...was true? Amway Corp and two affiliates will pay the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Washington $225 million to settle allegations that the multilevel marketing company and its affiliates made deceptive claims about how much money new participants could reasonably make. As it happens, most of the people wh...

Older partners at law firms are not retiring, which has created logjams at the top of the legal profession and has sent younger ambitious partners jumping ship and getting poached by competitor rival firms promising senior positions. A third of lawyers in the United States are aged 55 or older, and 14 percent are over ...

Burger King! Burger King has managed an enviable turnaround, posting Q2 same-store sales growth of 8.5 percent, outpacing the rest of the burger field by nine percentage points and building on a Q1 where they grew 5.8 percent. This is attributed to the success of the Reclaim the Flame program, an initiative of the burg...

A new analysis dove deep into estimated roster spending on college football teams in the Power 4 conferences, revealing which schools are and which schools aren't spending big on their players. The highest-spending schools include Ohio State ($49 million to $54 million), Oregon ($48 million to $54 million) and Texas ($...

The companies that produce ejection seats for aircraft maintain clubs for the people who have been launched out of an airplane on their equipment: a rumored, secretive group of pilots who have had to ditch. Martin-Baker, a British company that builds ejection seats, contacts ejectees and welcomes them to their club wit...

Malls are, if not back, at least doing alright these days after a Darwinian bloodletting that saw 200 mall closures since 2008. Compared to other real estate, the 900 or so remaining malls are doing rather well; since 2022, the private market value of malls, according to Green Street, is up five percent. Meanwhile, the...

Costco has hiked the price of its private label Kirkland Signature motor oil and capped the amount that customers may buy in an attempt to stave off hoarding and reselling. A five-quart two-pack now costs $58, up from about $30 it had been selling for last year, and customers may buy two boxes per week. It's also limit...

The air conditioner manufacturing industry is overwhelmingly based out of Asia, and companies like LG, Daikin and Midea have had a banner year as Europeans adopt cooling technology that was once generally unnecessary in their climate. For Midea, the PortaSplit - which costs about 1,000 euros and is appealing for renter...

From 2022 to 2025, the number of United States-produced linear television content orders fell from 1,773 to 1,304 shows, a decline of 26 percent. That's a big drop, but it's a pretty solid hold compared to the bloodbath among streaming shows, where orders fell from 1,144 shows in 2022 to just 678 in 2025. On television...

..ASAP... The age of permissive return policies has quietly ended, as companies tighten up their protocols around what they will accept as a return, when they will accept it and in what manner they'll compensate the customer. Right now 68 percent of retailers are charging a fee on returns at least some of the time, up ...

U.S. cookie sales are projected to hit $18.9 billion in 2026, as growth slows to 1.2 percent amid pressure on discretionary spending, reduction in snacking frequency and naturally the vile and pervasive libel that cookies are "a sometimes food." One significant impediment for cookies is that there are now sim...

Sales of CDs are booming, with the RIAA reporting that 17.5 million CDs were sold by the music industry in the first half of the year, up 45.7 percent year over year, fueled in large part by BTS and young listeners preferring them as collectibles. While they're not quite vinyl - which moved 26.5 million units for $543....

Talisman A new survey found that 53 percent of U.S. adults believe they spend too much time on their smartphone, a percentage that rises to 70 percent among the 18 to 29 cohort. While 45 percent of adults have tried to cut back on their smartphone usage in the past 12 months, only 25 percent of those who made an attemp...

N/A? yes.... Dollar sales of nonalcoholic beer, spirits and wine in the United States were up 14 percent in the 52-week period ending July 18, and in the three-month period up to June 27, sales of nonalcoholic beer hit $235 million. The thing is, while the phrase "nonalcoholic" sounds rather decisive, chemica...

There are just a few more weeks of playoff uncertainty left in Major League Baseball, as the window of opportunity closes for teams on the bubble. At the beginning of June, there were five teams with a 90 percent chance or higher of making the playoffs, seven teams with less than a 10 percent chance and 18 teams with a...

Some libraries have experimented with ditching the rigid, and at times antiquated, organizational principles of the Dewey Decimal System in favor of taking a page out of retailers' playbooks and organizing their shelves as one would a bookstore. Deschutes County, Oregon recently overhauled its library system and experi...

New research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety argues that we are drastically undercounting the number of accidents that stem from distracted driving and smartphone use, based on anonymized cellphone data from Cambridge Mobile Telematics - which had data on cellphone activity before and after collisions. ...

....exploding sunroofs? The sunroofs of automobiles have been spontaneously exploding at a consistently rising pace this year, with 498 reports of sunroofs exploding or shattering, which would set us up for a record 2026; in 2025, there were 550 reported incidents, up from 350 in 2021. According to drivers and testers,...

A new survey found that nine percent of adults planned to play in a fantasy football league this season, with 23 percent of fantasy players involved in three or more leagues. According to the survey, the primary reason that respondents played fantasy football was that they enjoy competition (67 percent), followed by ma...

Big screen televisions are in a boom market right now thanks to falling screen prices and increasing memory prices. This year, sales of LCD televisions 70 inches or bigger are expected to hit 30.11 million units, up from 16.74 million units in 2022. The LCD panels that constitute a substantial chunk of production costs...