Struggling Sears Teams with Amazon to Sell Appliances Sears announced that it will begin selling its appliances on Amazon.com, including smart appliances that can be synced with Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa. Sears, which also owns Kmart, said that its Kenmore Smart appliances [...]
Housing Continues to Get Less Affordable for Many Americans According to new research by Harvard University, almost 40 million Americans cannot afford to pay for housing. The report is titled the “How Housing Matters Survey,” and was commissioned by the nonprofit John [...]
Is the U.S. Suffering a Skills Shortage? Is there a skills shortage in the U.S.? Businesses complain that they cannot find workers with the skills they need (and recruiters are in great demand), but workers and their advocates respond that employers simply [...]
Chobani Opens a “Non-Greek” Front in the Yogurt Wars Since its founding in 2005, Chobani has grown into an almost $2 billion-a-year thorn in the side of the dairy aisle’s established giants. It introduced Americans to Greek yogurt by promoting its thick [...]
Big Oil Counts on Big Data for Bigger Profits In today’s U.S. shale fields, tiny sensors attached to production gear harvest data on everything from pumping pressure to the heat and rotational speed of drill bits boring into the rocky earth. The [...]
Lidl: The Next Wave in the German Grocery Store Invasion German grocery powerhouse Lidl (pronounced lee-duhl) arrived in the United States recently, opening 10 new stores along the East Coast and putting big-name companies like Walmart, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s on [...]
Adobe’s Cloud Subscription Strategy Creates a Profit Boom When Adobe Systems Inc. started the transition from a product-sales model to a cloud-based subscription model less than five years ago, the move looked risky. Skeptics figured it would eat into the rich profit [...]
Japan Could Lose a Third of its Population by Mid-century as Births Continue to Decline In the latest discomforting milestone for a country facing a steep population decline, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare reported that the country’s number of births [...]
The World May Come Up $400 Trillion Short in Retirement Savings by 2050 Longer life spans and disappointing investment returns will help create a $400 trillion retirement-savings shortfall in about three decades, a figure more than five times the size of the [...]
Young Homebuyers Face a Shortage of Good Schools for their Kids One effect of the U.S. housing market crash was to cripple homebuilders and their lenders, forcing construction workers to find jobs in other fields. Today, homebuyers have returned to the market [...]