Should You Get a Discount for Paying Cash?

When a consumer buys something with a credit card, the credit card company gets a cut of the transaction. Stores figure that cut into their pricing system, figuring that when they sell an item for $100, they don’t get all of that $100 if the purchaser uses plastic. If it’s a cash purchase, on the other hand, the store gets all of that $100.

Ten Ways the Mall Has Changed During the Recession

The shopping mall, that wonderfully iconic, most American of places, is changing, and the economic downturn bears a lot of the responsibility. Store names that were once ubiquitous have disappeared. Vacancy rates are seriously high. And just about everybody is discounting merchandise and looking for new ways to connect to consumers.

My sad Saturn farewell

The Cheapskate Blog’s Brad Tuttle writes that “the first new car I could truly call my own was a bare bones Saturn SL.” My first new car was a Saturn, too. Being no cheapskate, I splurged on an SL2. It was a 1992, just the second model year. I was living in Montgomery, Alabama, not all that far down the road from the Saturn factory …

Are we in the middle of the W?

UniCredit’s Harm Bandholz offers an interesting reading of one of the piles of economic releases that came out today:

The mild decline in the headline ISM and its most important subcomponents (production, new orders and employment) is so far the most clear-cut signal that the technical rebound of the US economy might have reached the

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