Yuppie parents who have been partial to Maclaren strollers are "having fits," Sean Gregory reports, over the way that company has handled the recall of models that have been implicated in amputations involving 12 children who got their fingers caught in a hinge. Maclaren is offering free hinge covers, available through its website, as a remedy. But yesterday afternoon the site was besieged by traffic and it was difficult to get through. (Still is this morning, and the recall notice is not very apparent.) "We are working to address the issue," says Charlotte Addison, marketing …

Matthew Boyle weaves the tale of Stuart Frankel, a transplanted New Yorker who began selling foot-long subs for $5 in his two Miami Subway franchises on weekends and evidently turned around the company's fortunes in the process. Subway sold $3.8 billion worth of footlongs in the year ending in August, making it one of the top 10 fast-food brands in the U.S, according to NPD Group. "There are only a few times when a chain has been able to scramble up the whole industry, and this is one of them," says Jeffrey T. Davis, president of restaurant consultancy Sandelman …

Well, if you're like me, you've got to find out what paradessence means exactly before agreeing or disagreeing. Turns out it's a blend of paradoxical and essence and, in a product, it's "the intrinsic property that promises to simultaneously satisfy two opposing consumer desires." "Amusement parks provide terror and reassurance. Automobiles render drivers reckless and safe. Sneakers grasp earth and help consumers soar free. Muzak is a hybrid of transience and eternity," writes Aidan O'Driscoll in "Culture, Contradiction and Marketing Pragmatism" in the Irish Marketing Review. The earliest citation that Paul …

Toyota may be thinking about building out its Prius hybrid brand into a full-blown line of vehicles but General Motors doesn't intend to extend the Volt nameplate after it's launched next year. Instead, it will transfer the technology -- which combines a rechargeable battery pack for all-electric driving with a gas-powered generator for longer trips -- to other products. "The Volt was the original vehicle that we started, but I wouldn't see that as a brand marketing direction for us," Brent Dewar, chief of global operations for Chevrolet, told the Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit. Bob …

A raft of Journal reporters led by Julie Jargon in Chicago, Pui-Wing Tam in San Francisco and Ellen Byron in New York talked to marketers across the country and determined that grimness is tightening its grip on consumers' wallets despite glimmering rays of recovery. They are responding accordingly by knocking prices down or, at worst, holding them where they are. Bargain-hunting remains the operative shopping mode, and even venues that tend to fare better in recessions -- such as grocery stores, which pick up business from restaurants as people eat in -- are finding that margins …

David Evans' lede zeros in on Pfizer and the fact that, even while it was settling a fraudulent marketing case with the feds in 2004, it was engaging in similar activities -- specifically off-label marketing -- in another unit. In September, its Pharmacia & Upjohn unit paid the largest criminal fine in U.S. history after pleading guilty to instructing more than 100 salespeople to promote Bextra, a drug approved only for the relief of arthritis and menstrual discomfort, for treating acute pains of all kinds. But the article paints a broader picture of widespread wrongdoing in the industry. …