Business

Via: Chicago Tribune In the continued flailings of the Starbucks chain, here’s a new one: the stealth Starbucks store. A Seattle outlet of the 16,000-store coffee behemoth is being rebranded without visible Starbucks identifiers, as 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea. Two other stores in Starbucks’ native Seattle will follow suit, each getting its own name [...]

This had me a bit confused this morning, though certainly not surprised. Apparently, one can patent a human gene. A gene… the basic unit of heredity in a living organism. Patented, and “owned” by someone. The mind boggles. After I heard this, my initial thought was, “What good is that?” Oh, ho – it’s plenty [...]

Via: MSNBC Would you pay $38 for a cup of coffee? Clifford Phillips of Spokane, Wash., did. He used his debit card to pay for a latte, not knowing there wasn’t enough money in his checking account to cover it. The bank could have declined the transaction for insufficient funds. Instead it approved the electronic [...]

I was reading this fantastic article on Truthout (a site that if you’re not reading, you should), and I was struck not only by the personal story of a woman and her husband being threatened by debt collectors, but by the sobering facts scattered throughout the piece. First, let me cover the surface of this [...]