Key to Shoe Company's Success
KAYE: An online shoe company is seeing big profits during a tough time. Tom Foreman reports it may be because employees get to have a whole lot of fun.</s>TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): 24/7, two by two, Zappos.com is moving shoes. More than $1 billion annually in Internet sales, fueled by a wide selection, free shipping, and money-back guarantees.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thank you for calling Zappos.com.</s>FOREMAN: Not bad for a company that started a dozen years ago with a radical concept -- success is about service --</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK. No problem.</s>FOREMAN: -- not selling. CEO Tony Hsieh.</s>TONY HSIEH, CEO, ZAPPOS: And for us, culture is just important, it's actually the number one priority of the company.</s>FOREMAN: The culture is raucous, infectious, and everywhere. Employees decorate as they choose, enjoying an unbelievable array of company services, including free lunch, ice cream, massages. We asked our guide, Ray Andre (ph), about the business environment. (on camera): This is a business meeting?</s>RAY ANDRE, ZAPPOS: This is a business meeting.</s>FOREMAN: There's a lot of giggling go on in there.</s>ANDRE: There is.</s>FOREMAN: Getting in is not easy. Zappos takes months to screen applicants, and even in training, new hires are offered $4,000 to quit just to weed out those who might not really want to be here.</s>ANDRE: So we figure we could train most people to do their jobs, but we can't train somebody to fit into our culture.</s>FOREMAN (on camera): What is your key philosophy about running this business?</s>HSIEH: Internally, we have a saying that we're a service company that just happens to sell shoes.</s>FOREMAN: You realize nobody in America who sees this is going to want to go to work tomorrow? (voice-over): So they can laugh at comments like that because everyone here seems eager to come to work every day, building up this runaway success. Tom Foreman, CNN, Henderson, Nevada.</s>KAYE: And this just in to CNN, what could be a significant development coming to us out of Egypt. President Hosni Mubarak, we're told, has resigned. Not as president. I want to make that very clear. Not as president, but he has resigned as head of the National Democratic Party. That is Egypt's ruling party. So he is still president. This just in to us. We are working on getting a live report from Egypt, possibly in the noon hour, or the next few minutes for you. But once again, Hosni Mubarak has resigned as head of the National Democratic Party, Egypt's ruling party. NEWSROOM continues at the top of the hour with Fredricka Whitfield. And Fred, you have a whole lot for us besides that that could be breaking.</s>FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Yes. We have an interesting panel of guests to join us on Egypt, and so we're going to be now posing new questions to include that element, what does that really mean for Egypt. Also, our legal guys will be with us in the noon Eastern hour.</s>KAYE: They're always fun.</s>WHITFIELD: We always love Avery and Richard. And they're going to be tackling two pretty interesting cases. Well, many cases, but two in particular. One involving Halle Berry, and now this custody battle. She and her ex-boyfriend, Gabriel Aubry, are going toe-to-toe, so to speak, over their 2-year-old little girl. A custody battle, it's ugly. Apparently, Halle Berry, now accusing him of using racial slurs, and that she fears for the safety of her 2-year-old daughter, Nahla. And Lindsay Lohan, what would a legal segment be without Lindsay Lohan being part of it? Our legal guys are going to tackle this one. She is being accused of stealing a $2,500 necklace from a jewelry store, or her camp is saying it was borrowed. So which is it? She returned the necklace, but just shy of a search being conducted on her home. And then in the 2:00 Eastern hour, we're going to talk about the rise of the grandparents, the population of the grandparents.</s>KAYE: The grandparent economy, as it's being called.</s>WHITFIELD: That's right. Three out of 10 adults is a grandparent. And so the grandparents of today, the profile very different from the grandparents of yesteryear. Our Josh Levs is looking into the economic impact of that and how the relationship is also relying on some new technological tools that grandparents are using with their young grandkids, and how that is really also creating a new opportunity for entrepreneurs as well.</s>KAYE: They're big spenders, grandparents.</s>WHITFIELD: Yes, they are.</s>KAYE: I don't remember if mine were.</s>WHITFIELD: It's the baby boom generation as grandparents. Yes, very different from, say, the Depression era grandparents. They're spending, they're digging a little deeper these days.</s>KAYE: All right. Yes, they are. Fred, lots of good stuff to talk about. We'll see you at the top of the hour.</s>WHITFIELD: All right.</s>KAYE: In a moment, a look at how Egypt's capital has changed during nearly two weeks of protests. We'll bring you a different view of where anti-government demonstrators are making their stand.