Does the above headline seem like déjà vu all over again, and again, and again to you? Seems like I've been typing it for a year now, based on projections, but I'm dutifully including it for the record. The Detroit Free Press reports that GM execs are shrugging off the news. "I don't think being No. 1 in global sales means much at all to the average consumer. I think it's an internal benchmark of our industry," says Mike DiGiovanni, GM's executive director of global market and industry analysis. Toyota itself wasn't exactly ecstatic …

Savvy customers are taking advantage of marketers' desires to hold on to their current customers by negotiating lower rates on everything from phone bills to ... well, cable bills, Vishesh Kumar reports. Can other products and services be far behind? Consumers are finding that negotiating with cable and phone companies may present a more direct route to saving on communications services costs than switching to cheaper prepaid cell phone plans or using Web-enabled mobile devices to connect to the Internet. And companies are often happy to make deals with customers, Kumar writes, particularly if they can poach them from …

Would you be more inclined to buy a container of Tropicana orange juice if the packaging trumpeted the fact that its carbon imprint brand was 3.75 -- meaning that the equivalent of 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted to the atmosphere for each half-gallon carton of orange juice that's produced? It may not have quite the same ring that "lower your cholesterol" has on a box of Cheerios or "less fat" has on a package of Ritz, but PepsiCo is wrestling with how to use the data it has collected on exactly how much impact manufacturing its OJ has …

Procter & Gamble says it is taking its "My Black is Beautiful" campaign in a new direction and the anchor of the revised campaign will be a television program it's developing with BET Networks that will launch by early March, David Holthaus reports. The first episode will feature first lady Michelle Obama, according to Kisha Mitchell Williams, P&G multicultural brand manager. The initial campaign, which launched in 2007 to support multiple P&G brands, included a Web site, a multi-city road show, a four-city exposition with discussion guides, advertorials and other materials to encourage African-American women to organize meetings and …

I've never excerpted from a restaurant review, but Sylvia Rector's piece about Five Guys Burgers and Fries, which is based in the Washington, D.C., area, has more than 300 locations in 25 states, and is expanding to Michigan, caught my eye. "Five Guys is one of the chains that has helped spawn the national trend toward fresh, higher-quality ingredients cooked to order and served in a fast-food setting," Rector writes. "The concept is being widely copied all over the country, but this chain has honed it to a science." To play up the …

I prematurely moved the New Jersey Nets to New York yesterday in retelling NYSportsJournalism.com's account about the "A Day in the Life" program. The Nets will move to Brooklyn in 2011.

First, the bad news, as brought to us by Business Week's David Welch and Carol Matlack and echoed in a host of other stories around the net this morning: "Chrysler needs cash and competitive new models now -- neither of which Fiat can bring." To wit, Fiat made absolutely no commitment to help finance Chrysler, which is heavily in debt, and it remains to be seen how the two companies will fund development of jointly built vehicles. In fact, it could cost Chrysler hundreds of millions per model, and take three or four years, just to retool its …