American Express is offering customers with whom it no longer wants to do business $300 to pay off their bill and cancel their credit card, Wendy Kaufman reports.

Here's the new ad (after an HP ad).

Private-label packaged goods could surge as much as six times the roughly one-point market-share gain already seen since the recession began in December 2007, Jack Neff reports, bolstered by a slowdown in consumer spending that could last from four to 10 years. Executives at the CAGNY conference in Boca Raton, Fla., last week acknowledged the growing threat from private label, but they all felt that the impact would be felt by their competitors, not them. All in all, private-label market shares grew 0.8 percentage points to 21.9% of volume and 0.7 points to 17.1% of dollars in all package-goods …

Akshay Rao, director of the Institute for Research in Marketing at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, says that as the economic downturns hits home, people will trade down slowly. If they are used to eating out twice a month, for example, they will switch first to buying food at an upscale grocery. "It's not steak to meatloaf overnight," he tells Anne M Hamilton. But taking advantage of trends like that is a key strategy across the board, according to Andrew Razeghi, a lecturer in marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. …

Even as new ads for Mr. Clean play up a value message by showing the product doing the work of three brands combined, as Elaine Wong reports in Brandweek, along comes a potential new rival: electrolyzed tap water, which is simply a mixture of common H2O and table salt whose ions have been scrambled with an electric current. "It's a kitchen degreaser. It's a window cleaner. It kills athlete's foot. Oh, and you can drink it," writes Ken Hively. It can also be used to destroy harmful bacteria on food. It has been used for …

The top performers in Business Week's third annual ranking of Customer Service Champs are treating their best customers better than ever, even if that means doing less to wow new ones. They are trying to preserve front-line jobs and investing in cheap technology to improve service. In fact, more than half of the top 25 brands of the more than 200 brands surveyed showed improved customer service scores over last year; scores mostly fell among the bottom 25. Just as companies are dealing with plummeting sales and sinking employee morale, customers are demanding more attention, better …

Pizza chains are getting squeezed by changing tastes, rising prices (some in the industry refer to cheese as "white gold"), and the dramatic pullback in consumer spending, Richard Gibson reports. John Schnatter, founder and interim CEO of Papa John's International, says conditions late last year were the worst he'd seen in his 32 years in the business. "The pizza segment's struggles are part of a longer-term secular trend in which market share is being lost to healthier and fresher dining options on one side and less expensive burger and sandwich players on the other," says Walter Butkus, principal …

Some folks carped that packaging that rolled in early January was "ugly" or "stupid." Worse yet -- you guessed it -- others said it made Tropicana resemble "a generic bargain brand" or a "store brand."

Veggie seed sales are up double-digits at the nation's biggest seed sellers this year, reports Bruce Horovitz, and the number of homes growing vegetables will jump more than 40% compared with two years ago, according to the National Gardening Association.