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14 Oct 2010 21:19

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Biz: CVS sorry for giving crystal meth-makers their key ingredient

  • $75
    million     the amount CVS has to pay in fines for selling pseudoephedrine to criminals producing crystal meth
  • $2.5
    million     the amount the massive pharmacy chain has to give up in profits linked to the drug’s sale source
  • » Where you’ve used pseudoephedrine: Sudafed, Claritin, Zyrtec, Contac and Mucinex, among others. Some of these brands, by the way, no longer use the drug. What CVS did here wasn’t intentional so much as a blind eye. They didn’t question people making repeated purchases of these drugs.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

14 Oct 2010 20:57

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Biz, Tech: Based on its profits, Google’s freewheeling spending warranted

  • $2.17 the size of Google’s profits this quarter
  • 25% boost in Google’s overall revenues last quarter – not bad, considering all that extracurricular spending
  • 9% jump in stock price on the news; put that in your self-driving car’s tailpipe and smoke it source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

14 Oct 2010 10:50

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Biz: Cheerful foreclosure numbers: Read at your own depressing risk

  • 930,437 number of properties hit with a foreclosure filing in the third quarter of this year alone
  • 102,134 number of foreclosed homes in September, which, by the way, is an all-time record source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

13 Oct 2010 21:49

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Biz, Tech: Rumor mill: AOL interested in buying fellow giant also-ran Yahoo

  • Good freaking god, could you imagine? Yahoo and AOL together would be like Scott Baio and Tony Danza doing a sitcom together. It’d be diminishing returns all around. It’d be a sitcom on ABC Family instead of ABC, trying its best to win a smaller audience than either star once had, and the jokes will almost certainly feel old and worn by the time they make ’em. On the other hand, we really like AOL’s current editorial-leaning direction, but Yahoo has not done anything of note since around 2000. AOL would strip Yahoo of most of the extra crap and turn it into a big advertising company. How would this work? And why is AOL acquiring so much stuff right now? And would Tim Armstrong boot out Carol Bartz? We wanna know what Alec Baldwin thinks of all this. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 2 Comments • Permalink

13 Oct 2010 10:54

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Biz, Tech: Don’t own any Apple stock? Start kicking yourself now, loser

  • $300.20 Apple’s opening stock price this morning, which is the first time it’s been above $300
  • 43% the stock’s increase this year alone; guess that iPad pushed it over the edge or something source
  • » And it gets better: In the time that Steve Jobs has been behind the wheel – since 1997 – the stock has increased immensely. It’s 30 times bigger than it was just seven years ago, when everyone was first going gaga over the third-generation iPod.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

13 Oct 2010 10:03

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Biz: JPMorgan Chase to Wall Street: Bad quarter? Pssh… whatever.

  • 23% increase in 3Q income for the massive banker source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

11 Oct 2010 09:24

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Biz: States ready to throw collective book at mortgage lenders

  • Know how we know that the government is taking this whole foreclosure thing seriously? Well, more than two-thirds of the state attorney generals are about to probe the mortgage industry to see what happened with all that questionable paperwork that they’ve reportedly been plowing through the legal system. Last week, Bank of America halted foreclosures in all 50 states, but other companies have yet to follow suit to that degree. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

08 Oct 2010 22:44

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Biz: Rooster sauce success: Sriracha getting a $40 million expansion

It appears the world agrees with us that Sriracha is pretty much the greatest thing ever, because they have to move to a new factory to keep up with demand. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 1 Comment • Permalink

08 Oct 2010 22:26

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Biz: To our friends in marketing and rebranding: Great work this week

  • Earlier this week: Gap The Gap, an ultra-iconic, ultra-basic brand of basic clothing, decided to redo its logo to look like every other logo on the Internet. People hate it. The company tries to crowdsource a new logo. People complain about that too.
  • Today: MySpace Apparently looking to up the ante, MySpace takes a cue from AOL and redesigns their logo in such a way that it can use secondary art. Too bad they took out the word “space” and replaced it with a madlib. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

08 Oct 2010 14:04

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Biz: Depressing: Tribune Corp. apparently run by overgrown teenagers

  • Here was this guy, who was responsible for all these people, getting drunk in front of senior people and saying this to a waitress who many of us knew. I have never seen anything like it.
  • An anonymity-hidden former Tribune executive • Describing a scene where a top Tribune Corp. exec offered a waitress $100 to show him her breasts. If that doesn’t underline the frat-boy atmosphere of the company, we don’t know else would. The company, currently comprised of a bunch of former radio execs, was run into the ground thanks to Sam Zell, who leveraged relatively little of his own money to pay for the sale, but many of his employees’ pensions. Zell no longer has a day-to-day role in the company, which has somehow managed to wear its lack of respect for journalism as a badge of honor, one that shows itself with every layoff, with every questionable advertising decision (looking at you, L.A. Times) and with every disgusting detail of this New York Times story that we’re linking to right here. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
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