Posted Thursday, October 8, 2009 - 3:07pm
Photograph by Medioimages/Photodisc/Getty Images.

It might seem odd to claim during the week that Condé Nast closed Gourmet magazine—famously presided over by the former New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl—that the newspaper’s new restaurant critic has a shot at becoming the paper’s next editor. Yet Sam Sifton, who starts this month, is unlike any other previous choice for the paper’s restaurant critic. He has more management experience than the job has ever called for.

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  • Marion Maneker is a regular contributor to The Big Money.
Photograph by Medioimages/Photodisc/Getty Images.

Kausfiles-Shifting Gears Smackdown!


Posted Thursday, October 8, 2009 - 1:13pm

Over at Kausfiles, I think Mickey is slightly, ever-so-slightly, misinterpreting my point about the Detroit automakers’ market share.

  • Matthew DeBord has written about the auto industry for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, and Car Design News.

Schmidt and Sergey Schmooze with the Scribes


Posted Thursday, October 8, 2009 - 12:56pm

Yesterday, Google (GOOG) alpha dogs Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin took the extraordinary step of being available to the press. Specifically, they showed up at the company's New York office and sat down for a 90-minute interview with reporters from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, and Search Engine Land, among others. Everything was on the table; no topic was taboo. And how did our esteemed colleagues respond? Churlishly, of course.

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  • Chris Thompson is a writer living in Brooklyn.

Yum Brands: Healthy in China, Sick at Home


Posted Thursday, October 8, 2009 - 12:41pm

Despite eye-popping profit growth in its third quarter, things continue to look grim, at least in the United States, for Yum Brands (YUM), owner of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut.

That's because although profits rose 18 percent, sales are down—way down, by some measures. Systemwide, revenues fell by 2 percent. But same-store sales in the United States declined by 6 percent. And Pizza Hut's U.S. same-store sales fell 13 percent.

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  • Dan Mitchell has written for The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The MInneapolis Star-Tribune and Wired.

Posted Thursday, October 8, 2009 - 11:50am
Bugaboo Stroller

When Fairchild Publications announced way back in 2005 that it was going to launch a magazine for the high-end parenting market called Cookie, it felt like ideal zeitgeist timing. You couldn't walk down the streets of any major American city without getting run over by a perfectly coifed and dressed yummy mummy pushing an infant in a $900 Bugaboo stroller, complete with a $200-plus diaper bag slung over her shoulder.

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Posted Thursday, October 8, 2009 - 5:18am

A solid two years into the housing bust, the national foreclosure wave doesn't show the least signs of abating. Banks that had called a foreclosure moratorium are now back to the business of taking back properties, and the foreclosure numbers are again at record highs. As the foreclosures rise, so too does the criticism of “walkaways” who hand the keys to their drastically devalued houses back to the bank.

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Bing Hits a Bump


Posted Wednesday, October 7, 2009 - 1:48pm

Standard disclosure: When tracking who's up and who's down in the search market, most industry analysts find the metrics company comScore to be the industry standard, and the following ain't from comScore. But it's interesting nonetheless. The Internet tracking company Experian Hitwise has released a report on the search market for September, and it looks like Bing's effort to challenge Google (GOOG) may have stalled.

  • Chris Thompson is a writer living in Brooklyn.

Help! I Bought a Small Car But It Sucks!


Posted Wednesday, October 7, 2009 - 11:45am

Here’s a little grenade thrown into our collective march toward being a nation of small-car drivers, as we motor toward a new EPA fuel-economy standard of 35.5 mpg by 2016: Americans don’t actually like small cars that much. Did I say grenade? Well, we should have seen it coming. Allow me a moment for personal digression.

  • Matthew DeBord has written about the auto industry for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, and Car Design News.

Posted Monday, October 5, 2009 - 3:34pm
Photo of shopping bag by Workbook Stock/Steven Puetzer/Getty Creative Images.

Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue is a world away from the rain forests of Indonesia, yet there’s a direct connection between the two that one environmental group is trying to make clear: fancy shopping bags. Many clothing and luxury brands may be—often unwittingly—sending their customers off with a little slice of obliterated rain forest in addition to their intended purchases.

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  • Hillary Rosner writes about science and the environment, and recently traveled to Borneo's rainforests for Mother Jones.
Photo of shopping bag by Workbook Stock/Steven Puetzer/Getty Creative Images.

Private Equity Wants Sweden’s Volvo Money


Posted Monday, October 5, 2009 - 3:24pm

Michael Corkery at the Wall Street Journal’s Deal Journal has exactly the same question I have regarding reports that a private equity firm, Crown, is interested in competing with Chinese carmaker Geely to buy Volvo from Ford (F): Didn’t private equity, in the form of Cerberus Capital Management, learn from its experience with Chrysler that the auto

  • Matthew DeBord has written about the auto industry for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, and Car Design News.