Fiat Workers Strike over Ronaldo

Workers at a Fiat Chrysler plant in Italy are to strike after its main investor decided to pay €112m (£99.2m) to sign footballer Cristiano Ronaldo for Juventus. Both the football club and the carmaker are controlled by the Agnelli family through their holding company. For the USB union, the decision means Fiat is missing out on investment. It said the firm needed to guarantee the future of thousands of people, "rather than enriching only one". The union added that it was "unacceptable" that while Fiat Chrysler workers were making "huge economic sacrifices", millions of euros were being spent on the purchase of a player.Although Juventus and Fiat Chrysler are run as entirely separate businesses, they are both controlled by Exor, the investment holding of the Agnelli family.Its members will walk out at 22:00 local time on Sunday and remain on strike until 18:00 on the following Tuesday. However, the impact of the stoppage is likely to be limited. The factory is just one of seven Fiat Chrysler plants in Italy and the USB does not represent many workers there.
Fiat Workers Strike

Strawbucks

Starbucks has announced that it will stop handing out single-use plastic straws at its 28,000 stores around the world. The company says it will design a 'strawless lid' or find an alternative material to use by 2020.Once fully implemented, the policy will eliminate 1bn plastic straws per year from heading to landfills and play a part in saving the estimated 100,000 mammals who die each year from ingesting or getting tangled in plastic waste, particularly in the ocean and on beaches. Since the city of Seattle outlawed plastic straws and utensils beginning last week, Starbucks will begin with stores there and in nearby Vancouver, Canada. Shareholders voted down an effort to get a report about plastic straws across all locations, but the fast food icon said it would be testing plastic alternatives in select US stores.

Strawbucks

Build-A-Bear Chaos

A cheap teddy offer which left shoppers with young children queuing for up to eight hours amid chaotic scenes has been abandoned over "safety concerns". Build-A-Bear Workshop was offering UK customers a chance to buy any bear, which can cost up to £52, for the price of their child's age. At Leeds' White Rose Shopping Centre police were called when queues of "about a mile long" formed. The company said the response had been "overwhelming and unprecedented". There have also been reports of long queues in US shopping centres, where the American company was also putting on the same promotion on Thursday. Gemma Butler, marketing director at the Chartered Institute of Marketing, said: "This was an ill thought-out and unprofessional promotional execution, one that not only risks their own brand reputation, but has the potential to bring the wider marketing sector into disrepute."

Build-A-Bear

Self-Made Billionaire

Kylie Jenner was just 10 years old when she made her debut on her family's reality television series Keeping up with the Kardashians. A decade on, the show is still going strong and its youngest star is now the famous family's highest earner. It emerged this week just how vast a chunk of the family's wealth belongs to the 20-year-old. Despite Kim's initial eclipsing fame, Forbes magazine says Kylie is now worth almost three times as much as her sister at an estimated $900m (£680m). The magazine lauded her for heading towards becoming one of the youngest "self-made" billionaires ever. Given her background, many online scoffed at the title, but the impressiveness of the speed of her business success is harder to mock. Kylie Cosmetics is by far her biggest earner. It's not sold in stores and does not advertise traditionally, because unlike other competitors it doesn't seem to need it.

Kylie Cosmetics

Ice Cold Profit

Just a few years ago Justin Woolverton was pleading with US supermarkets to keep his reduced calorie ice cream tubs in their freezer cabinets. Sales of his low fat, low sugar brand Halo Top were flat-lining, and stores were continually threatening to stop stocking it. "We were hanging on by the skin of our teeth," says the 38-year-old, who launched the business in 2012. "We'd tell them 'leave us up there, things are going to turn around'." In his wildest dreams Mr Woolverton couldn't have predicted just how dramatic the turnaround would be. Just six years after starting, his ice cream is now the best-selling brand in the US. With very little money for marketing, the LA-based start-up had been trying to inch up sales by working hard to promote itself on social media. In 2016 it was reported to have sold 28.8 million tubs, generating $132.4m (£101m) in revenues becoming the best-selling pint of ice cream in the US, beating iconic industry leaders such as Ben & Jerry's and Häagen-Dazs.

Halo Top

Festival Failure

Festival Republic has blamed the company running its bars for the huge queues that saw fans miss headline sets over the weekend. People complained it took two hours to get a drink at the Liam Gallagher and Queens Of The Stone Age gigs in London's Finsbury Park. Festival Republic says the queues were because not enough staff turned up. That explanation hasn't gone down well, with organisers being accused of "passing the buck". The gigs took place over one of the hottest weekends of the year - but getting your hands on a drink was not easy. On Sunday evening, after being hit by so many complaints, organiser Festival Republic put out a statement, which blamed the company running the bars.

Festival Failure

Cadbury Inventor

Chocoholics, it’s time for your cocoa-drenched dreams to become a reality. Cadbury has called on fans to design its next chocolate bar. The chocolatier is calling on customers to choose from more than 90,000 flavour combinations online, where they can invent, design and name the chocolate bar of their dreams. With a range of unconventional ingredients such as marshmallow, elderflower, popping candy and mustard at your disposal, it’s an unrivalled opportunity to flex your creative culinary muscles. Entries will be judged on taste and creativity and are open until July 31, after which Cadbury will draw up a shortlist of the top three bars before putting the final call to a nationwide vote.
Cadbury Inventor

Happy Shopper

Iceland has been named the UK's top supermarket for customer satisfaction for the first time. The UK Customer Satisfaction Index surveys 10,000 consumers, is released twice a year, and covers all types of business. Iceland came 10th overall - the highest performing food retailer - while the online giant Amazon came top of the list for the sixth time in a row. Waitrose was 17th while Aldi and M&S Food were joint 23rd. The survey measures more than 30 aspects of customer service, including staff professionalism, the quality and efficiency of the service, trust, and transparency Amazon scored 86.7 out of a potential 100. John Lewis came second, getting 86.5 out of 100.

Customer Satisfaction