What’s in the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile USA cell phone industry merger for you? Nothing. That’s nicht, for you T-Mobile subscribers. Big mergers in consumer goods and services rarely help the customers, and frankly this isn’t about you. It’s about a couple of very large telecom companies solving a particularly large strategic issue. …
You may soon be paying more at the teller (Photo: Getty Images)
Earlier this year, JPMorgan Chase began to charge its customers in New York $1 if they wanted to get a printed account statement from the ATM. Thank you very much, I’ll just guess. But it turns out this may have been the opening salvo in Chase’s chase after new fees. …
Japan created just in time manufacturing, the method in which parts arrive at the plant just prior to the time they’ll be used. It was widely adopted by the auto industry, because it saves money and improves quality. Pre JIT, automakers would keep weeks or months of safety stock sitting in warehouses to make sure the lines kept running …
Corporate America’s future customers, at least that’s the hope (Kim Kyung-Hoon/REUTERS)
“There are hundreds of Groupon clones there (in China),” Groupon CEO Andrew Mason told me a couple of months ago, “It’s tricky to figure out how an American business can participate.” Looks like he did. Groupon, the molten hot social …
(Photo: Brian Blanco/REUTERS)
It had to come to this eventually. The budget war has morphed into a cultural war. Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) wants the Army to stop spending millions of defense dollars on NASCAR sponsorships. The army shells out $7 million to rent space on the Sprint Cup car driven by Ryan Newman. McCollum says that in …
There’s no evidence that malfunctions in electronics caused sudden acceleration mishaps in Toyota vehicles. That was the conclusion of an investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, assisted by NASA. The investigation will spare Toyota from additional lawsuits tied to the recall of vehicles in which …
Vision Air is landing in a business where profits are often delayed (Photo: Yuri Gripas/REUTERS)
Next March, the airline industry will have a new arrival: Vision Air, which calls itself the “nation’s newest big jet, low-cost carrier,” will fly to currently underserved southeastern cities (Asheville, N.C, St. Petersburg, Fl., …
In explaining his decision to pass the boss torch back to co-founder Larry Page, Google CEO Eric Schmidt tweeted that, ha-ha, “adult supervision” is no longer needed at the company that dominates internet search and advertising. And Google’s monster fourth-quarter earnings offer evidence that Schmidt is true to his tweet: profits …
Moody’s CEO Ray McDaniel (right) testifying about the Financial Crisis, along with Warren Buffett (Shannon Stapleton/REUTERS)
It’s not often that I burst out laughing when I open up the business section, but I couldn’t help myself after cracking the Times to a see a big cartoon and the scarifying story that Moody’s and Standard and …
Just as the valuation of Facebook crossed the $50 billion mark, its once great rival MySpace was revealing a different set of numbers: MySpace axed half its work force, some 500 jobs. MySpace’s owner, News Corp. may have had enough the social networking business. At Time’s parent, Time Warner, we know all about what happens when a …
French Fighting for the Right to Retire Relatively Young (AP)
The French work force was doing what it does as well as anyone yesterday—going out on strike. Somewhere between one and three million workers (the police and the big union, CGT, disputed the totals) hit the streets to protest the plan by the government of President …
In the not so distant past the Great Atlantic & Pacific, the A&P, dominated retailing in the U.S. the way Walmart wished it did. A&P once had more than 13,000 stores; it set prices in the market and enforced them. God help any competitor who ran afoul of Great A&P. Now, a little divine intervention might be useful for the 21st century …