Business u0026 Finance

The first time I opened the app for Temu, the viral Chinese shopping site, a pop-up greeted me: I could spin a wheel to win $200. The spinner landed on “1 more chance.” I spun again, and this time, I won $200. But wait, there was more — if I checked out in the next 10 minutes, I could net a cool $300. Cold hard cash right into my wallet? Well, no: $300 worth of coupons, which, on Temu, can buy you selected home goods, cutesy electronics, apparel — really, anything you can imagine. This carnival barker’s pitch is…

Starbucks’s value is down billions of dollars. People online are calling for a boycott of Starbucks. The extent to which these two things are related, if they are at all, is not clear. One thing is true here: The Seattle-based coffee company is not having a bang-up time heading into the end of the year. Its share price has seen a sharp decline since mid-November, falling by about 9 percent, meaning a decline of some $11 billion in its market cap. “Starbucks’s stock is experiencing a historic losing streak, influenced…

Twitter (the company that Elon Musk insists upon calling “X”) appears to be hemorrhaging advertisers. And it’s responded to this lost revenue by suing a prominent critic of the increasingly right-wing social media website: Media Matters, a left-leaning organization known for criticizing conservative and GOP-aligned outlets. Ordinarily, this lawsuit would be the kind of stunt that legal observers could probably ignore. The First Amendment provides extraordinarily robust protections against lawsuits that target speech.…

In December 2018, Google searches for the term “porch pirate” reached a peak. The phrase describes a particular kind of thief unique to modern living: someone who takes packages ordered online and left unattended at doorsteps. Since the pandemic, when a huge surge of Americans started buying much of their everyday goods and luxuries online, many more people have had at least one run-in with a porch pirate. A New York Times analysis of package theft in 2019 found that 1.7 million packages went missing every day in the…

The general rule about consumer boycotts is that they rarely work, at least in terms of taking a real bite out of a company’s bottom line. Take some recent examples. Plenty of coffee drinkers still love their Keurigs, despite a handful of people smashing their already-purchased machines in 2017. In 2018, Nike got a sales boost after angering some conservatives for doing an ad campaign with former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. In 2020, calls among progressives for a boycott of Goya products semi-backfired — the…

New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking a speedy judgment against former President Donald Trump for allegedly inflating his net worth by billions of dollars to fraudulently secure favorable loan and insurance terms for more than a decade. In a filing Wednesday night in New York court, James argued that Trump, his sons, and his business had obtained “hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten savings and profits” and that, given the volume of evidence her office has collected, the judge should issue what’s…

LAKELAND, Florida — The lore around Publix goes as follows: George Jenkins was working as a store manager at a Piggly Wiggly in Winter Haven, Florida, when he tried to meet with the grocery chain’s new owner to talk business and introduce himself. The guy blew him off — his secretary said he was in important meetings, but Jenkins overheard him talking golf. So he quit and opened his own store, which he called Publix, right next to the Pig in 1930. He built the business gradually, its growth mirroring Florida’s, and…

Rupert Murdoch spent a lifetime building one of the world’s most important media empires. Now, at age 92, he says he’s no longer going to run it day to day. In November, Murdoch will step down as chair for Fox Corporation, the company that owns Fox News and the Fox broadcast channel, as well as News Corp, the company that owns publishers including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. Murdoch has been the last remaining media megamogul running the business he created. And that business has been extremely…

First it was the writers. Then it was the actors. Now, it’s the auto workers who are on strike after the United Auto Workers and Detroit’s Big Three — Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (which owns Chrysler) — have failed to reach a deal in labor negotiations. This one is going to be a doozy as the UAW seeks to wrestle back some of the profits the automakers have been raking in. After midnight Friday, September 15, when the deadline for a new contract passed, some 12,700 workers at a Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan, a…

Linda Yaccarino is angry. Not at Elon Musk, the man who hired her to be the CEO of Twitter, the company he subsequently renamed X. Yaccarino says he’s a brilliant leader who is turning his company into something that has more ambition than “any other company likely on earth.” Instead, Yaccarino is furious that my colleagues at Vox Media announced a last-minute programming update before her onstage interview at the company’s Code conference: They would also host a session featuring Yoel Roth, the former head of trust…