When can a company get away with routinely charging 50 percent more than the advertised price for its items? Repeatedly? On Valentine’s Day, of course, when good-hearted souls go online to buy flowers for the people they love and instead get taken to the cleaners. It’s the most clear example [Keep reading]
Skeptic that I am, I am also a sucker for the Olympics. There are a 1,000 reasons to dismiss the Games as a commercial fraud, but still, in every competition, amazing stories of perseverance, love, and achievement emerge. So I’ll be watching every chance I get. This time around, there [Keep reading]
Just how much data leaks out of a person every day? Perhaps a terabyte, guessed Rapid7’s Tod Beardsley. A terabyte! Every touch of a cell phone, ever block you drive, every card you swipe – heck, even while you are asleep — firms are constructing a digital mirror image of [Keep reading]
I have plenty of thoughts about today’s Senate Judiciary hearing credit card hacking hearing, where Americans heard for the first time directly from executives at Target and Neiman Marcus. I’ll get to them in the next day or two. But this caught my eye from the testimony of Neiman Marcus Chief [Keep reading]
Money and time have a very funny relationship, and by funny, I mean, most people misunderstand it. For example: What’s more valuable to you: $10 today or $20 next month? Next year? The choice to spend or save money is a constant trade-off between having something today vs. having something tomorrow, but [Keep reading]
Executives from Target and Neiman Marcus will face a public grilling on Tuesday as they are scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I’ll be there, running back and forth between the hearing and a TV camera, where I’ll be translating the corporate-speak we’ll be hearing. Officials from Consumers [Keep reading]
You’ve had this sneaking sensation all along, haven’t you? That those security machines at airports don’t really do any good? That someone might be looking at naked X-rays of you and laughing? That a whole lot of money has been wasted on technology that doesn’t work, and that the best [Keep reading]
With all the stories of major retailers losing millions of credit card account numbers, you are probably scouring your monthly bills looking for fraudulent charges like a $700 plane ticket or $600 television you didn’t buy. That might be a big mistake. One common way credit card hackers steal commit [Keep reading]
The national conversation has begun on the problem of overwork, and even what I call “binge working.” There’s a lot of horribles we all already know about overwork — it hurts relationships, it impairs judgment, and it even (ironically) hurts productivity. Add to that list that it increases your liklihood [Keep reading]
Janet Yellen arguably becomes the most powerful woman in the world on Saturday, when she takes over as “Chairman” of the Federal Reserve. Take five minutes and get to know a little about her. The running joke about economists is that they equivocate on every question, answering always with a [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan