Staff Writers August 10, 2012 news.com.au IT’S no secret Google employees get a sweet deal when it comes to job perks, including gourmet food, on-site doctors and free haircuts. But until now, we didn’t know just how good they have it. Google’s chief people officer Laszlo Bock has revealed a new “death benefits” that means employees are covered not just in life, but in death. The never-before-released details of the tech giant’s perks program include an amazing benefit that if a Googler dies while under the tech giant’s employ, their spouse or life partner will receive 50 per cent of their salary for the next decade. We’ll say that again. The next decade. Death benefits extend to all employees and do not require any tenure or accruement. “One of the things we realized recently was that one of the harshest but most reliable facts of life is that at some…

Sarah Needleman August 10, 2012 The Wall Street Journal A STREET fight is brewing across the US between gourmet food-truck vendors and restaurants – not over the grub, but how it’s sold. Under pressure to protect bricks-and-mortar restaurants from increased competition, several big cities are starting to apply the brakes on a rising tide of food-truck vendors with fully loaded kitchens. Boston, Chicago, St. Louis and Seattle are among the cities enacting laws that restrict where food trucks can serve customers in proximity to their rivals and for how long. Some food-truck operators argue that they shouldn’t be punished for offering an innovative service, especially since many cities already allow restaurants to open up alongside one another. “The rules are unfair,” says Amy Le, owner of Duck N Roll, a food truck in Chicago serving Asian-style cuisine that includes short ribs and mango lychee. Three weeks after she launched the…

August 9, 2012 The Age “Now retailers understand smartphones have changed the way people shop. They are seeing customers use their phones in their shops” … Natasha Rawlings. You’re walking down the street and feel that familiar vibration in your front pocket – you’ve received a message – only this message is not from one of your friends, it’s from a retailer near you. StreetHawk, which was launched in January this year, identifies where a shopper is in relation to a store and sends a notification about offers and products, based on what the person has previously bought, or “liked”, or other information the retailer has about the shopper in its database. The app uses cloud-based technology to create “set-and-forget” smartphone marketing campaigns. Chief executive Natasha Rawlings explains “set and forget” as a marketing approach that allows retailers to target audiences with minimum effort. “Retailers can set up a campaign…

August 10, 2012 The Age AUSTRALIANS have banking economists stumped. They thought they knew what we would do when in 2009 the Reserve Bank outlawed largely hidden payments between financial institutions that were usually passed on to us as account-keeping fees whenever we used a so-called ”foreign” teller machine owned by another bank. They thought we would do nothing. In place of the indirect fees were direct fees in which the owner of each foreign ATM took the money directly from our accounts each time we made a foreign withdrawal. But the size of the charge, typically two dollars, didn’t change. All of the economic models – including the Reserve Bank’s own model – suggested we would use ATMs pretty much as we had before. The incentives were much as they had been. Instead withdrawals from foreign machines dived from around half of all ATM withdrawals to just 40 per…

NACSonline August 9 2012 The winner will be announced at the Insight/NACS Future of International Convenience Retailing 2012 in late September. LONDON – The finalists for the 2012 Insight NACS International Convenience Retailer of the Year Award have been unveiled, with six convenience retailers and forecourt operators from around the world vying for the title. The U.K.-based award, sponsored by Imperial Tobacco, is now in its fourth year. The six finalists hail from Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, the United States and the United Kingdom, highlighting the international reach of convenience retailing and advanced concepts. Each of the six finalists has differentiated their convenience offerings, and innovations abound across the key entry criteria of format innovation, range, people development, customer service initiatives, corporate social responsibility, technology and results. Here are the six finalists; to cast your vote, click on the link: BP Connect, New Zealand Musgrave Centra, Rochestown, Ireland Spar Ireland,…

Sophie Foster August 09, 2012 The Courier-Mail “CAUTIOUSLY optimistic” was how one Brisbane newsagent greeted a long-awaited plan that’s set to transform the future of the newspaper distribution and retail industry nationwide. The T2020: Newsagents for the Future distribution model will be made public by News Ltd, publisher of The Courier-Mail, today , but rolled out first at a launch region south of Brisbane over the next six months. “The upside has got to be instantly better than where we’re at right now,” said Grahame Bunyon, of Palmdale News in Upper Mount Gravatt, who’s among 56 Brisbane newsagents forming the vanguard for implementation of T2020. “There’s bound to be a call for newspapers for years to come.” In a statement to newsagents nationwide, News Ltd executive commercial and operations director Jerry Harris said the company remained committed to all forms of media, including print, with newsagents a fundamental part of…