Economy

I visited the San Diego Convention Center a couple of weeks ago and was quite impressed by it. It’s located just a frew minutes’ cab ride from the San Diego International Airport, bookended by two hotels – Hilton to the south and Marriott to the north – and it runs parallell to the San Diego [...]

Retailers are already pushing the Back-to-School shopping season, even though kids have barely gotten out of school for summer. There are simple reasons for why Back-to-School promotions are seemingly everywhere. Summer is a slow season for most retailers to begin with and back-to-school pretty much the only reason consumers to turn their wallet upside down [...]

Georgetown Cupcake is of course the cupcake bakery made famous by not only its truly delicious cupcakes but also the reality TV show D.C. Cupcakes. Below are a few photos of the Georgetown Cupcake store in Bethesda, MD, (the main one really is in Georgetown, but we didn’t go there) and a half-dozen cupcakes and [...]

The once widely popular hand-sized Flip camcorder has been discontinued by Cisco, which purchased the camera’s manufacturer, Pure Digital, in 2009 for a staggering, MySpace-like sum of $590 million just two years ago. This paragraph from New York Times article on the Flip camera’s demise is painfully accurate: At the same time [as smartphones undermined [...]

The Boston Globe’s Megan Woodhouse wrote on February 14, 2011, about Marathon Tool, “a small contractor supply company” in Franklin, Massachusetts, to illustrate why job growth is so maddeningly slow in the wake of the Great Recession. To afford to hire another full-time employee the company would need to sell 20 million nails more per [...]

Starting around summer 2010, I think, Starbucks has been rolling out new packaging for its instant coffee (or “ready brew” as it prefers to call it) Via. The original Via packages resembled WWII-era magazine clips or magazine clip holders. They were rectangular boxes with muted colors. High on function, low on form, one could say. [...]

Once a year the Bureau of Labor Statistics revises the payroll data series from the monthly Establishment Survey to reflect added data and – in the case of seasonally adjusted data – adjusted seasonal factors. The table below shows the revised month-by-month job growth and job loss in the United States in 2010 (seasonally adjusted). [...]

Paul Levy, who is no longer running a hospital, fears hospitals are in a private-equity investment bubble not unlike those fueled the likes of Enron and WorldCom. I think he’s right. A couple of years ago I wrote the following: Some of the boom in hospital employment over the last few years is quite frankly [...]

On December 30, 2010, the Washington Post published an article on the job market that veterans of recent wars are facing (Gulf War 2 is apparently the Federal name for the Post-9/11 wars). It’s a good article that gives a glimpse into the difficulties (and also successes) of young veterans who’ve left the service. The [...]