CHICAGO (Reuters) – With only 160 shopping days left, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in some stores.
After U.S. retailers posted 10 straight months of sales declines, some chains are trying to bring holiday spirit — and revenue — to the summer with “Christmas in July” promotions.
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Walking the pharmacy aisle of a Target Corp discount store, shoppers can’t miss the many anti-shoplifting measures: locked display cases, alarm cords around boxes of expensive merchandise, display hangers with locks on the end.
Those represent only a fraction of the anti-theft advances created over the years to protect stores against shoplifters and organized retail theft gangs.
But what about the determined insider?
This year’s All Things Organic conference and expo showcased necessity as the mother of invention. Slumping sales and a weak economy have forced the industry to innovate just to hold onto customers.
There‘s a point in every Star Wars film when the good guy inevitably turns to his buddies and says, “I‘ve got a bad feeling about this,” right before all the big explosions begin.
One can only imagine that is what Nescafe was thinking when they saw Starbucks‘ VIA instant coffee mix arrive in Chicago, Seattle and London. After all, Nescafe is nearly synonymous with instant coffee.
So, what is Starbucks thinking?
A multimedia project on the past, present and future of the world’s oldest broadcast radio station, KCBS.
For Tim McBride, this is bigger than Woodstock.
It is 12 hours until the inauguration, and McBride is looking at the White House from across the street in Lafayette Park. He‘s standing with his son, Eamonn, and his son‘s friend, Kacey, who grew up so poor that he‘d never had a chance to visit a big city.
McBride has been here before, and so has his son. But this time is different for both of them. This time, it‘s like a pilgrimage.
“It‘s a thing from my generation, but have you ever heard of a contact high?“ McBride asks. “It‘s like contact elation.“
SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Balancing checkbooks and relying on paper bank statements is so last century.
Over the past two years, websites such as Mint, Buxfer, Geezeo and Wesabe are wooing users with powerful online money management tools and the promise of access to their financial information from anywhere in the world.
And it’s working.
SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – If the Phoenix Lander comes back to life on Mars, Twitter users could be among the first to know.
NASA gave the historic Space Age mission an Internet Age spin by adding a Twitter page, enabling the robotic interplanetary explorer to answer the hot micro-blogging website’s trademark query: “What are you doing?”
We all have fond memories of playing Monopoly, Scrabble and Connect Four when we were kids. But when you‘re an adult, it‘s really hard to find people who can dedicate the time to play. After his friends and family turned him down for a game of Risk, Ian Sherr went in search of more *worthy* opponents at Board Games night at Games of Berkeley.
My father can cook. Or so he says.
I grew up hearing stories of how my father wooed my mother by cooking her fabulous dinners and serving them to her over his grand piano in his tiny New York apartment.
The story, as my father tells it, was that his apartment was too small to hold a table and his piano and, being a world-class concert pianist, he chose the piano. So he bought a cover for the piano and fed his dates. I imagine he probably serenaded them, too, but the details have been lost both to time and trailing mumbled memories.
Still, what I’ve been brought up to believe is that my father can cook. And my mother – she grew up in Atlanta in the ’40s. Of course she can cook.
So what shocked my girlfriend, Laura, was that Thanksgiving this year was going to be catered by Marie Callender’s.
I said my parents could cook. I didn’t say they did.