Would you close a brick-and-mortar presence in the year you marked your 120th birthday? The American Automobile Association’s Washington club did.

In 2024, it celebrated its birthday with a new ad campaign featuring celebrity rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot, a Washington native, and a live event at the Seattle Seahawks’ home field. At the same time, it made a transformative move with much bigger implications: closing AAA Washington’s 12 brick-and-mortar stores and reinvesting the savings into digital offerings and expanding its service fleet operations geographically.

CFO Carrie Wilson, who has been with not-for-profit AAA Washington since 2019 and in the CFO seat since 2021, spoke with CFO Brew about guiding her board and other stakeholders through a major operational change.

Metrics matter. Sharing metrics helped to get the board behind the decision to close the stores, Wilson said. Two or three years before the decision, she said, the analytics team, which she manages, found that “less than 4% of our [1.2 million] members visited the store on an annual basis,” she said, which wasn’t enough to justify “the millions of dollars we were spending” on them.

How Wilson measured whether the move was a success.—CV

Holder of the second-longest tenure as Federal Reserve chair and President Ronald Reagan’s first-appointed chairman, Alan Greenspan died at 100 years old this past weekend.

Greenspan led the Federal Reserve through several key economic periods, starting soon after taking office in August 1987 with the stock market crash known as “Black Monday” in October 1987. He guided US monetary policy all the way until 2006.

Greenspan’s tenure is remembered as a time of “Great Moderation” in the US, marked by low unemployment, limited inflation, and for a period during 2001-2004, an extremely low Fed funds rate. He is known for coining the term “irrational exuberance” in 1996 to highlight the concerns over speculative bubbles in public markets.

Accounting stances. Greenspan was not shy about commenting on accounting standards developments during his Fed tenure. Among his most remembered stances were his endorsement of FASB’s proposals on the expensing of stock options and his opposition to a proposed accounting standard for derivatives.

In the wake of the Enron scandal, Greenspan formally backed FASB’s proposal on stock options expensing in 2004 and was an early critic of such options. “I fear that the failure to expense stock option grants has introduced a significant distortion in reported earnings—and one that has grown with the increasing prevalence of this form of compensation,” he told a financial markets conference in 2002.

What Greenspan said in 2020 about his complicated legacy.—DL

The minimum wage is set to go up in two states and Washington, DC, on July 1. Higher minimum wage rates will also take effect in more than 20 localities throughout the US.

A host of minimum wage raises already took effect on Jan. 1, affecting 19 states and nearly 50 cities and counties.

Here’s what employers should know about mid-year changes taking effect.

Alaska, Oregon, DC raise the minimum wage. Workers in Alaska will be entitled to earn $14 an hour, up from to $13, starting July 1.

Oregon’s standard minimum wage will increase from $15.05 to $15.55 an hour, while employers in the Portland metro area will be required to pay employees at least $16.30, and those in non-urban areas must pay a minimum wage rate of $14.05.

And in DC, the minimum wage will increase to $18.40, up from $17.95 per hour.

Overall, though, inflation is again outpacing wage growth.—CV

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