Michigan attorney general, agreeing to set up a $25 million compensation fund.

"All my life I have worked to create jobs in Oklahoma, grow its economy, and to provide abundant and affordable energy to all Americans," McClendon said yesterday in response to the federal indictment. "I am proud of my track record in this industry, and I will fight to prove my innocence and to clear my name.

Kena Betancur / AFP / Getty Images

While Apple and the FBI battle in court over an encrypted iPhone in San Bernardino, another judge across the country has dealt a significant blow to the government’s case there.

U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein of the Eastern District of New York denied the government’s request to compel Apple to assist law enforcement in extracting encrypted information from a suspect’s iPhone in a drug-related case. As in the San Bernardino case, the federal government invoked the All Writs Act of 1789 (AWA) in New York — asking the court to force Apple to help federal law enforcement pull information from a locked iPhone.

Orenstein rejected the request on multiple grounds — although Attorney General Loretta Lynch has said the Justice Department will be seeking further review of his order.

The order came a day before the House Judiciary Committee has scheduled hearings on encryption that will include testimony from both Apple and FBI officials.

First, Orenstein found that the AWA did not allow for the order sought by the federal government because the order would not be "agreeable to the usages and principles of law" — a requirement of the law.

The government argued that the absence of a specific law addressing the type of data in the circumstances here meant that the AWA could, in effect, be used as a "gap filler" where there was no specific law. Orenstein disagreed, concluding that "a comprehensive legislative scheme" is at play in this area of law and Congress chose not to require an entity like Apple to "provide the assistance sought here." Even if the AWA could be viewed as a "gap filler," in other words, it would not allow an order in this case because there is legislation covering the area — it just doesn't allow for the order the government wants.

Additionally, Orenstein considered discretionary factors considered by courts in granting requests under the AWA. In doing so, he weighed Apple’s relationship to the government’s investigation, the burden imposed by the government’s request, and the necessity of imposing that burden. After reviewing the facts and arguments, Orenstein found that "none of those factors justifies imposing on Apple the obligation to assist the government's investigation against its will."

Orenstein concluded that the novel questions surrounding the AWA, encryption, and government intrusion are best resolved by Congress, rather than the courts. "It would betray our constitutional heritage and our people's claim to democratic governance for a judge to pretend that our Founders already had that debate, and ended it, in 1789."

Attorney General Lynch expressed her frustration with Orenstein's decision, saying in a statement: “We are disappointed in the Magistrate’s ruling and plan to ask the District Judge to review the matter in the coming days. This phone may contain evidence that will assist us in an active criminal investigation and we will continue to use the judicial system in our attempt to obtain it."

While Orenstein’s decision does not bind the judge in San Bernardino, senior Apple executives said the New York ruling speaks directly to the California case.

In the New York case, the device in question runs on iOS 7, which enables Apple to pull information from the phone onto a separate hard drive — all without having to unlock it. The San Bernardino case, the Apple executives stressed, asks the company to do much more. The iPhone in California runs on iOS 9, an advanced operating system that no longer allows Apple to extract data from devices when they are locked. To gain access to the data held inside of the San Bernardino iPhone, the government has asked Apple to design new software that would disable and bypass several security features, something the company insists it has never been asked to do and has never done before.

In a call with reporters Monday night, the executives said the two cases are predicated on the same arguments offered by the government, and they viewed Orenstein’s decision as a possible prelude to a favorable ruling in San Bernardino.

BuzzFeed legal editor Chris Geidner contributed to this report.

Read the judge's order:

Tom Kubik / Via tomkubikphoto.com

The lobby of the WeWork on San Francisco’s Market Street looks like The Truman Show, but for startups: It’s the middle of the afternoon, and people are actually playing ping pong. The jug of complimentary “fresh fruit water” is icy and glistening. Stay in the same place long enough and the same Macbook-toting twentysomething is bound to loop by again.

On a sunny day in late January, Nootrobox co-founder Michael Brandt ventured onto this soundstage for startup utopia to talk about his company’s newest product: a line of chewable coffee-flavored gummy bites called Go Cubes. They, like all of Nootrobox’s wares, are nootropics: substances designed to make you think harder, better, and faster, also known as smart drugs. (Nootropics are typically marketed as dietary supplements, which are not reviewed by the FDA, although the agency has issued warning letters. Nootrobox says it only uses ingredients that the FDA has classified as generally safe.) Brandt strode into the lobby wearing a neon baseball hat that said “THINKING CAP.” See? It's unnerving when reality is too on the nose.

Go Cubes represent a big departure from Nootrobox’s other products, a trifecta of pills called Rise, Sprint, and Yawn, which are supposed to help you start the day alert, conquer deadlines, and ease into sleep, respectively, and come in spartan glass containers. The cubes, on the other hand, come in bright packaging that Brandt told BuzzFeed News was inspired by Winnie the Pooh’s honey pot and Keith Haring. Nootrobox raised the money for Go Cubes through an Indiegogo campaign and also has funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The geometric treats begin selling online today.

Each Go Cube contains as much caffeine as half a cup of coffee, as well as six grams of sugar. The nootropic elements are B-complex vitamins and l-theanine, an amino acid found in green tea. (L-theanine plus caffeine is a popular pairing to start with because the combination reduces jitters.)

Brandt hopes that Go Cubes will introduce consumers to the idea that “your smartness is something to be optimized,” he said. “Own the fact that when you’re going to get coffee, 80% of the time you’re doing it to enhance your work abilities somehow.” And if coffee drinkers are trying to “modulate” performance, “Wouldn’t you want something more precise than coffee?” he said. “That’s our whole hypothesis there.”

He opened up a fat jar of cubes before we made our way to a conference room, so that I could try one. It tasted sweetly dank, like the first sip of a cold brew coffee, but with a Haribo mouthfeel and no hint of bitterness. My editor later described the taste as “synthetic,” but said she loved it.

Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed News

Brandt believes that Go Cubes could be a breakthrough product. “We’re just trying to take over the world so that this is an iconic logo before anyone else can follow us,” he said. “For every Coca-Cola, there’s a Pepsi and a bunch of others. That’s OK as long as we’re the Coca-Cola.”

Brandt was an associate product manager for YouTube, and his co-founder Geoff Woo is a former product manager at Groupon. Although Nootrobox’s line of pills is taking off, Brandt said he recognizes the limits of the company’s reach. “Ninety-nine percent of the world has never tried a nootropics in general, hasn’t heard about Nootrobox.” Chewable coffee seemed like a good gateway food. It looks approachable, and it’s portable so you can take it “on a long road trip or when you’re going hiking or into outer space,” he explained, but didn’t specify the planet.

Later this week, Go Cubes will be available on Amazon Launchpad, a portal for all things startup or crowdfunded. Brandt said he got the Amazon introduction through Andreessen Horowitz, which has also invested in BuzzFeed. The most popular items on the launchpad right now include Sphero’s app-controlled BB-8 robot and FitBark, a dog activity monitor.

Nootrobox co-founder Michael Brandt at WeWork

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Roughly two minutes after we moved from the lobby to a conference room, I asked Brandt if it was possible to feel the effects already. I had walked into WeWork groggy, but suddenly found myself on a higher plane of mental acuity. Shit was coming together. Ideas were ~~~~connecting~~~~. Brandt and I had a sharp-angled conversation about unexplored corners of human physiology, the earliest uses of caffeine in Ethiopia, how to achieve peak cognitive performance, and Elon Musk’s theory about first principles. I felt like I was on office Molly.

Half an hour later, I started to crash. Brandt’s and my conversation grew sluggish. Overall, it felt like good part of a caffeine high, but a little higher, a little more focused, and without the dehydration. After a week or so of eating cubes, my peaks and valleys flattened somewhat, but I still felt like the cubes were effective.

My colleagues’ reactions were mixed. The same editor said the cubes “were like Adderall but less sweaty.” Another co-worker who had two cups of coffee before trying the Go Cube said: “OK, very suddenly, I’m jacked,” adding, “I kind of think I may need to go for a run.” One writer said she had been “depending on them to get over the 1pm lunch slump” and may be addicted. “WHAT SORCERY IS IN THOSE WEIRD CUBES ON THE TABLE. I’M SO AWAKE AFTER BEING SO TIRED,” said one of the journalism lab fellows, while another called the gummy bites sugar bombs of evil.

Go Cubes capitalize on a few shifting trends among tech workers, as well as widespread changes in workplace culture and health. That may sound highfalutin’ for a sugar-coated pick-me-up. But marketing and pedigree mean something in tech — otherwise columnists for top newspapers wouldn’t keep reviewing Soylent, earnestly asking each time if a venture-backed beverage could “replace” or “end” food.

Among Silicon Valley locals, the idea of smart coffee plays into the idealization of the hacker lifestyle and the drive to self-optimize — both of which tie into the industry’s insistence that personal fulfillment comes from work, rather than out-of-office pursuits. In terms of more mainstream phenomenons, Go Cubes fits thematically into Americans working longer hours and the growing anxiety around productivity, whether that’s keeping up with the pace of news and technology, or just one’s inbox. Oh, and our coffee addiction.

“Humans are the next platform,” Brandt explained. “Five or six years ago if someone was measuring their footsteps, they were a crazy person, right? That wasn’t a normal thing. But now your aunt or your cousin can have a Fitbit and they don’t consider themselves a biohacker, they just have an Apple Watch.” Brandt sees an increasing interest in treating ourselves like machines. “We want better insight into how our body is performing and we want better ability to affect it,” he said. “We want to be able to pull the levers.”

Tom Kubik / Via tomkubikphoto.com

Venture capitalists and founders sometimes make analogies to computing in order to justify funding low-tech small businesses — perhaps because tech startups command higher valuations than, say, a power bar company.

People in the nootropics or quantified self “movement” use the word “stack” to describe their regimen of pills. Bodybuilders use supplement stacks, but in software, a stack is a set of applications or subsystems needed to build platforms or websites. (Rumor has it that Facebook prefers to hire “full-stack” engineers.) Nootrobox sells all three pills together in a package called the Full Stack.

Another way to align your company with Silicon Valley is by having the same heroes. Brandt told me Nootrobox has modeled its approach after what Elon Musk calls "first principles" — in other words, stripping something down to the basics so you can be truly innovative. When it comes to coffee, Brandt said, that means: “What do people want? What actually works? What are the intended effects?”

The on-the-nose vibe around Nootrobox comes from the prevalence of all these startup tropes: for example, the tech industry’s infatuation with new entrants over experience and expertise. “We’re both pretty young, we’re 27, so for better or for worse, I think mainly for better, we don’t have huge decades of experience in supplements,” said Brandt. Consumers have found Nootrobox “refreshing,” he said, compared with the supplements industry, where companies tout proprietary blends that turn out to contain “whatever happens to be on deck.”

Then again, if channeling Elon Musk is what it takes to get to chewable coffee, more power to them. Whether Go Cubes goes mainstream or only lasts a month, it made me more aware of how mindless it is to reach for a cup of coffee when I just want to feel smarter.

Tom Kubik / Via tomkubikphoto.com

Nootrobox rejected 200 other ideas — including selling Sprint as an energy shot and making a chewable version in fruit flavors — before arriving at the obvious conclusion of chewable coffee: “Coffee connotes a performance aspect that lemon just doesn’t,” said Brandt. He and Woo made a down payment for R&D with a factory in Los Angeles that does “truckloads a day of jellybeans, gummy multi-vites, and things like that,” Brandt said. They opted to coat the cubes in a fine layer of sugar so they don’t stick together, he said, spinning the jar around.

To make Go Cubes more mainstream, Nootrobox also changed the tone of its advertising. The commercial for the gummy bites is loud, friendly, and “super hammed up," whereas the commercial for the pills (above) was designed to talk to “our tribe,” Brandt told me. “There’s something really fascinating when you look at a computer programmer or a really elite day trader — someone that’s really good at the work they do, that busts their butt, that puts in super long hours, like a Ph.D. in a science lab — and when you look at a person like that through the lens of how you would look at a professional athlete.” These elite workers are achieving the same marvelous levels of proficiency “as your Super Bowl athletes, but they’re doing it in Node.js and they work at some startup,” he said, referring to a popular tool for JavaScript developers.

Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk may be international idols, but the universal need for validation persists.

The Nootrobox team “likes to think” that they're good at brain sports too, said Brandt. “No one has really talked to nerds like they’re Nike athletes, right? But I would like to be talked to like that.”

Bill Pugliano / Getty Images

Warren Buffett said Monday that his mobile-home firm that earned record profits last year does not charge minority customers higher rates than whites but acknowledged that some employees at Clayton Homes may not always have followed consumer-protection rules.

In a December investigation about the practices of Clayton Homes, reporters from The Seattle Times and BuzzFeed News analyzed federal loan data to show how the company charges minorities substantially higher rates. Compared to its peers in the industry, Clayton’s internal lending division, Vanderbilt Mortgage, had the largest gap.

Buffett did not address that issue in his annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter, published over the weekend, but CNBC asked him about it.

“It’s not true,” Buffett said. “There are a variety of factors that enter into the rate charge.”

Buffett said the interest rates are influenced by things such as credit score, down payments, earnings and whether the customer owns land. It has “nothing to do with your religion or your color or anything of the sort,” he said.

CNBC’s Becky Quick followed up by pointing out that reporters had documented specific examples of transactions where it appeared Clayton had misled customers. Numerous Clayton Homes customers have reported being guided into Clayton’s costly financing, led to believe it was the only option.

Buffett said Clayton retail lots provide paperwork and a board on the wall showing non-Clayton lending options.

“Does that mean that every single transaction gets handled perfectly? No,” Buffett said. “I mean, we’ve got 330,000 employees at Berkshire, and I will guarantee you somebody is doing something they shouldn’t do today.”

He suggested that the “tone at the top” of the company was one of compliance. But he did not address the internal documents that showed how Clayton pressures managers to get a high percentage of customers to take on Clayton financing — described internally as the company’s “capture rate.”

Buffett said the company gets regular examinations by federal and state regulators. He said in the last two years, those examinations led to about $38,000 in fines and refunds of about $700,000.

“If you look at our record compared to most lenders, I think it’s pretty darn good,” Buffett said.

In the Berkshire Hathaway annual report released over the weekend, Buffett disclosed that Clayton foreclosed on more than 8,000 customers last year but still managed to earn $700 million on $3.58 billion of revenue, making it the company’s most profitable year since Berkshire acquired Clayton more than a decade ago.

Abercrombie / Via abercrombie.com

Abercrombie & Fitch, which has been working to cut back on "sexualized marketing" while making its stores friendlier, said today that its turnaround is taking hold. But the good news is coming from a much smaller Abercrombie in the U.S.

Abercrombie executives said today that the company has closed about 340 stores, or nearly one-third of its domestic fleet, in the past six years, and plans to close another 60 this year. The company operated 754 namesake and Hollister stores in the U.S. at the end of January, compared with 1,068 locations six years ago. In that time, it's added 150 international stores with plans to open more.

"Importantly, we do not view these closures as a defensive move, but as a proactive one to ensure we are properly positioned to respond to the dramatic changes in how our customer chooses to shop," Jonathan Ramsden, Abercrombie's chief operating officer, said on an earnings call today. He went on to note that online sales made up 28% of Abercrombie's sales in the fourth quarter.

The shopping habits of American consumers are indeed changing and Abercrombie is far from the only retailer whittling down its store base. But the numbers are yet another reminder of how much ground Abercrombie has lost with American teenagers in recent years.

Abercrombie & Fitch / Via abercrombie.com

Abercrombie & Fitch / Via abercrombie.com

While the company was the king of the mall for years, Abercrombie's pulsating and costly nightclub-like stores and shirtless models stopped doing it for U.S. teens a few years ago. The company fired longtime CEO Mike Jeffries, the architect of Abercrombie's sex-meets-East Coast prep school vibe, at the end of 2014, and has been working to reshape its brands ever since under a series of new leaders.

Abercrombie reported annual sales of $2.3 billion in the U.S. today, down from $3.2 billion in 2008. Including everything else, the company's sales are about the same today as they were then, but the difference has been made up with international customers.

The question for Abercrombie is whether the namesake chain and Hollister can recoup those lost sales from young Americans, and still maintain their popularity overseas. It's been testing new stores that customers can see into, and relaxing rigid dress codes and behavior guidelines for employees who work there. It's also offering cheaper "entry-level" basics, in stark contrast to the high prices it was able to command in the early 2000s.

Instagram: @hollisterco

LINK: Abercrombie Says Farewell To Its Shirtless Men And Sexy Vibes

Party time at the Encore Beach Club at Wynn Las Vegas.

David Becker

On a Wednesday last May, a young startup called Zenefits vaulted into Silicon Valley's elite ranks, becoming a "unicorn" with a $4.5 billion valuation. That Friday, for its inaugural President's Club weekend, Zenefits flew around 70 top sales reps and executives to Las Vegas.

The select crew partied at high-priced tables at the Omnia nightclub, crashed in suites at the Cosmopolitan hotel, and spent the next day in a private bungalow at the Encore Beach Club, where champagne showers were on the menu, according to people who were there and pictures posted to Instagram. It was a bash that wouldn’t have been out of place in the big leagues of sales, where Zenefits, a San Francisco-based health insurance broker, badly wanted to play.

Before long, however, dreams gave way to disappointment. Even as Zenefits dangled incentives before its sales staff, reps struggled to hit their quotas, and operational problems — including the compliance failures that led last month to the ouster of Parker Conrad, the co-founder and longtime CEO — mounted. Employees in operational roles questioned the special treatment of the sales team and felt insulted by the oversized checks given to the few sales reps who outperformed, former employees say.

Now, the three-year-old Zenefits faces a painful retrenchment, announcing last week that it would cut 250 jobs, or 17% of its headcount, almost entirely from sales. The layoffs show how Zenefits overreached in its attempt to build a high-octane sales force, straining its culture while failing to produce the hoped-for financial results.

"This is the most difficult decision I’ve had to make in my career, but it is necessary for Zenefits to move forward successfully," David Sacks, the executive who succeeded Conrad as CEO, and who previously was an executive at PayPal and Yammer, said of the layoffs in a staff memo. "This reduction enables us to refocus our strategy, rebuild in line with our new company values, and grow in a controlled way."

Parker Conrad, right, the Zenefits co-founder and former CEO.

@elisedouglas / Via instagram.com

Zenefits had different priorities a year ago. The company gives away human resources software to small businesses, but makes its money from the recurring commissions it gets after selling those businesses health insurance policies. By February 2015, Zenefits had hired close to 100 insurance sales reps in a roughly 12-month period, supporting them with a staff of at least 50 sales development reps, who prospect for leads, executives said at a software conference at the time. This system had produced about $20 million in annually recurring revenue by the start of 2015, compared with $1 million a year earlier.

The executives seemed convinced they had hit on a winning formula, one that would quickly turn Zenefits from a Silicon Valley darling into a blue chip business. Plug more bodies into the chairs, the thinking went, and out would pop more dollars of recurring revenue. The goal for early 2016 was to dial the recurring revenue up to $100 million.

"It just became a numbers game," Conrad said at the conference. "It's like, well, if you can't get there with 30 sales reps, you just need to hire 60 sales reps. And so it becomes just about recruiting and training."

"It really is a machine today," added Sam Blond, then the vice president of sales, who sat next to Conrad on stage. "It's all about, how aggressively can we scale without the wheels falling off the track?"

The machine, however, wasn't nearly as sturdy as this confident talk made it seem. Behind the scenes, operations staff scrambled to help customers enroll in health care, an error-prone and frustratingly low-tech process that involved manually entering data into spreadsheets and sending it to health insurance carriers, according to former employees. Account managers felt like they were constantly putting out fires, or resetting the expectations of customers who had been given a hard sell.

Zenefits’ compensation structure created big rewards for sales reps on the enterprise team, who handled the largest customers, despite the reality that, as Zenefits later acknowledged, its software and processes worked better for smaller companies. And as more bodies filled the San Francisco headquarters and a satellite office in Scottsdale, Arizona — with the sales organization growing to around 500 or more, according to estimates by several former employees — reps increasingly failed to hit their monthly quotas.

One former rep compared Zenefits to an apple tree, "and you have two guys that are able to sell all the apples, and then you hire 10 guys, but the tree is still putting out the same number of apples."

Those who did hit their quotas were treated like lottery winners, a source of annoyance for some less-successful reps and employees in operations, former employees said. At regular sales meetings last year, Jeff Hazard, an executive who joined Zenefits in late 2014 after managing a sales division at payroll processor ADP, handed out oversized checks to the reps who had earned the most commissions that month, according to people who were present. Last month, Hazard was promoted to head of sales, succeeding Blond, who left the company.

One rep on the enterprise team earned about $60,000 in commissions one month, while another took home $85,000, former employees said. As the novelty checks gathered dust in the office, operations employees observed that the largest monthly commissions were higher than what some of them earned in a year.

Perks for sales reps included frequent happy hours and dinners at places like Bobo's steakhouse, as well as $100 cash prizes or gift cards for those who closed deals or made the most phone calls in a day, according to former employees and an email obtained by BuzzFeed News. Toward the middle of the year, such perks tended to have a demoralizing effect, both on the struggling reps and on operations employees cleaning up frequent messes, who felt under-appreciated, the former employees said.

Last week, as Sacks announced the layoffs, he disclosed that Zenefits had reached "over $60 million" in annually recurring revenue — triple the amount a year earlier, but well short of the $100 million goal. In a sign that Zenefits has struggled to serve bigger customers, the company last month lost its biggest client, the e-commerce startup Jet.com, BuzzFeed News reported. Sacks has told staff he will disband the enterprise sales team entirely, focusing on smaller customers, "where we have product-market fit."

Zenefits sales reps at Javier's Cantina.

@laurenmhelm / Via instagram.com

Last May, after arriving in Vegas, the Zenefits employees boarded a party bus and headed to the Cosmopolitan, where suites cost more than $500 a night, according to people who were there. The revelers enjoyed Mexican food and drinks at Javier's Cantina, before descending on the Omnia at Caesars Palace, where Calvin Harris was spinning. Reserving one table near the dance floor there would cost around $15,000 in minimum drinks expenditures. Zenefits, according to attendees, got three.

The next day, employees congregated at an Encore Beach Club bungalow, which would require at least $15,000 in food and drink spending. One video obtained by BuzzFeed News shows a shirtless Blond, then the head of sales, dancing poolside to a thumping beat from the Swedish D.J. Avicii, with colleagues lounging nearby in orange Zenefits hats. In quintessential Vegas fashion, the group cooled off with a champagne shower, which, at the cheapest level of $6,000, includes one three-litre bottle of Veuve Clicquot, for drinking, and five bottles of house bubbly — for spraying.

BuzzFeed News

The President's Club weekend, details of which have not previously been reported, was a topic of much discussion inside Zenefits, as pictures circulated on Facebook and Instagram. Afterward, at an all-hands meeting led by Conrad, one employee pointedly questioned whether spending on sales events like the President's Club was financially wise, according to two people who were there. In achieving its $4.5 billion valuation, Zenefits had raised $500 million from big investors, including the mutual fund giant Fidelity and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and was expected to one day turn a profit. (Andreessen Horowitz is also an investor in BuzzFeed.)

Conrad's response, according to three people who heard it, was that such events were commonplace in the high-stress world of sales and that Zenefits needed to hold them in order to attract and reward the best talent. One person who was there, paraphrasing Conrad, said he suggested that "celebrations and spending on sales would pay for themselves by attracting the best sales reps, who would make up for the spending in deals closed." Another person recalled Conrad saying Vegas was less expensive than, say, Fiji. Conrad did not respond to requests for comment.

This exchange seemed to encapsulate a burgeoning rift inside the company, with growing resentment directed toward the sales team. It didn't help that many in the sales organization were fresh out of college and liked to party, playing flip cup in the office on Friday afternoons, former employees said. On the Friday before Halloween, one young employee gulped some beer and flipped his cup while dressed as the actor Jared Leto — who is an investor in Zenefits — with a long-hair wig and a wide-brimmed hat, a video obtained by BuzzFeed News shows.

In June, San Francisco-based employees were told in an email that "several used condoms" had been found in the stairwell, and that they should "not use the stairwells to smoke, drink, eat, or have sex." The email was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

Hazard eventually stopped handing out the oversized checks, but the checks remained in the office. Recipients tended not to take the checks home — what are you going to do, frame it? — so they just piled up, leaning against a wall or stacked on the floor, former employees said.

At least one employee in operations submitted a complaint to their manager about the checks, asking that they be removed, according to one person who saw the email and another person familiar with the matter. Nothing apparently came of it, these people said.

Last summer, with sales reps struggling, one board member sought to tap the brakes. Lars Dalgaard, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, insisted that Zenefits freeze hiring completely, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company froze hiring in operational departments, this person said, but kept hiring in sales.

@lindseystevens99 / Via instagram.com

Many of the newly hired reps lacked any background in health insurance; several said they felt unqualified to help customers select plans for their employees. As BuzzFeed News has reported, Zenefits repeatedly failed to enforce legal requirements that anyone selling a health insurance policy have an appropriate state license, and sales reps were given software to help them cheat on the California broker licensing process. Zenefits is currently under investigation by insurance regulators in Washington state and California.

A more urgent problem in the minds of many reps, however, was the fact that they weren’t making the kind of money they had expected. Reps earned a dollar amount per "life," the term for an insured employee of a client company. Above their quota, they got "accelerators," yielding more money per life.

Only one sales rep on the 54-person team handling small and medium-sized businesses hit 100% of his quota in December 2015, according to a chart in a January email that was obtained by BuzzFeed News. Only three other reps achieved more than 60% of their quotas, the chart shows. All but 10 closed less than 40%.

Even if they hit their quota, some reps discovered that their commissions would be clawed back if a customer dropped Zenefits within 12 months of a deal closing. It's difficult to estimate how often this happened, but several former reps interviewed by BuzzFeed News said they or their colleagues experienced clawbacks, with thousands of dollars withheld from subsequent paychecks.

Just as operations staff resented having to clean up after sales reps, sales reps came to resent the work of the operations staff, who managed the nuts of bolts of insurance, which can lead a customer to leave.

A Zenefits spokesman, Kenneth Baer, told BuzzFeed News in an emailed statement, "In just three weeks as Zenefits' new CEO, David Sacks has implemented new compliance controls, instituted new company values, refocused the strategy, and made major personnel changes. Zenefits is focusing on the future. Our mission is to make entrepreneurship easier, and we're doing that for many thousands of small businesses."

Sacks, in his memo about the layoffs last week, said he would work to make the remaining sales reps "as successful as possible."

"Our sales leaders will be meeting with the team this afternoon to roll out new sales plans and quotas," he said. "By expanding the size of territories and concentrating lead flow, the sales reps who stay will be in a great position to succeed."