Welcome to the May 2025 Business by LA Times Studios Magazine
In May's Business by LA Times Studios Magazine, you'll find a wealth of need-to-know insights regarding Southern California's dynamic professional sectors, from biotech to legal developments – however, we also want you to take your mind off things and relax.
That's why we're featuring stories about new trends in wellness travel, which can aid harried businesspeople from LAX and beyond. In addition, we've highlighted several new business-friendly hotels in a region that is seeing new properties pop up everywhere.
Consumer trends are rampant this spring as well, from new waterless makeup hitting both conservation-minded individuals and those following the latest celebrity 'it' products to super-startup Alpha Motor, whose unique crowdfunding model is firmly planted in how companies are doing business in 2025.
Getting back to business, see informative charts documenting commercial real estate in Q1, our list of the top pharmacy education programs in the state and Southern California's most impactful biotech and life sciences companies.
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Wall Street Journal
5 hours ago
- Wall Street Journal
How Flying on a Private Jet Became the No. 1 Marker of Real Wealth
When Maxx Chewning sold his sour-candy business to Hershey for $75.5 million, the first thing he did—before buying a Rolex or dream home—was jet his wife and six friends to Vail on a Dassault Falcon 900. They skipped security lines, zipped straight to the runway and seated themselves in leather recliners with gold accents in the wood-paneled cabin. The price tag for this adventure: $100,000.
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Yahoo
Starbucks' problems may be too big to fix
Starbucks' problems may be too big to fix originally appeared on TheStreet. In its early days, Starbucks' approach was unique. Unlike rivals like Dunkin', Tim Hortons, and breakfast diners, its mission wasn't to provide one coffee for everyone as fast as possible. Instead, it treated making coffee like a craftsman makes fine furniture, focusing on the highest-quality product, regardless of how long it takes. That approach helped Starbucks grow from a single store in Seattle, Washington, to a coffee powerhouse with 32,000 stores located in just about every nook and cranny of the globe, including: Over 18,000 stores in North America. About 2,800 stores in Europe. More than 6,500 stores in China. Roughly 1,300 stores in the Middle East and North Africa. 1,800 locations in Latin America, including more than 70 in Colombia, putting Starbucks about as close to the coffee's origins as possible. With that kind of growth, and plenty of shareholders eager for ever-increasing profits, it's pretty unsurprising that Starbucks has dealt with growing pains. The company has faced controversies over worker pay (and what they wear), as well as customer complaints over inconsistent drink tastes, food freshness, and, more generally, the rise of a less-relaxed cafe vibe, too focused on boosting transactions and profit margin. The situation has left many scratching their heads, wondering if Starbucks' new CEO, Brian Niccol, can get things back on track. Longtime hedge fund manager Doug Kass is among the doubters. He recently sent a particularly harsh message about Starbucks, suggesting Niccol's strategy to get Starbucks back to its roots is unlikely to pan out. Starbucks comes under fire from Wall Street Starbucks' () stock price financed a good chunk of the company's global expansion. Investors eagerly bought shares early in the company's growth phase to profit from the opportunity for its customer-first approach to dislodge market share from rivals like Tim Hortons and Dunkin'. Longtime shareholders have been handsomely rewarded, given that Starbucks shares have surged since its IPO in 1992. A $10,000 investment then would be worth over $3 million many investors' love affair with Starbucks has faded since the company has mostly saturated major U.S. markets like New York and California, reducing chances for sales growth. Its share price is up just 15% over the past five years, while the S&P 500 has climbed 89%. In 2025, Starbucks' stock price has fallen nearly 5%. With Starbucks stores seemingly everywhere, longtime hedge fund manager Doug Kass suggests the company's strategy nowadays is less about reimagining coffee houses and more about milking as much money out of existing locations as possible. Such an approach can boost earnings in the short term, but it poses a significant long-term risk to Starbucks' brand. '[Starbucks] morphed into overpriced purveyors of food/coffee — while the quality of their product offering has deteriorated and the selling cost of the product has risen,' wrote Doug Kass in a post to investors on TheStreet Pro. It's not just the coffee, either. While many may think Starbucks bakes its treats on site, many are previously frozen. 'I couldn't create a danish as unappealing,' said Kass, who has managed money professionally for about 50 years. Starbucks' worker relationship has soured over time Some Starbucks employees agree that the company's mission has lost its way. It was once highly recognized as a pioneer in employee pay, offering solid wages and a 'partner' approach to its workers. Employees, however, have increasingly explored unionization in recent years, saying the faster-paced environment is taking a heavy toll on its once-lauded baristas, and pay hasn't kept pace. Starbucks' response to unionization has drawn fire from worker advocates who suggest management has engaged in union-busting decisions. For example, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has accused the company of firing or disciplining workers, including the high-profile case involving the 'Memphis 7,' seven workers terminated after advocating unionization. That case went to the Supreme Court, where an earlier court decision to grant an injunction supporting the workers was reversed in Starbucks' favor, and the case was sent back to the lower courts. The first corporate Starbucks location to unionize was in Buffalo in 2021, led by Starbucks Workers United. As of August 2025, workers at over 600 Starbucks stores across the U.S. have voted to unionize, according to Workers United. Starbucks turnaround plan faces uphill battle The company's frayed relationship with some employees isn't the only problem CEO Brian Niccol is trying to fix. Niccol joined Starbucks as CEO in 2024 after over six years at the helm of Chipotle. Shortly after Niccol took over as Starbucks' CEO, he acknowledged 'a shared sense that we have drifted from our core' and announced his 'Back To Starbucks" plan to get the company back on track, focusing on a 'welcoming coffeehouse where people gather and where we serve the finest coffee, handcrafted by our skilled baristas.' However, those comments and Niccol's plans sound hollow to Kass. 'When he got to Starbucks, Niccol started off by using fancy jargon to distract from the fact that Starbucks is losing to both value and premium brands/operators,' wrote Kass. 'Starbucks now faces a very expensive overhaul in its physical locations and product offerings.' Starbucks faces fierce competition from big and small rivals Starbucks' competitive advantage hasn't been lost on rivals. Big rivals like Dunkin' and McDonald's have expanded menus, including popular refreshers, while local mom-and-pop cafes have leaned hard into the artisanal coffee house back market share from those players won't be easy. As a result, Niccol's overhaul could pressure Starbucks' profits while ultimately doing little to restore Starbucks's culture, disappointing investors. 'The brand is now very weak competitively — they aren't premium (artisans, local brands, etc.) and the previous also-rans are coming in hot with smaller footprints,' said Kass. 'From a product standpoint, they sell more chemicals, sugar and ice — it's not coffee.' Undeniably, many remain loyal Starbucks fans, but there are more choices, and with less connection to the employees, the moat of loyalty isn't nearly as strong as it was in the past. 'It is the Regal Cinemas concession stand without the movies. The notion that the baristas want to hang with the customers has been lost,' said Kass. 'I suspect the turnaround in both companies will take a lot longer than the consensus expects.' To be sure, Starbucks' challenges aren't unique. Indeed, most companies experiencing the kind of success it has experienced deal with similar issues. Still, the hyper-competitive coffee market and the challenges facing Niccol leave Kass thinking that there are better alternatives for investors. 'I would not bottom fish despite the material share-price weakness,' concluded problems may be too big to fix first appeared on TheStreet on Aug 3, 2025 This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Aug 3, 2025, where it first appeared. Sign in to access your portfolio
Forbes
10 hours ago
- Forbes
Office Hellscapes And AI Process Mapping
Why are human workplaces so disorganized? In some ways, it's a question people have been asking themselves ever since the first cubicle dwellers rose up from the primordial swamp - whenever that was. We know that larger systems tend to be disordered, especially if they're administrated by humans. Just go read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and it might remind you of the modern office – people and products and materials strewn about a gigantic footprint, with very little centralized control. You get the same kind of idea reading the most recent piece by Ethan Mollick on the site where he posts his essays, One Useful Thing. I always follow his posts, interested in his emerging take on the technologies that are so new to all of us. Mollick has MIT ties, and an excellent track record looking at the AI revolution from a fresh perspective. The Office Dilemma Human wothis most recent piece, he talks about process mapping and how AI can help people to sort through the disorganization of a business. Think of a company with 100 or more employees, and probably a dozen locations. The first thing you tend to find is that sense of disorder. Mollick talks about a 'Garbage Can' principle, which posits that most businesses are a collection of disparate processes thrown into a large, disorganized bin. To me, you could use the analogy of what programmers used to call 'DLL hell' in the earlier days of the Internet. DLLs are digital libraries. Their application was often chaotic and disordered. There were dependencies that would flummox even the most seasoned engineers, because things were complicated and chaotic. That's what a large company is often like. Everyone for Themselves Mollick also pointed to some numbers that I've seen in various studies, and presented at conferences where we've talked about AI over the past year. His number was 43% – the number of employees who are using AI in the workplace. But as Mollick points out, and as I've heard before, most of them are using AI in personal ways. The use of the tools is not ordered across an organization – it's piecemeal. It's people using an AI tool like you would use a hammer, or a saw, or a drill, or a lathe --- largely in an unsupervised way. However, in general, it seems AI is largely catching on, especially when it comes to product development. You have resources like this one from the Texas Workforce Commission, referencing thousands of AI jobs. So even if there's not much centralized AI in the boardroom, there is abundant AI in business processes. It's just that those processes may or may not be unified. The Bitter Lesson Then Mollick references something called the 'Bitter lesson' that's attributed to Robert Sutton in 2019. It's the idea that AI will prove to be cognitively superior to humans without a lot of poking and prodding – but given enough time and compute, the system will find its own way to solve problems. That phrase, problem solving, is what people have been saying is the unique province of humans. It's the idea that AI can do the data-crunching, but people are still doing the creative problem-solving. Well, that bastion of human ingenuity doesn't seem that safe anymore. Mollick references the early days of chess machine evolution, where eventually Deep Blue beat Kasparov. He notes that there are two ways to go about this – you can program in innumerable chess rules, and have the system sort through them and apply them, or you can just show the system thousands of chess games, and it will make those connections on its own. Back to Machine Learning Principles Reading through this, I was reminded of the early days of machine learning, where people talked a good bit about supervised versus unsupervised learning. We often used the analogy of fruit in a digital software program enhanced with machine learning properties. Supervised learning would be labeling each fruit with its own tag – banana – apple - or grapes. The program would then learn to correlate between its training data and new real-world data. That comparison would be its main method. And that comparison isn't hugely cognitive. It follows the tradition of deterministic programming. The unsupervised version would be simply to tell the program that bananas are yellow and long, that grapes are purple or green and have clusters, and the apples are red or green and round. Then the system goes out, looks at the pictures and applies that logic. The interesting thing here is taking that analogy to the bitter lesson. Is AI more powerful if it simply analyzes reams of training data without applied logic? Or is it more powerful if it can actually distinguish between various kinds of outcomes based on requested logical processes? Which came first: the chicken or the egg? The theory of the bitter lesson seems to be that the system can actually do better through supervised learning. But that supervision doesn't necessarily have to be human oversight. The machine gets a practically infinite set of training data, and makes all of its own conclusions. That's contrasted to an approach where people tell the machine what to do, and it learns based on those suggestions. Back in the era of supervised versus unsupervised learning, the unsupervised learning seemed more powerful. It seemed more resource-intensive. But AI might finally show us up just by doing things in a more efficient way – if I can use one more analogy, it's the traditional idea of the Laplace demon, an invention of the physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace who suggested that if you know enough data points, you can predict the future. In other words, brute force programming is king. We learned a lot of this in the big data age, before we learned to use LLMs, and now we're seeing the big data age on steroids. In Conclusion I also found a very interesting take at the end of Mollick's essay where he talks about businesses going down one or the other avenue of progress. Sure enough, he suggested that these companies are playing chess with each other – that one of these chess teams consists of companies using AI to be logical, and that another chess team consists of businesses using it for brute force programming and classification. If all of this is a little hard to follow, it's because we're pretty securely in the realm of AI philosophy here. It makes you think about not just whether AI is going to win out over human workers, but how it's going to do it. I forgot to mention the exponential graph that Mollick includes showing that we're closer to AGI then most people would imagine. Let's look back at the end of this year and see how this plays out.
