Back in the day, a layaway plan made sense for many consumers who did not have the full purchase price of an item but could pay regular small installments until the item…
World stock markets hit 15-month lows. (Reuters) Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) to launch the iPhone 5 as competition grows from Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android. (Reuters) China warns of a trade war if Congress…
Some boards of directors of America’s largest public companies have shown such poor judgment guiding their troubled corporations that they have long stopped being effective. Just recently, the misguided actions of the…
The outlook for US holiday season retail sales is either good or not so good, depending on whom you ask. Cargo container shipping has been slow in July and August, leading to…
Web site visitors didn’t set any records last month, but they also didn’t lose any ground. Among the leading sites, some had small gains and others had small losses. Overall though, more…
Moody’s cuts ratings of France’s Credit Agricole and Societe Generale as Greek debt trouble spreads. (Reuters) Federal Reserve may try to help the economy with more bond purchases. (Reuters) Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO)…
The job market has remained relatively stagnant since 2009. To make matters worse, the educational requirements of the average U.S. employer have increased consistently from 2005 to 2009, recently outpacing the growth…
One indicator of a profitable holiday season for US retailers is the flow of goods into US ports. The shipping season for holiday goods generally starts in July and August and runs…
Retail sales in August put up solid gains that were slowed somewhat by the effects of Hurricane Irene along the eastern seaboard. Among the stores reporting sales numbers today are Costco Wholesale…
Deep discount retailers could be preparing for a comeback after slowing down somewhat since the beginning of the year. This includes dollar stores, but also includes the clearance and deep discount stores. …
Shares in home improvement store Lowe’s Companies, Inc. (NYSE: LOW) were trading higher by around 3% in the pre-market this morning on news that the company will initiate a $5 billion stock…
Walmart’s (NYSE: WMT) domestic sales may have stumbled, but its online presence is still dominant. July Comscore figures show that Walmart’s sites had 38.7 million unique visitors. That is nowhere close to…
William Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management has dumped more money into J.C. Penney. It is a mistake, unless he has some undisclosed plan to mine assets which are not obvious or break…
Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) may spin off its PC business because it bought enterprise software firm Autonomy for $10.3 billion. (Reuters) News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWS) begins to prepare for the possibility that James…
Walgreen Co. (NYSE: WAG) is just a drugstore… Right? Maybe not any longer in entirety. As of last year, the company operated 7,650 drugstores and it owned 37 strip shopping malls. It…
