A Michigan marijuana store will pay $205K to settle a workers' lawsuit over lost tips
THREE RIVERS, Mich. — A judge approved a deal Friday to try to solve a major buzzkill: Employees at a Michigan marijuana dispensary chain said management was keeping tips left by happy customers.
Timber Cannabis, which has seven locations, agreed to pay $205,000 to settle a lawsuit, though it admitted no liability in making the deal. Lawyers are entitled to one-third.
Terms of the agreement seem 'fair and appropriate,' U.S. District Judge Matthew Leitman said during a brief hearing.
The lead plaintiff, budtender Chad Underwood, said he was making as much as $150 per shift in tips before management changed course in 2024 and began taking money left in a basket or jar, according to the lawsuit.
Timber Cannabis denied violating federal wage law in its formal response to the lawsuit. More than 60 employees will qualify for the settlement, said attorney Angeli Murthy, who represents them.
Recreational use of marijuana was made legal in Michigan in 2018 for people age 21 and older.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Associated Press
15 minutes ago
- Associated Press
ROSEN, GLOBAL INVESTOR COUNSEL, Encourages TechTarget, Inc. Investors to Inquire About Securities Class Action Investigation
New York, New York--(Newsfile Corp. - June 7, 2025) - WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, announces an investigation of potential securities claims on behalf of shareholders of TechTarget, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTGT) resulting from allegations that TechTarget may have issued materially misleading business information to the investing public. SO WHAT: If you purchased TechTarget securities you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement. The Rosen Law Firm is preparing a class action seeking recovery of investor losses. WHAT DO DO NEXT: To join the prospective class action, go to or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] for information on the class action. WHAT IS THIS ABOUT: After market hours on April 18, 2025, TechTarget filed with the SEC a current report on Form 8-K. In this current report, TechTarget announced that certain previously filed financial statements 'should no longer be relied upon due to certain accounting errors[.]' Further, the current report announced that TechTarget's management had identified material errors 'relating to certain technical accounting matters associated with goodwill impairment, changes in contingent consideration, and amortization of intangibles, including related tax impacts thereof.' On this news, TechTarget stock fell 12.7% on April 21, 2025. WHY ROSEN LAW: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience, resources, or any meaningful peer recognition. Many of these firms do not actually litigate securities class actions. Be wise in selecting counsel. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm achieved the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company at the time. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 4 each year since 2013 and has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020, founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs' Bar. Many of the firm's attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers. Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: on Twitter: or on Facebook: Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. ------------------------------- Contact Information: Laurence Rosen, Esq. Phillip Kim, Esq. The Rosen Law Firm, P.A. 275 Madison Avenue, 40th Floor New York, NY 10016 Tel: (212) 686-1060 Toll Free: (866) 767-3653 Fax: (212) 202-3827 [email protected] To view the source version of this press release, please visit
Bloomberg
40 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Musk Looms Over Latest Ergen Fight Threatening EchoStar Debt
Save Welcome to The Brink. I'm Eliza Ronalds-Hannon, a senior reporter in Atlanta, covering EchoStar's missed interest payment after the Federal Communications Commission started a review. We also have updates on Wellness Pet and auto sector distress. Follow this link to subscribe. Send us feedback and tips at debtnews@ Creditors to EchoStar and its pay-TV unit Dish Network huddled over the past eight days as they came to terms with the latest curveball thrown by Charlie Ergen.
TechCrunch
44 minutes ago
- TechCrunch
Superblocks CEO: How to find a unicorn idea by studying AI system prompts
Brad Menezes, CEO of enterprise vibe coding startup Superblocks, believes the next crop of billion-dollar startup ideas are hiding in almost plain sight: the system prompts used by existing unicorn AI startups. System prompts are the lengthy prompts — over 5,000-6,000 words — that AI startups use to instruct the foundational models from companies like OpenAI or Anthropic on how to generate their application-level AI products. They are, in Menezes view, like a master class in prompt engineering. 'Every single company has a completely different system prompt for the same [foundational] model,' he told TechCrunch. 'They're trying to get the model to do exactly what's required for a specific domain, specific tasks.' System prompts aren't exactly hidden. Customers can ask many AI tools to share theirs. But they aren't always publicly available. So as part of his own startup's new product announcement of an enterprise coding AI agent named Clark, Superblocks offered to share a file of 19 system prompts from some of the most popular AI coding products like Windsurf, Manus, Cursor, Lovable and Bolt. Menezes's tweet went viral, viewed by almost 2 million including big names in the Valley like Sam Blond, formerly of Founders Fund and Brex, and Aaron Levie, a Superblocks investor. Superblocks announced last week that it raised a $23 million Series A, bringing its total to $60 million for its vibe coding tools geared to non-developers at enterprises. So we asked Menezes to walk us through how to study other's system prompts to glean insights. Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW 'I'd say the biggest learning for us building Clark and reading through the system prompts is that the system prompt itself is maybe 20% of the secret sauce,' Menezes explained. This prompt gives the LLM the baseline of what to do. The other 80% is 'prompt enrichment' he said, which is the infrastructure a startup builds around the calls to the LLM. That part includes instructions it attaches to a user's prompt, and actions taken when returning the response, such as checking for accuracy. He said there are three parts of system prompts to study: role prompting, contextual prompting, and tool use. The first thing to notice is that, while system prompts are written in natural language, they are exceptionally specific. 'You basically have to speak as if you would to a human co-worker,' Menezes said. 'And the instructions have to be perfect.' Role prompting helps the LLMs be consistent, giving both purpose and personality. For instance, Devin's begins with, 'You are Devin, a software engineer using a real computer operating system. You are a real code-wiz: few programmers are as talented as you at understanding codebases, writing functional and clean code, and iterating on your changes until they are correct.' Contextual prompting gives the models the context to consider before acting. It should provide guardrails that can, for instance, reduce costs and ensure clarity on tasks. Cursor's instructs, 'Only call tools when needed, and never mention tool names to the user — just describe what you're doing. … don't show code unless asked. … Read relevant file content before editing and fix clear errors, but don't guess or loop fixes more than three times.' Tool use enables agentic tasks because it instructs the models how to go beyond just generating text. Replit's, for instance, is long and describes editing and searching code, installing languages, setting up and querying PostgreSQL databases, executing shell commands and more. Studying others' system prompts helped Menezes see what other vibe coders emphasized. Tools like Loveable, V0, and Bolt 'focus on fast iteration,' he said, whereas 'Manus, Devin, OpenAI Codex, and Replit' help users create full-stack applications but 'the output is still raw code.' Menezes saw an opportunity to let non-programmers write apps, if his startup could handle more, such as security and access to enterprise data sources like Salesforce. While he's not yet running the multi-billion startup of his dreams, Superblock has landed some notable companies as customers, it said, including Instacart and Paypaya Global. Menezes is also dogfooding the product internally. His software engineers are not allowed to write internal tools; they can only build the product. So his business folks have built agents for all their needs, like one that uses CRM data to identify leads, one that tracks support metrics, another that balance the assignments of the human sales engineers. 'This is basically a way for us to build the tools and not buy the tools,' he sais.
