archiveEconomy

Some unfortunate wording left NBC’s Matt Lauer struggling to keep his composure during a report about food prices on Tuesday’s edition of the Today show. Today Financial Editor Jean Chatzky was warning viewers about rising food prices when Lauer asked a question about the way food is packaged. He read...

Time Warner Cable is doing something revolutionary in test markets in New York and Northeast Ohio: offering its customers a cheaper channel lineup. When the economy went south, Americans started doing what many considered unthinkable: cutting their cable service. Broadcasting & Cable magazine recently reported that 22% of consumers either...

Tammy was married, working for an investment management form and earning about $40,000 a year. But she and her husband had racked up lots of debt then realized that all of the things they had purchased just weren’t making them happy. So she came up with a shocking idea! They...

One of the biggest objections to taxes for businesses is the notion that cutting their taxes will allow them to lower the prices on the products they sell, saving customers money and allowing them to spend more, spurring economic growth. Do you really believe that it works that way? Let’s...

Consider the plastic Coke bottle. If you had to completely revolutionize the design to make it more economical to ship and to take up less space when it was time to recycle it, how would your design look? It might look like what Andrew Kim came up with: a squared...

The Postal Service, citing continued economic shortfalls, is considering a plan to end mail delivery on Saturdays. Postmaster General John Potter told USA Today that cutting service was unavoidable if the organization is ever to move back into the black: “We know we’re going to have less mail in 2020...

A recent promo required the use of piggy banks as a visual metaphor of people donating to political campaigns. Though I haven’t shopped for a traditional piggy bank in quite a while — what I save, I save in a bank account — I didn’t think it would be that difficult to find...

I don’t have anything against computers, really.  And I don’t have anything against a certain amount of automation in service industries like banking or credit. But at some point, there has to be a human being in the mix somewhere, or else you wind up with the kind of stupidity...