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Consumer Reports pushes back against hidden fees | WNYT.com

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Consumer Reports pushes back against hidden fees | WNYT.com

When Consumer Reports recently asked for opinions on hidden fees, they got an earful.

"Ninety-six percent said they were annoyed with hidden fees they experienced in their lives," says Consumer Reports' Anna Laitin.

Those included fees added when people bought plane or concert tickets, rented a car, or paid phone or cable bills.

"Eighty-five percent of people in the last two years said they noticed a hidden fee in a bill," Laitin notes.

There were so many complaints that Consumer Reports launched a new website asking consumers to share their hidden fee horror stories.

 

Planet Money : NPR

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The Rise Of The Blue-Collar Noncompete : Planet Money : NPR

Workers in sales jobs, or those who have access to a company's trade secrets, are often asked to sign noncompete clauses as part of their employment contracts. By signing noncompetes, employees often agree — in the event they quit or are terminated — not to go and work for a competitor for a certain period of time. That way the company is protected from having the employee take intellectual property — like client lists, proprietary corporate processes, or other secret sauces — to a competitor.

Noncompetes are common in industries like banking and insurance, and they often feature in employment agreements for managers and other white-collar professionals. But as the labor market has tightened over the last few years, noncompetes are starting to show up, and to be enforced, in the contracts of all kinds of blue-collar workers, from heavy equipment operators to hairdressers.

How to Identify A Recession Before It’s Official – Bloomberg

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How to Identify A Recession Before It’s Official – Bloomberg

As the U.S. nears a record-long expansion in July, the conversation is increasingly turning to when it will all end.

Recessions are inherently hard to spot. The National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, a panel whose determinations of when expansions begin and end are accepted as official, generally waits about a year to make a call. By the time a sustained downturn is evident in data like payrolls or gross domestic product, a contraction may have already begun.

BBC – Capital – The curious origins of the dollar symbol

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BBC – Capital – The curious origins of the dollar symbol

The dollar sign is among the world’s most potent symbols, emblematic of far more than US currency.

It’s shorthand for the American dream and all the consumerism and commodification that comes with it, signifying at once sunny aspiration, splashy greed and rampant capitalism. It’s been co-opted by pop culture (think Ke$ha when she first started out, or any number of fast-fashion t-shirts) and borrowed by artists (Salvador Dali fashioned a moustache from it, Andy Warhol rendered it in acrylic and silkscreen, creating an iconic body of work that itself now sells for $$$).

It’s used widely in computer coding and it provides money-mouth emoji with its dazed eyes and lolling tongue. Yet despite its polyglot ubiquity, the origins of the dollar sign remain far from clear, with competing theories touching on Bohemian coins, the Pillars of Hercules and harried merchants.