Opinion

My hometown of Baltimore was the first city to install gas street lights in 1816 in an effort to curb crime. More cities quickly followed suit.  By the turn of ...

For nearly three decades, the internet rewarded people who knew how to find information fast. The pros learned to turn questions into a few notable keywords and cherry-pick through pages ...

Easy loans are luring millions of Americans into a dangerous cycle of debt. Young people, particularly college students, are being seduced by easy credit and instant gratification, spending money they ...

In 1915, a Wall Street analyst named Benjamin Graham saw an opportunity. Guggenheim Exploration was trading as a single stock, but it held shares in multiple copper mining companies worth ...

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon in 1969, their giant leap for mankind was also a giant mass of dependencies navigated over eight long years. Saturn ...

In 1996 the Palm Pilot felt like the future. For those unfamiliar (or not yet born), the Palm Pilot was a pocket computer that organized contacts, calendars and tasks in ...

March 7, 1947  –  September 13, 2025 The payments and retail industries didn’t transform on their own. They had catalysts. The people bold enough to see the future before others could. Don Kingsborough ...

There’s a little of my mother in my grocery cart. Downy Fabric Softener, Reynolds Wrap and Philadelphia Cream Cheese are brands I still buy without thinking. They were always in ...

Everything you always wanted to know about how to measure the return on investment of generative AI (and agentic AI) comes down to one anecdote: The Soviet Nail Factory. In the ...

In 2016, David Evans and Richard Schmalensee published the Harvard Business School Press book, Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms. The book explained what made platforms work, why so ...

The U.S. middle class is more than a household income bracket. The American middle class has always been the heartbeat of the U.S. economy. The symbol of the American Dream. ...

Mark Twain once remarked that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” A century later, the line still gets a chuckle. Not because statistics are inherently dishonest, but because we ...

By the 1920s, cars and telephones had changed how people connected. Young adults could travel on their own and make plans without meeting in person. It felt revolutionary to their ...

About sixty years ago, credit cards changed shopping by solving a simple problem: they let people buy now and pay later anywhere the cards were accepted. In the decades that followed, ...

Maybe it was when Ruoming Pang, the executive leading Apple Intelligence, jumped ship earlier this month to Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs. Or when a leaked internal memo in March described Apple’s AI efforts as ...

For many Americans, saving money at the grocery store was once a Sunday evening ritual. Out came the scissors and spreadsheets to clip coupons from the Sunday papers stuffed with ...

In 2000, USA Today was the most circulated newspaper in the United States. More than 1.6 million copies were printed each day. Over 6.6 million readers picked it up. It ...

Relationship experts say that the honeymoon period lasts about two years. After that, the newlywed sheen wears off, and what’s left is navigating the real work of building a future ...

Perplexity started it in November of 2024 with Buy with Pro. Then Open AI with ChatGPT followed in April 2025. These two large language models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving from ...

It takes a lot to get most people to agree on anything. Even members of the same family have a hard time deciding what movie to watch on a Friday night, ...

I have bad news for all of you on the waiting list for the all-electric Maserati MC20 Folgore. It’s been sunset before even seeing daylight. After five years of development, ...

A six-figure income, a house in a nice neighborhood, two cars in the garage and kids in private schools — yet still feeling panicked when an emergency expense hits. And ...

The American consumer has been given a crash course in global trade over the last three weeks. On February 1, 2025, President Trump’s announcement of a 25% tariff on goods ...

Turns out, we can learn a lot of things about people by studying rats. When the scientific world wants to better understand human behavioral psychology, they often run extensive experiments using ...

The average consumer spends about 3 seconds when opening an app on their smartphone. Most open 10 different apps a day. Over the course of a year, the time people ...

It’s only been for the last 443 years that the start of the new year was celebrated on January 1st.  For millennia before that, it wasn’t until late March and ...

There are 52 Mondays in a year. For the last 15 of those years, I have published a piece of content on as many of those Mondays as I could. ...

PYMNTS Intelligence published its annual report on the usage and adoption of Apple Pay yesterday (October 21). That report marked the ten-year milestone of Apple Pay’s launch, which was the ...

After listening to and scrolling through days of “expert” commentary about the lawsuit filed by the DOJ against Visa over debit interchange, I feel compelled to weigh in. Big headlines about ...

Summer should get a speeding ticket, a wise person once said, and that’s a reality that all of us living in the Northern Hemisphere came to grips with last weekend. ...

Amazon turned 30 on July 5th and did something that nearly 70% of all women also say they do on their birthday: They bought themselves a present. On July 4th, the ...

The 2,000 members of the Marubo tribe were among the most disconnected people on Planet Earth. A people whose roots span many centuries, they live in a part of the ...

The big consumer news last Friday was that the University of Michigan’s June Consumer Sentiment Index hit a seven-month low. Many scratched their heads, particularly since the CPI print earlier ...

The Census Bureau collects demographic data on the birthrates of those living in the United States and groups them into age-related cohorts based on the year in which they were ...

Sixty-three years ago this month, the world’s first supercomputer was born. In May of 1961, IBM introduced its Model 7030, also known as “Stretch.” The gamechanger was its computational processing ...

Google’s market cap topped $2 trillion last week after quarterly earnings convinced investors that demand for its GenAI platform was not only strong but being monetized in the here and ...

There are 69 million consumers in the U.S. who are between the ages of 12 and 27. They are described as the first digitally-native generation — a generation that has ...

Last Saturday (March 23), legendary fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg made her exclusive collection of 200 clothing, baby and household items available for shoppers to buy at Target. DVF, who ...

A friend was preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime yoga retreat to a fancy resort in Malaysia. The trip was a long one with stopovers in Qatar and two days in Kuala ...

In 1955, the island nation of Borneo was in the throes of a serious malaria virus outbreak. It turned to The World Health Organization for help. WHO recommended spraying massive ...

A couple of weeks ago, more than 123 million people tuned in to watch the Super Bowl. Analysts say that it was the most watched program ever — thanks, in ...

Trying to get rid of the middleman seems to be a universal business pastime. Companies spend billions trying to “go direct” to gather first-party data, exert more control over the customer ...

const scrollToHash = () => { const pageHash = window.location.hash; if (!pageHash) return; const anchor = document.querySelector(pageHash); anchor.scrollIntoView(); } document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', () => {setTimeout(scrollToHash, 250)}) One: Companies monetize certainty as ...

The traditional look back at the end of the year that was begs the question: What have we learned? Specifically, for 2023, the question might also be: Was it all about ...

I have perfected the art of multitasking. Thanks to my mobile devices, the internet, apps and embedded payments, I can book airline tickets while waiting for a Zoom call to start, ...

It seemed impossible. A product that looked like beef, bled like beef, and cooked like beef made entirely out of plants. But Impossible Foods and its founder, Patrick Brown, had a ...

Silicon Valley’s 72-hour OpenAI drama was quelled last week with the return of Sam Altman as CEO to the firm he co-founded in 2015.  The board will be reconstituted with ...

It was going to be different this time. The failure of then-Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer in 2007 to recognize the disruptive power of smartphones and app stores to change the world ...

I’m feeling flush. I got an email last Saturday from Shop that I had $43.40 in my Shop wallet to spend on the app. This was news to me, since I ...

Kimberly Clark introduced Kleenex in 1924 as a product used by movie stars instead of face cloths to remove their makeup and keep their skin soft. The key selling point ...

No one really knows the origin of the phrase “seeing is believing.” The Oxford Dictionary traces its English language roots to 1609. Others say that it was the Ancient Greeks ...

It has been reported that by 2010, cable television in the U.S. had sort of hit its stride. Analysts report that 90% of homes with a television had a monthly ...

In June of 2014, Amazon launched the Fire phone. Priced at $650 and offered exclusively by AT&T, the phone’s big selling point was its “Dynamic Perspective” — a feature that ...

Warren Buffet is reported to have said that digital transformation is a fundamental reality of business today.  McKinsey says that 70% of digital transformation projects fail. Both suggest the need ...

“You can’t always get what you want” are both lyrics made famous by Mick Jagger in the 1968 rock classic by the same name and very likely the most frequently ...

Instacart filed its S-1 on Friday, August 25 — and with it came a glimmer of hope that the 18-month tech IPO drought may be ending. EquityZen’s head of market ...

Many of you may be reading this article on your smartphone or tablet while sitting in the back of an Uber on the way to the airport, at your desk ...

Four days from today, the Federal Reserve’s instant account-to-account payments rail will go live. FedNow’s launch on July 20 will bring the number of real-time rails in the U.S. to ...

After spending the last 20 minutes online deliberating over what you really need to round out your summer wardrobe, you’re ready to check out. You review your basket, apply the ...

I was recently asked for my advice on a new B2B network aimed at solving a big problem for a segment of small business sellers. The network was built on ...

The conversation over the last three years about the shift to digital has been largely about the share of consumers who once did most things in the physical world and ...

Consumers live their lives in a digital-first, connected world — habits formed after three years of a forced shift to digital. And they like it that way. But that’s today. In a ...

It all started with a cat and a baby. In 1959, neurophysiologists David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel conducted an experiment on an anesthetized cat to better understand the interactions between the ...

It’s almost an eerie coincidence. Nearly three years to the day that the World Health Organization declared the novel Coronavirus a global pandemic, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. The mass exodus of ...

Nearly half of U.S. consumers say they shifted to brands and stores that offered steeper discounts than their usual retail and grocery haunts in the last year. Half of consumers ...

Groceries, and how and where consumers buy them, is almost as topical as generative AI these days. Food inflation remains stubbornly high, and nearly all U.S. households have adjusted the ...

Will Grocery Stores Go the Way of the Department Stores? If grocery store executives want to see what their industry could look like over the next decade, they might want ...

One of the worst-kept secrets in payments was finally confirmed last week. That’s when Early Warning Services (EWS) announced its plans to launch a digital bank wallet in the second ...

The holiday ornaments have been put away, the resolutions have been made, the new year well wishes have been given. That means it’s time for predictions about the year to ...

Looking for analysis of everything from the digital economy to consumers’ instincts about inflation? Let Monday be your guide. “Monday.” It comes from the Anglo-Saxon word Mōnandæg, meaning “the moon’s day.” ...

PYMNTS’ national study of 13,250 U.S. consumers over the last seven months may tell policymakers everything they need to know about inflation expectations: consumers think it will take another nineteen ...

Almost 57 years ago to the day, the 1960’s rock band The Byrds appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show to sing their number one hit “Turn, Turn, Turn.” A song ...

Investors with money sitting on the sidelines, listen up. I’m on to the next big thing and need capital. The total addressable market is every single human on the planet. The vision ...

In 1963, Nobel-prize winning physicist Dennis Gabor wrote that the future can’t be predicted, but it can be invented. Gabor, who won the Nobel for inventing the hologram, explained in ...

Steve Ballmer’s reaction to the release of the iPhone in 2007 is regarded as one of modern business history’s most egregious faux paus. As the story goes, the then-president of ...

Joe Jones has become something of a household name in the last ten days because of an idea he had in 1989.  Jones is the inventor of the robotic vacuum ...

A new survey of U.S. consumers, hot off the presses at PYMNTS, tells a lot about how they’re handling the current economic turmoil and when they think it will end. ...

Timing is everything, as it turns out. Yesterday, I wrote a piece that posited that one of Amazon’s untapped areas of expansion would be to leverage Whole Foods, its prepared foods ...

Turns out that not many people order burgers at a restaurant that sells pasta and pizza, even though they’re a menu option. But many did from MrBeast Burger, a delivery-only ...

Spanish-born, Harvard educated professor and philosopher George Santayana was a prolific writer, known best for his many aphorisms. Perhaps one of his best-known soundbites is also one of his most ...

Apple’s Project Breakout finally broke out a week ago today at Apple’s WWDC. It was then that Apple confirmed what was probably one of the worst kept secrets in payments: ...

In 1986, Former President Ronald Regan said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Those who relied on ...

It’s over. It’s done. Stick a fork in it. All those digital habits that consumers developed and fine-tuned over the last two years — they were temporary, at best. Ordering groceries online? ...

When Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and INSEAD Professor Erin Meyer released their business book bestseller No Rules Rules in September 2020, they wrote that it was the video company’s unconventional ...

Project Breakout is said to be Apple’s now-not-so-secret plan to turn itself into a full-fledged payments and financial services company by building its own acquiring, payments processing, risk management, fraud ...

The Netflix series “Emily in Paris,” which debuted in May of 2021, didn’t exactly start off on the right foot. Panned by critics and viewers, its Rotten Tomatoes average audience ...

There has been so much written over the last two years about the consumer’s great shift to digital – and PYMNTS has contributed our fair share to that subject. Many ...

Last Friday’s news that Amazon could be one of the suitors interested in buying Peloton caused that stock to jump 30 percent in after-hours trading. The collective pressures of the ...

When general-purpose credit cards were introduced in the late 50s and early 60s, they were advertised as a way for consumers to buy something they wanted or needed but didn’t ...

The Fed released its long-awaited paper on Central Bank Digital Currencies last week. After reading it, I don’t get the feeling that even the authors themselves are convinced that a ...

Ten Things Will Define the Digital Transformation in 2022 Just about everyone has their own prediction for what three, four, five or ten things will happen each time the calendar turns ...

The vintage pop song says, “Monday morning, you gave me no warning of what was to be …”   No disrespect to The Mamas & The Papas, but I do that nearly ...

The invasion of 156,000 Allied Forces on the beaches at Normandy on June 6, 1944 is regarded by historians as the big turning point of World War II. The invasion ...

In 1907, Mark Twain famously popularized the saying “lies, damn lies and statistics,” almost as a self-deprecating comment about his own ability to interpret “figures” when writing about them. An ...

When I announced the acquisition of the leading global media and content platform on antitrust and competition policy, Competition Policy International (CPI), six weeks ago, I hinted that it was ...

Who wants to be a millionaire? For two decades, beginning in 1999, that was the name of one of the most popular TV game shows ever syndicated in the U.S. The ...

A study conducted in 2011 by two University of San Diego professors says that people who read the end of a book first not only go on to read the ...

In an era of explosive growth in online advertising and social media spend, media experts still say that TV advertising is the most effective way to build a brand. Analysts report ...

After nearly a week of market rumors, PayPal released a short but sweet statement on Monday morning (Oct. 25) stating that it is not pursuing an acquisition of Pinterest “at ...

December of 2019. It would be weeks before the first case of COVID-19 was diagnosed in China. And months before The World Health Organization declared a global pandemic. That month, ...

Alexa and voice AI is to the connected economy what Microsoft was to the PC in 1990 and what iOS and Android were to smartphones in 2008: the operating system ...

Remember this? It was about seven years ago – Sept. 9, 2014 – when Tim Cook took the stage at Apple’s WWDC and introduced Apple Pay. What the world saw that day ...

As the world navigates the latest surge in COVID cases attributed to the Delta variant, and medical experts caution that COVID will soon transition from pandemic to endemic disease, the ...

Square’s announcement that it’s going to acquire Afterpay for $29 billion just about broke the payments portion of the internet last Monday (Aug. 2). No one saw it coming, many ...

The “Pay Later” pure-play stocks took a drubbing last week on the news that Apple Pay and Goldman, who partnered on the Apple Card, are doing it again to build ...

Today is Chris Cracchiolo’s first day on the job at Walmart. The 19-year American Express veteran is taking over as the head of Walmart+, which is Walmart’s subscription program that ...

The economic principle of replacing existing business processes and models with innovative and more efficient ones is nothing new. In banking, it’s more recently become a burning issue, as banks’ ...

Two weeks ago, Ferrari named its third CEO in as many years. That wasn’t the big news. This new CEO, Benedetto Vigna, isn’t a car guy but a tech guy, ...

Over the last year, nearly everyone — 92 percent of consumers — went online to make a purchase, and more of them made online purchases (75 percent) than made them ...

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s exchange with J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon on overdraft fees has been viewed 750,000 times in the first 24 hours since the May 26 Senate Banking Committee ...

Would you be surprised if I told you that as many U.S. consumers now order groceries online as order restaurant food online? Don’t be. According to PYMNTS’ latest national consumer study fielded ...

Coinbase’s April 14 IPO was the stock market event that launched a thousand superlatives. A “watershed moment,” a “rocket” that analysts said would see its stock price double and a ...

Netflix first introduced its streaming service in the U.S. in January of 2007. It landed with a bit of a thud with analysts and pundits. Media accounts then poo-poohed its impact, ...

The U.S. has 40,460 grocery stores. If you want to see how physical retail might look 20 years from now, you might want to watch the grocery store space over ...

The U.S. has mobilized the largest COVID-19 vaccination rollout of any country in the world. The Biden administration has set May 1 as the date that all states will be ...

March 19 will mark the one-year anniversary of the U.S. lockdown in the face of the global pandemic. Since then, the payments and commerce headlines have been mostly about one ...

Thirty-three years ago, in 1988, in Washington, Missouri, the first Walmart Supercenter opened its doors. The store concept itself took a page from the European hypermarkets, which had begun dotting ...

An article published in the Harvard Business Review in August of 2009 posed a question that many airline and travel industry CEOs are pondering 11 years later: Will videoconferencing kill ...

Every year for the last 110 years, members of the retail trade group, known as the National Retail Federation (NRF), have assembled to discuss the slate of issues pertinent to ...

Let’s start 2021 being provocative instead of safe with wishy-washy predictions. Karen Webster says let’s drop the prefixes from commerce. Then get our heads wrapped around the fact that consumers ...

You can see it in the quarterly earnings reports this year of just about every publicly traded company and among the list of companies that have either gone public one ...

In June of 2019, PYMNTS asked a national sample of 1,037 smartphone users about their interest in having a single app that would make their everyday activities easier to access ...

On the same day that COVID-19 cases in the U.S. topped 10 million and hit 50.5 million globally, the world got news that Pfizer and BioNTech had successfully completed Phase ...

It’s one year from today: Nov. 9, 2021. It’s been 18 months since the coronavirus swept the world and changed everything about it. But finally, the citizens of the world are ready ...

“Membership has its privileges” was the nine-year ad campaign launched by American Express in 1987 to persuade consumers that it was worth it to pay an annual fee for one ...

“Whose customer am I? And who’s going to take care me?” Those are the questions I asked myself last week when trying to resolve an online order gone astray. In my case, ...

Consumers crave certainty, and they work pretty hard to minimize the risk of making a bad choice. That’s why once consumers find something that works, they stick with it. And ...

The “Mighty Thor” was a household game-changer in 1908. Invented by Alva John Fisher, Thor was the first electric washing machine to be mass-produced and sold. Until its debut, washing clothes ...

Human beings are creatures of habit. Take popcorn and going to the movies. Americans consume roughly 13 billion quarts of popcorn every year, roughly 30 percent of that at the movies. Well, ...

Netflix Co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings has written a new book about building the video-streaming powerhouse that now has nearly 200 million subscribers globally, as of the end of July. ...

The Commerce Department released July’s retail sales last week, showing an increase in seasonally adjusted retail spending – up 1.2 percent overall last month, but down from the 8.4 percent ...

By now, you’ve no doubt heard the story about how Isaac Newton turned quarantining during London’s outbreak of the Bubonic Plague between 1665 and 1667 into a time of great ...

The most interesting thing about Big Tech’s Fab Four tour of Capitol Hill last Wednesday (July 29) wasn’t the perfunctory lawmaker grandstanding, or even the number of times lawmakers used ...

“We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism.” That is the first sentence of a roughly 4,000-word essay titled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” written in 1930, ...

In 1946, the then-61 members of the World Health Organization (WHO) saw the need for a consistent yet comprehensive definition of “health.” They felt strongly that any definition had to ...

If your business touches retail in any way, it might pay to follow a few important breadcrumbs. Nike posted its lowest quarterly sales in two years, along with a $790 million ...

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Then, cases in the U.S. had hit 1267 and there were 38 deaths, most of them concentrated ...

There is an out-and-out frenzy to capitalize on the pandemic-fueled digital shift that gave consumers few options for accessing products and services over the last twelve weeks. Miss this shift and ...

Between all the burger-flipping, and making sure your mask didn’t catch fire while you were doing it, you probably missed an important development that happened over the holiday weekend here ...

To understand when and how consumer demand will return and the impact it will have on federal and state efforts to reopen the economy, we need consistently refreshed data from ...

Economists, policymakers and epidemiologists have been modeling the cost/benefit of reopening the U.S. economy since governors began asking their citizens to #stayathome in mid-March, and even well before that. A decision ...

Never has one letter of the alphabet been such a hot topic of conversation. That letter — V — has become the proxy for how some describe the shape of the ...

For weeks now, American consumers and businesses – everyone everywhere, really – have been desperate for the answers to three questions: Are we flattening the curve? When can we reopen the economy? What ...

Friday, April 3 was the day everyone expected would bring a sigh of relief — and offer much-needed hope — to the 30 million SMBs that employ roughly half of ...

March 11 marked the end of traditional business in the U.S., maybe even the rest of the world – and probably forever. That was the day when the World Health Organization ...

For most small businesses, the dawn of the new decade was filled with optimism for their futures. Consumer confidence was at an all-time high, and unemployment at an all-time low. Consumer ...

Thursday, March 19 was the first day of spring in the U.S. — a season that is symbolic of rebirth and renewal after a long, cold winter. It was also the ...

On March 6, at the end of the first week that the coronavirus roiled markets and rocked the U.S., PYMNTS asked 2,128 U.S. consumers to tell us about its impact ...

Aristotle may have originated the notion of first principles thousands of years ago, but it would take Elon Musk to add a contemporary business flair to that method of analyzing business ...

Sixty-seven years ago this month, Jonas Salk announced that he had successfully tested a vaccine for polio. Many in the U.S. breathed a huge sigh of relief. In 1952, polio ...