Expense Account Dining: More McDonald's Than 'Mad Men'
The 15 Most Popular Restaurants for Business Travelers
Road warriors know that business travel can be far from glamorous — a seemingly endless series of meetings broken up by long stretches behind the wheel or in cramped airplane seats. And despite the occasional great meal, expense account dining isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, either.
That’s made clear by a new quarterly report from Certify, which provides software for companies and employees to manage their expenses. The company used millions of receipts and vendor ratings from business people to compile rankings of the most commonly expensed restaurants and those with the highest ratings.
Unsurprisingly, Starbucks was the most commonly expensed restaurant, accounting for 4.7 percent of receipts submitted for reimbursement. McDonald’s and Subway were next on the list, with the burger chain the most common choice for dinners and the sandwich chain the top pick for lunches. Fast food chain Chick-fil-A received the top rating among restaurants, with a 4.5 average on a scale from 1 to 5. The days of the three Martini lunch are clearly long gone.
Related: 9 Ways McDonald’s Wants to Get You Excited About Its Food Again
Certify also reported that business travelers continue to increasingly choose Uber and Airbnb over taxis and hotels. Airbnb grew 143 percent in receipts in the second quarter of the year, though it remains far behind hotels like Marriott and Hampton Inn in popularity. Rental cars still dominated the group transportation receipts (45 percent), but Uber made up 31 percent of receipts, an increase of 8 percentage points from this time last year. For the first time ever, Uber was more popular than taxis, which made up 24 percent of receipts.
Budget ‘Chaos’ Threatens Army Reset: Retired General
One thing is standing in the way of a major ongoing effort to reset the U.S. Army, writes Carter Ham, a retired four-star general who’s now president and CEO of the Association of the U.S. Army, at Defense One. “The problem is the Washington, D.C., budget quagmire.”
The issue is more than just a matter of funding levels. “What hurts more is the erratic, unreliable and downright harmful federal budget process,” which has forced the Army to plan based on stopgap “continuing resolutions” instead of approved budgets for nine straight fiscal years. “A slowdown in combat-related training, production delays in new weapons, and a postponement of increases in Army troop levels are among the immediate impacts of operating under this ill-named continuing resolution. It’s not continuous and it certainly doesn’t display resolve.”
Pentagon Pushes for Faster F-35 Cost Cuts
The Pentagon has taken over cost-cutting efforts for the F-35 program, which has been plagued by years of cost overruns, production delays and technical problems. The Defense Department rejected a cost-saving plan proposed by contractors including principal manufacturer Lockheed Martin as being too slow to produce substantial savings. Instead, it gave Lockheed a $60 million contract “to pursue further efficiency measures, with more oversight of how the money was spent,” The Wall Street Journal’s Doug Cameron reports. F-35 program leaders “say they want more of the cost-saving effort directed at smaller suppliers that haven’t been pressured enough.” The Pentagon plans to cut the price of the F-35A model used by the Air Force from a recent $94.6 million each to around $80 million by 2020. Overall, the price of developing the F-35 has climbed above $400 billion, with the total program cost now projected at $1.53 trillion. (Wall Street Journal, CNBC)
Chart of the Day - October 6, 2017
Financial performance for insurers in the individual Obamacare markets is improving, driven by higher premiums and slower growth in claims. This suggests that the market is stabilizing. (Kaiser Family Foundation)
Quote of the Day - October 5, 2017
"The train's left the station, and if you're a budget hawk, you were left at the station." -- Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C.