• The Eyes Have It: TOTN's Top 10 Stories Of 2011
    It's always illuminating to read which stories have most touched readers' fancies. Not surprisingly, news about big brands that have a place on our personal shelves, screens or desktop score highly: Netflix, Facebook, Apple, Google, Toyota. Promising news, such as a possible recharge of JC Penney's battery with new CEO Ron Johnson, are definitely popular, but so also are gaffes such as the No. 1 most-clicked-upon story among all of "Marketing Daily"'s 1,500 or so headlines last year -- indeed, Netflix's decision to summarily raise prices 60% is one of the most boneheaded misreadings of the customer we're likely to …
  • Shoes Appear To Have A Future After All
    Someone reading Walter Issacson's biography of the ahead-of-his-time Steve Jobs mentioned to me last night that the Apple co-founder had a penchant for attending business meetings barefoot. As much as I have come to appreciate the benefits of running either barefoot or in minimalist shoes -- sometimes having to deal with the barbs of aghast bystanders -- I have no intentions of going that far. (Better to skip the meeting.) But I do recognize that there is a more strident, countervailing force in the universe. Call them "The Shoe Worshippers."
  • Shuttering Sears Stores Sends Shudders
    "Sears and Kmart -- can you imagine America without them?" reads the lede in the Los Angeles Times this morning. Sears Holding Co.'s announcement yesterday that as many as 120 of its nearly 2,200 full-line U.S. stores would shut following a disappointing holiday sales season puts us a little bit closer to that reality.
  • Crystal Ball Murky For Screens And Their Content
    In the end, it's not as easy as it might appear to predict what people want to watch, Joe Flint observes in a piece in the Los Angeles Times this morning. "The hot stars on the TV screen this fall were supposed to be Playboy bunnies, Pan Am stewardesses and angry dinosaurs. Instead, the winners were broke waitresses, snarky suburbanites and Snow White."
  • Wal-Mart Pulls Enfamil Newborn Formula After Death
    How does a product recover from new reports that it is perhaps -- perhaps -- responsible for causing the death of a 10-day-old infant? That's a question facing Mead Johnson Nutrition's Enfamil Newborn baby formula this morning after Wal-Mart and SuperValu (which owns Jewel, Shaws, Shop and Save, Acme, Farm Fresh, Shoppers and some Albertsons supermarkets around the country) pulled the product from its shelves following the death of a baby boy in Missouri from a rare bacterial infection, Cronobacter sakazakii, that he contracted after ingesting the formula.
  • What Wendy's Has Done To (Nearly) Overtake BK
    Just as it has been steadily, almost stealthily, gaining share over the years, the news about Wendy's imminent overtaking of Burger King as the No. 2 burger and fries purveyor is trickling out in the mainstream media.
  • T-Mobile USA Faces A Less-Than-Magenta Future
    Whither T-Mobile USA, now that AT&T did the expected and dropped it's $39 billion bid for the No. 4 U.S. wireless carrier?
  • Electronic Couponing Takes A Big Step Forward
    It's not difficult to predict that a press release about a future trend or product is going to have a big impact if it's issued under the logo of, say, Wal-Mart or Procter & Gamble because of their sheer muscle mass. Yesterday's announcement that P&G is going to partner in a new e-couponing technology is the answer to a problem that most of us probably didn't know existed (although we wondered why scanning smartphones at the checkout counter really hasn't caught on at the local Piggly Wiggly).
  • Apple Reportedly Chatting Up Its TV Plans
    The definition of television, and the business models that make it possible, are changing as fast as a weak primetime lineup, report the "Wall Street Journal"'s Jessica E. Vascellaro and Sam Schechner, and Apple is reportedly getting closer to throwing another monkey wrench into the creaky machinery that is as dated as a Sunday night appointment with "Bonanza."
  • A Nightmare That's Larger Than Victoria's Secret
    It's hard to imagine a more blistering lede than the one on top of Bloomberg's Cam Simpson's expose of the mistreatment of children harvesting cotton in West Africa for undergarments eventually sold by Victoria's Secret.
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