Retailers once considered July to be a slow month as regular customers spent their money on travel and other activities rather than shopping at local stores. Then Amazon created Prime Day, a 48-hour sales event that turned the middle of July into a bonanza of consumer cash for the e-commerce giant. This past Prime Day was Amazon’s biggest yet, with the company racking up $14.2 billion in sales over the course of two days last week, an 11 percent increase Continue reading
From grocery stores to fast food drive-throughs, today’s consumers pay a lot more for food than they did just a little while ago. In the years following the pandemic, food and beverage companies steadily increased prices to compensate for soaring commodity and labor costs and to please investors looking to boost profit margins. For example, the average price for a bag of potato chips in June 2020 was $5.09. These days, though, that same bag of chips goes for Continue reading
The fast food industry has long depended on affordability as one of its key selling points, offering customers quick meals that are easy on their wallets. Those days might be in the past, however, as inflation and other factors have sent fast food prices soaring in recent years. According to Finance Buzz, average prices at the country’s most popular chains have increased by as much as 100 percent over the last decade. The 31 percent rise in inflation over the Continue reading
A few weeks ago, we examined TikTok’s uncanny ability to provide entrepreneurs with major marketing opportunities at the expense of brand control. The potential downsides of the latter became clear last week when President Biden signed a bill into law that could ban the social network in the U.S. Under the provisions of the bill, which passed both the House and Senate with considerable support, TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance has 270 days to sell the app to an American Continue reading