Class is in session at Taco Bell, which announced yesterday that it’s opening a business school—but not to give students a bachelor’s in burritos.

The fast-food chain is teaming up with the University of Louisville to introduce the Taco Bell Business School, a franchisee training program it hopes will eliminate barriers to entrepreneurship for its employees.

• The six-week program, welcoming its first class of three to five students next month, will teach participants the nuts and bolts of running their own Taco Bell, from financing, marketing, and HR, to growth and development.
• It’s aimed at employees in managerial roles, and participants will receive scholarships from Taco Bell to cover tuition. (No details yet on the cost.)

Amid a tough labor market, Taco Bell hopes to challenge the idea that fast-food jobs are “stepping stones to other careers,” CEO Mark King said in a statement. He told Entrepreneur that employees rarely become owners because franchises take a lot of $$ and resources to start, so the school could help simplify that path to ownership.

“This school is really one of those things that says, ‘Hey, if you come to work at Taco Bell, you can have a career, not just a part-time job,’” he said.

Food for thought: The biz school comes after parent company Yum! Brands (which also owns KFC and Pizza Hut) formed the Yum! Center for Global Franchise Excellence in May 2021 to educate underrepresented communities about the franchising business.

• James Fripp, chief equity and inclusion officer at Yum!, discussed at NRF this week how to make DE&I personal by highlighting the importance of reverse mentorship: POC and women are often “overly mentored and under-sponsored,” he said.

The new biz school also builds on Taco Bell’s “Start with Us, Stay with Us” program, introduced in 2016, that includes its Live Más college scholarship—which will award $2+ million to restaurant employees in 2022—a GED certification program, and a partnership with Guild Education (which has also worked with companies like Chipotle, Walmart, and Five Guys), a startup that helps employees with educational programs.

Faced with the ever-looming Great Resignation and student debt in the US totaling at least $1.75 trillion, subsidized higher education is one of the latest benefits retailers from Target to Macy’s are using to win over—and hopefully retain—workers.—EC

Some teens drive their parents’ old-school minivans. Others will get to drive 18-wheelers. That’s the upshot of a new pilot program that will allow those as young as 18 to be trained as commercial truck drivers.

The deets: Established by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the program can enroll up to 3,000 apprentices at a time.

• Trainees will need to complete 400 hours of “on-duty time” during a probationary period alongside an experienced driver. Afterwards, they can drive solo—but would still be under continuous monitoring by trucking companies.
• TBD on an official start date for the program.

Planning ahead: Supporters of the initiative hope it will help address the trucker shortage in the US. Trucks transport more than 70% of the country’s goods—but the industry could be short by as many as 160,000 drivers by 2030 if nothing is done to help, per the American Trucking Associations.

Moreover, the current workforce is aging; estimates put the industry’s average age at 55. Replacing these drivers can take 12 to 18 months, experts previously told Retail Brew.

• “These are not folks you can just hire off the street,” explained Dave Gilbertson, chief customer officer at UKG.

Though not an end-all solution, Nick Geale, a VP at the American Trucking Associations, acknowledged to The NYT, he said that he believes the pilot program is a solid step to getting more drivers on the road.

But, but, but: Not everyone is ready for this ride-along. Cathy Chase, the president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, shared concerns with the Times: “We think that putting one of the most dangerous driving populations, teenagers, behind the wheel of 80,000-pound trucks will imperil not only the teen truckers themselves,” she said, “but everyone on the roads with them.”—JS

Clean freak or not, it turns out that shoppers are still reaching for Clorox wipes.

In 2021, shoppers purchased 15% more home-cleaning items than in 2019, a boon for companies like Clorox Co. and Procter & Gamble.

• Case in point: P&G topped Wall Street’s Q2 earnings expectations, as net sales rose 6% to $20.95 billion.
• Home-cleaning and laundry sales in the US hit a weekly average of $972.8 million in mid-March 2020, compared to a weekly average of $448.1 million in 2019, according to market research firm IRI.

Clean slate: Across the board, sales haven’t exceeded 2020’s pandemic highs, but supply-chain shortages haven’t affected cleaning products to the extent of the larger CPG industry.

• 5.5% of home-disinfectant items were out of stock by the end of 2021, as opposed to 19% a year prior, per Euromonitor e-commerce data from January 12, cited by Bloomberg.

Pay up: Price hikes, though, seem unavoidable as inflation takes hold. P&G is planning more increases across categories and brands as soon as next month, after already raising price tags.

“Consumers are starting to feel this now and digest it a bit, so it’s going to be interesting to see if there’s some trade down to lower-priced brands, to private label, or, in the case of certain categories, trade out altogether,” Jefferies LLC research analyst Kevin Grundy told Bloomberg.—KM

Today’s top retail reads.

Running start: Inside Nike under John Donahoe—its shares are soaring (up 46% since he took over as CEO in January 2020), but some current and former employees have concerns about a changing culture. (Insider)

Join the club: Breaking down the DTC hiring spree. (Thingtesting)

Waste not: Can beauty companies use sell-by dates to their advantage? And be more eco-friendly at the same time? A few are making the case. “Maybe these are things you’re not meant to talk about as a brand, but customers appreciated our transparency.” (Vogue Business)

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The big number that you need to know.

Online shopping is raising some spirits.

E-comm alcohol sales from grocers hit $1.6 billion in 2021, according to estimates by Rabobank—that’s more than 4x the figure in 2019, which didn’t even crack $500 million. Come 2022, sales are expected to reach $1.87 billion.

• Growing the category will take work, but Rabobank still predicts that online alcohol sales will outdo grocery overall in a few years. (Cue the Drizly app downloads.)

Catch up on the Retail Brew stories you may have missed.

• The takeaways from NRF’s 2022 Big Show
• Walmart dips a toe into metaverse opportunities, while Ralph Lauren dives right in
• Non-alcoholic beverages seek a new frontier this year: retail doors