Contactless payments company Square has seen its clients' online sales jump since the coronavirus pandemic forced small businesses to adapt to social distancing and stay-at-home orders with new technology.
"Moving online became an absolute priority," said David Rusenko, head of e-commerce at Square.
The company not only signed up new clients but also found that existing clients began to rely on more of the fintech's offerings.
Touting his company's ecosystem for small businesses, which encompasses everything from payroll to online sales, Rusenko stated, "A lot of sellers were able to adopt Square's online store as their online ordering solution."
The ongoing crisis has also established the importance for businesses to have an online presence. According to Rusenko, "Everything completely changed, especially for small businesses who were hit extremely hard. It turned into survival mode." Rusenko also said that businesses expanding operations online has become a priority.
"It went from something people were sort of looking to do in the next few years and it really shortened that three-year adoption cycle down to three weeks."
Rusenko presented Macri's Bakery, a family-owned business in South Bend, Indiana that has been operating since 1978, as an example of a small business that was able to shift online when the pandemic hit.
"They were not selling online prior to the pandemic. They were very quickly able to leverage Square's online store to shift all of their sales online," he said. "They implemented grocery sales. They were receiving a huge amount of food from their supply chain and things that may have been difficult to find elsewhere."
"A restaurant used to be just a restaurant, and now people are really adapting and they're doing all kinds of things to weather through the times," he added.
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!