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In September Amy Huynh, a recent high school graduate who was accepted to Colby College in Maine, visited some of her childhood friends during move-in weekend at UCLA. They’re newly minted freshmen, ready to embark on an exciting college career. But Huynh is beginning a different adventure—instead of attending Colby, she’s mentoring middle schoolers in southern Los Angeles for a year.
Mitt Romney's comment directed at PBS during a presidential debate could present an opportunity for public broadcast to reach out to donors
Left for dead in August, the effort to reform money market mutual funds is getting a renewed boost. The stable $1 share price may be a casualty. Here's why reform would push the low yields on these funds even lower.
Your may still be trying to calm down after news spread of a looming “unavoidable bacon shortage” (which isn’t really going to happen). But don’t get too comfortable. Now we’re supposed to panic about the possibility of milk prices doubling in the near future.
What do coffee, cookies, beer, airline flights, and organic tea have to do with the upcoming presidential election? Nothing whatsoever, really. But nowadays any major event—even one that’s potentially alienating, like the 2012 elections—is viewed as a fresh opportunity for marketers to push their products.
American consumers are expected to collectively spend $370 million on pet costumes this Halloween. That’s $70 million more than last year, and a whopping 40% increase compared to 2010. And how’s this for perspective: Americans will spend barely three times more on costumes for children than they will for pets.
Italy is home to Ferrari and Lamborghini, two of the world’s most legendary automakers. But the country’s troubled economy has forced an increasing number of Italians to downside the number of wheels on their vehicles: For the first time since World War II, sales of bicycles surpassed those of cars in Italy.
When navigating the spectrum of products in the marketplace, consumers naturally gravitate to the middle. The popular mid-price hotel category, for instance, is attractive to the masses who don’t want to skimp by staying at a sketchy motel, but who don’t want to blow money on an unnecessarily posh suite in a luxury resort either. No matter if we’re talking hotels, new cars, dinner entrees, salad dressings, house paint, or bottles of wine, consumers tend to feel comfortable selecting options in the middle—indicating they’re neither cheap nor profligate. So why is it that mattress sales are booming at the high and low end of the marketplace, while sales of beds in the mid-price range remain flat?
When most people think of October, they think of brown, yellow and red leaves and bright orange pumpkins. Retailers think green. To them, the start of the fourth quarter represents hope that end-of-the-year sales will boost their bottom lines.
But because October falls between the back-to-school and Christmas shopping seasons, knowing what to buy this month is anything but a no-brainer. But if you know what to look for, you can save a lot of money in October.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has the credit card industry in its crosshairs, and it’s making banks who flout the law pay up.
Yesterday, the CFPB along with other federal regulators fined American Express $112.5 million for a laundry list of illegal credit card practices that went on from 2003 up to this year, the third such punishment meted out by the CFPB since July. American Express, which did not admit wrongdoing, has to reimburse around 250,000 customers to the tune of $85 million. This comes on the heels of a similar action last week against Discover, which was ordered to refund customers $200 million and fined an additional $14 million by the CFPB and FDIC.
Fed Chief Ben Bernanke's strategy for making risk fashionable is gaining traction. Affluent investors are jumping off the sidelines and home prices are getting a lift. We're not out of the woods by a long shot. But do you really want to fight the Fed?
A subscription service heralded as the "Netflix for movie theaters" is being launched nationally this week.
Can consumers be relied upon to jump onto the latest tech, regardless of price, practicality, and whether the product at hand actually represents worthwhile innovation? Well, if we’re talking Apple products, to some extent the answer is probably yes. But sometimes consumers respond to much-heralded new tech with a resounding “Thanks, but no thanks.”
