Rather than raising prices outright, companies are socking consumers with extra charges that push up the true cost of purchases. No area is safe, BusinessWeek reports, from retail to finance to travel to sports. The magazine says it's corporate America's attempt to escape the brutal price wars of the past few years. BusinessWeek suggests ways to fight back against the fee frenzy.
The number of dual-income families declined last year for the first time since the government began tracking the numbers nearly a decade ago. Economists and labor specialists attribute the drop to an increase in the ranks of the unemployed rather than a deterioration in what has been a bedrock of modern American families: a working husband and wife.
Americans have embraced check cards. Visa's total volume has surpassed $1-trillion in annual transactions on all cards. Visa says that's partly because of a significant surge in check card use, which now represents more than a third of total transaction volume.
If investors have learned anything from the past three bearish years, "it's that nothing is exactly as it seems," says Money magazine, which assembled some of the best minds on Wall Street for its fifth annual "ultimate investment club." Their advice ranges from "stocks are cheap" to "look abroad" to "be careful."
Refrigerators more than 7 years old are "energy hogs" compared with today's models, Florida Solar Energy Center researcher Danny Parker says. For every 3 kilowatt-hours refrigerators use, it takes another kilowatt-hour in air conditioning to remove the heat they produce. Parker says because refrigerators use about 10 percent of household energy, it pays to update.
