Mall Santas brave the pandemic with plexiglass barriers, sanitation elves and snow-globe bubbles
InternationalNov 26. 2020Santa’s helper works to keep things disinfected at the Springfield Bass Pro Shops store in Springfield, Mo. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Annaliese Nurnberg.
By The Washington Post · Abha Bhattarai · NATIONAL, BUSINESS, FEATURES, RETAIL
Santa Claus is coming to town with a few extra precautions this year.
Santa dons a face shield and sits behind plexiglass at a Bass Pro Shops store this week in Springfield, Mo. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Annaliese Nurnberg.
Old Saint Nick will pose for photos from inside an acrylic snow globe in Richmond. He’ll be barricaded behind a eight-foot picture frame in Lakewood, Colo. And in Gruene, Texas, Cowboy Kringle, who wears red leather chaps and a cowboy hat, will keep socially distant by asking visitors to sit on a saddle positioned six feet away.
This year’s holiday photos will have a decidedly pandemic feel: No more sitting on Kriss Kringle’s lap or whispering in his ear. Instead, venues are increasingly requiring reservations, masks and temperature checks. Santa is hosting drive-through events, attaching face shields to his hat and trading in his white cloth gloves for disposable ones to protect himself – and others – as coronavirus cases skyrocket to new highs around the country.
Although some retailers, such as Macy’s, have suspended Santa visits or moved them online, many others are forging ahead with extra precautions and backup plans, in hopes of getting customers into stores during a particularly fraught holiday season.
“Everything is different this year, but people are finding a way to keep that traditional Santa experience,” said Mitchell Allen, owner of the staffing firm Hire Santa, where virtual bookings have grown tenfold but still make up a sliver of the company’s total revenue. “It’s unexpected, to be honest.”
The stakes are especially high. The pandemic has sent a number of prominent retailers into bankruptcy and disrupted every part of the industry, from supply chains to consumer behavior. Many retailers are still struggling to make up for lost sales from coronavirus-related closures in the spring. Another round of shutdowns just as the holiday season is kicking off, they say, could be devastating.
Bass Pro Shops Santa Paul Porter in Springfield, Mo. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Annaliese Nurnberg.
Santa, though, has become a symbol of retailers’ optimism, even as challenges abound. Santa-booking companies say overall appointments are down about 40%, and many Santas are dropping out of the workforce because of health concerns. Even so, store executives and mall owners have spent months – and tens of thousands of dollars – trying to reimagine Santa’s Wonderland for the coronavirus era. The goal, they say, is to spread holiday cheer (but not the virus).
“Santa can’t give out hugs or candy canes this year, but people still want to see him,” said Mark Brenneman, 70, who has been playing Santa for nearly five decades. “They want hope. They want normal.”
But normal can be difficult during a pandemic. Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., canceled in-person Santa visits this month after the governor issued an executive order restricting all social gatherings, indoors and outdoors.
Santas are also nervous. Many are in their 70s and 80s and have health conditions such as diabetes that put them at particularly high risk of coronavirus complications. Brenneman, who owns the booking firm Santa Claus and Co. in Phoenix, said about half of the 30 white-bearded men he employs are sitting the season out, and a few are doing only outdoor events.
But at least a dozen Santas, he said, will continue to work because they need the money. “A lot of these guys are living on Social Security checks alone, so it’s a tough decision for them to make – their health or extra income,” he said.
A Santa gig, he said, can easily bring in hundreds of dollars a day. Brenneman charges $200 an hour early in the season and as much as $600 an hour on Christmas Eve. Overall bookings are down about 40% this year, but the company still has at least 300 events on its calendar.
Brenneman and his employees are making more house calls, too. With most corporate events and school visits canceled, more families are inviting Santa into their homes to read stories, perform magic tricks or sing carols from a distance. Some are renting golf carts or horses and buggies to parade Santa and Mrs. Claus around their neighborhoods.
“We have to give people hope,” he said, “more today than any year in the past.”
Bass Pro Shops began offering free photos with Santa during the 2008 recession, when the country was in need of a collective pick-me-up. It turned out to be an overnight success that helped drive sales and boost the company’s brand.
Now the outdoors retailer, which also owns Cabela’s, is hoping to re-create some of that magic, even if Old Saint Nick is stuck behind an acrylic shield and elves are pulling double duty as “Santa’s sanitization squad.” Demand has been brisk: 95,000 families stopped in for photos during Santa’s first week at 176 stores.
“A lot of our customers told us they want the event to continue,” spokesman Jack Wlezien said. “They said: ‘We’ve already had to sacrifice so much this year. We’d really like to be able to see Santa.’ So then the question became: How can we pull this off while also protecting Santa, our shoppers and employees?”
Photos are by appointment only, and all visitors must undergo a temperature screening. The company also has backup plans, such as moving the set outdoors, in case of new shutdowns and restrictions.
Other retailers are making similar calculations. Neiman Marcus has done away with its popular breakfast-with-Santa events and is enlisting the jolly old elf to deliver curbside orders to customers’ cars instead. More than 130 shopping malls owned by Brookfield Properties are offering their own twist on the North Pole, using oversize sleighs and fake campfires to keep visitors at least six feet apart.
Overall, Santa visits are expected to decline about 65% from last year, when more than 10 million families took their children to pose for pictures at malls and stores, according to GlobalData Retail. The majority of those people also spent money at nearby shops and restaurants during their visit, the firm said.
The SoNo Collection, a mall owned by Brookfield in Norwalk, Conn., is offering virtual visits this year for $25. But for those who would like to see Santa in the flesh, he’ll be greeting shoppers from inside an acrylic snow globe on the third floor.
“Santa has survived so many things – the Spanish flu, the bubonic plague – and I just couldn’t bring myself to tell my kids that he was afraid of covid-19,” said Kathryn Burgess, a Richmond-based photographer who designed the snow globe and spent $10,000 manufacturing it. “But we had to come up with a creative plan to protect him.”
Her acrylic barriers, which she sells for as much as $4,000, are being used by nearly 50 malls, schools and hospitals this holiday season.
Just about everything is bigger in Texas, Renee Davis said, and that includes Santa’s plans for the pandemic.
Davis, who owns events company Santa Express Central, recently spent $10,000 on a custom “hot rod sleigh” for Santa to drive to local parades, neighborhood events and hospitals. She is coordinating more outdoor events, including drive-throughs where children can drop off letters to Santa and take photos from their cars.
“It’s like re-creating the wheel with every client,” said Davis, who co-founded the company with her husband in 2002. “I’m working harder than I ever have in my life.”
The company is committing to fewer bookings this year and has backup plans in case Santa gets sick or has to quarantine. It has become more difficult to find qualified Santas with proper training and real beards who are willing to do in-person visits, Davis said.
There are more-practical considerations, too. Davis has spent months stockpiling hand sanitizer to last Santa the entire holiday season. And since masks ruffle his beard and muffle his voice, she has been buying up plastic face shields that connect to his glasses.
“We have to protect Santa, and we have to protect the child,” she said. “That’s the most important thing this year.”
IBM planning 10,000 job cuts in Europe ahead of unit sale
InternationalNov 26. 2020An IBM logo in London, on Oct. 29, 2018. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Chris J. Ratcliffe.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Olivia Carville, Helene Fouquet, Daniele Lepido · BUSINESS, WORLD, TECHNOLOGY, US-GLOBAL-MARKETS, EUROPE
International Business Machines Corp. is planning to cut about 10,000 jobs in Europe in an attempt to lower costs at its slow-growth services unit and prepare the business for a spinoff.
The wide-ranging losses will affect about 20% of staff in the region, according to people familiar with the matter. The U.K. and Germany are set to be most impacted, with cuts also planned in Poland, Slovakia, Italy and Belgium.
IBM announced the job cuts in Europe earlier in November during a meeting with European labor representatives, according to a union officer briefed on proceedings. The person asked not to be identified because the talks are private.
“Our staffing decisions are made to provide the best support to our customers in adopting an open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities,” an IBM spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. “We also continue to make significant investments in training and skills development for IBMers to best meet the needs of our customers.”
Hardest hit will be IBM’s legacy IT services business, which handles day-to-day infrastructure operations, such as managing client data centers and traditional information-technology support for installing, operating and repairing equipment.
IBM said in October it’s planning to spin off the business and focus on its new hybrid-cloud computing and artificial intelligence unit, which the company hopes will return it to revenue growth. IBM said it aims to complete the carve-out as a tax-free spinoff to IBM shareholders by the end of 2021.
“We’re taking structural actions to simplify and streamline our business,” said IBM Chief Financial Officer James Kavanaugh during the company’s third-quarter earnings call in October. “We expect the fourth-quarter charge to our operating results of about $2.3 billion.”
Once an iconic blue-chip company, IBM’s star has faded over the years as its legacy in mainframe computing and IT services fell behind while newer technology firms like Amazon.com Inc. swooped in to dominate the emerging cloud-computing market.
IBM was already cutting jobs earlier this year, although the company wouldn’t say how many positions were being eliminated. The company has traditionally declined to disclose the numbers of job cuts for decades, with arguably one exception in 1993 when Lou Gerstner, a CEO hired from outside the company, announced 60,000 dismissals.
The spin-off of its services unit is the first big move by Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna, who took over from Ginni Rometty in April and has been pushing to revive growth after almost a decade of shrinking revenue. Krishna earlier this year cut thousands of jobs as he began reshaping the business.
The current round of job cuts should be completed by the end of the first-half of 2021, one of the people added.
Dell, HP report sales topping estimates on pandemic PC Surge
InternationalNov 26. 2020A man walks with a box bearing the HP logo in New Delhi onJune 24, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Prashanth Vishwanathan.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Nico Grant · BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, RETAIL
Dell Technologies and HP reported quarterly revenue that topped Wall Street estimates, lifted by customer upgrades of personal computers for remote work and school during the pandemic.
Dell’s sales climbed 2.8% to $23.5 billion in the period that ended Oct. 30, the Round Rock, Texas-based company said Tuesday in a statement. Rival HP reported it shipped a record 19 million PCs in its recent quarter, as well as more home printers than it has sold in years. HP also gave a profit forecast for the current period that beat analysts’ projections and said it would raise its quarterly dividend 10%.
Michael Dell and HP Chief Executive Officer Enrique Lores are trying to revamp their PC makers into more profitable businesses. Both companies have taken steps to cut operating expenses during the pandemic, and they produced better-than-projected profits in the October quarter. Billionaire Dell is trying to spur more predictable, recurring revenue by letting corporate clients pay for products over time rather than upfront. Lores, meanwhile, is overseeing a corporate restructuring that will result in lower expenses and a smaller workforce.
“We are very optimistic about where the company is going to be going during the next quarters and years,” Lores said in an interview.
HP shares gained about 5% in New York trading, helped by the company’s announcement that it would boost the quarterly dividend to 19.38 cents a share. Dell shares fell roughly 2%. The stock is up more than 30% so far this year.
HP’s revenue fell about 1% to $15.3 billion in the period that ended Oct. 31, the Palo Alto, California-based company said in a statement. Analysts, on average, expected $14.7 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Profit, excluding some items, was 62 cents a share in the fourth fiscal quarter, while analysts projected 52 cents.
Adjusted profit in the current quarter will be 64 cents to 70 cents a share, HP said. Analysts, on average, estimated 54 cents.
Dell’s sales from consumer PCs jumped 14% to $3.5 billion in the fiscal third quarter, the company said. PC sales to business and government clients increased 5.4% to $8.78 billion. Server and networking sales fell 1.8% to $4.16 billion, the seventh consecutive quarter of year-over-year declines for the unit. Executives said they expect continued “soft” data-center spending in the current period. Storage hardware revenue declined 7% to $3.86 billion.
“I’m generally pleased with how the business performed,” Dell Chief Financial Officer Tom Sweet said in an interview. “We’ve got to continue to work our way through the uncertain environment. Given our broad, diversified portfolio, we have an ability to drive a consistent stable cash flow, consistent results.”
Dell said that it expected revenue in the current period to increase 3% to 4% compared with the third quarter’s.
Sales of HP’s Personal Systems, mostly computers, was little changed from a year earlier at $10.4 billion. Revenue from consumers jumped 24% while business sales decreased 12%. Printing revenue declined 3% to $4.8 billion. The company reported a 21% rise in consumer hardware sales and a 22% drop in hardware revenue from businesses.
While corporate customers aren’t buying printers with their offices closed or at reduced capacity, Lores said demand from consumers working at home was so strong that HP shipped 12 million printers in the quarter — the highest number since the corporate split from Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. in 2015.
Sunak warns of 2.6 million jobless in historic U.K. slump
InternationalNov 26. 2020A commuter wears a protective face mask on a bus in London on Nov. 17, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Simon Dawson.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Alex Morales, David Goodman · BUSINESS, WORLD, EUROPE
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak warned the U.K. will suffer its deepest recession in more than 300 years as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, with unemployment expected to reach 7.5%, as he set out government spending plans.
Sunak announced billions of pounds for new infrastructure projects to boost jobs, and support for low-paid workers, but he cut funding for policies he said were hard to “justify” — such as public sector pay rises and overseas aid.
“Our health emergency is not yet over and our economic emergency has only just begun,” Sunak told Parliament. “So our immediate priority is to protect people’s lives and livelihoods.”
The chancellor’s statement to Parliament on Wednesday began the British state’s painful reckoning with the financial consequences of the pandemic, with some tough decisions on how to address a ballooning budget deficit.
With renewed lockdowns threatening further economic damage, the chancellor focused on support for jobs and the unemployed, plowing tens of billions of pounds into infrastructure spending, and ensuring the health care system can cope with a resurgent wave of infections.
Sunak’s choices will set the tone for the ruling Conservative Party’s approach to the fiscal legacy of the coronavirus.
The most noteworthy announcement in advance was the biggest uptick in defense spending in three decades: a four-year, 24 billion-pound investment in the country’s armed forces that pleased traditional Conservatives. The chancellor also confirmed a cut in the U.K.’s foreign aid budget to 0.5% of national income, breaking a promise to spend 0.7%.
The drop in overseas development spending is likely to dismay other Tories including former Prime Minister David Cameron, who warned it will hamper renewed efforts to display Britain’s global role just as Brexit takes effect.
Sunak said the 0.7% aid commitment was “difficult to justify” to the British people. “I have listened with great respect to those who have argued passionately to retain this target,” he said. “But at a time of unprecedented crisis, government must make tough choices.”
Curbs to public sector pay also provoked an immediate backlash.
“Earlier this year the chancellor stood on his doorstep and clapped for key workers, today his government institutes a pay freeze for many of them,” Labour’s shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, told Sunak. “The beginning of his speech was that our economic emergency was only just begun. Try telling that to people who’ve been out of work since March.”
A new infrastructure strategy is expected to detail planned projects to deliver on 100 billion pounds of projects pledged over the course of the five-year Parliament that started last December. Sunak also unveiled a new financial institution to help attract private money into such programs.
The chancellor has found himself spending in a way that no Conservative chancellor would easily countenance. As of July, costs totaling 200 billion pounds had been racked up or earmarked to tackle the virus and support jobs and businesses through the crisis.
More borrowing will be needed. The government plans to issue a record 485.5 billion pounds of bonds this fiscal year.
The Office for Budget Responsibility forecast that the already dire economic situation would be made worse if the Brexit negotiations end without a deal. In that scenario, unemployment would peak at 8.3%, while the economy wouldn’t reclaim its pre-virus size until well into 2023. The long-term GDP scarring of virus would be 5% rather than 3%, according to the OBR’s latest forecasts, published Wednesday.
InternationalNov 26. 2020Homes under construction in the Versilia at Southern Highlands master-planned community are seen in this aerial photograph taken over Las Vegas on Sept. 17, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Roger Kisby.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Jarrell Dillard · BUSINESS, PERSONAL-FINANCE, US-GLOBAL-MARKETS
New-home sales in the U.S. held up in October, remaining near the best pace since 2006 and well above pre-pandemic levels, the latest sign that record-low mortgage rates are underpinning robust buyer interest.
Purchases of new single-family houses dropped 0.3% from September to a 999,000 annualized pace from an upwardly revised 1.002 million rate, government data showed Wednesday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for a 975,000 rate. The median selling price rose 2.5% from a year earlier to $330,600.
Recent momentum in housing has been driven by attractive mortgage rates and buyers looking for more space as they work from home. Purchases, however, may face greater headwinds after infections began to soar around the U.S. in recent weeks and new restrictions threatened to curb hiring.
The number of properties sold for which construction hadn’t yet started increased to a fresh 14-year high of 385,000 in October, suggesting that strength in construction will continue in coming months.
The supply of new homes remained the tightest on record. At the current sales pace, it would take 3.3 months to exhaust the supply, the same as the prior month and the leanest inventory in data going back more than a half century.
The number of homes for sale was unchanged at 278,000, the fewest since 2017.
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Santa’s helper works to keep things disinfected at the Springfield Bass Pro Shops store in Springfield, Mo. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Annaliese Nurnberg. 
An IBM logo in London, on Oct. 29, 2018. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Chris J. Ratcliffe. 
A man walks with a box bearing the HP logo in New Delhi onJune 24, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Prashanth Vishwanathan. 
A commuter wears a protective face mask on a bus in London on Nov. 17, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Simon Dawson. 
Homes under construction in the Versilia at Southern Highlands master-planned community are seen in this aerial photograph taken over Las Vegas on Sept. 17, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Roger Kisby. 
