Sections
Saturday Feature
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3.9KInnovationSpring Break Goes High-Tech
From smart bags to social media, spring break is becoming a surprisingly digital and high-tech travel period in the U.S. The words...
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3.7KRetailWhat’s Your Commerce Horoscope?
There are many mechanisms in the market designed to help match consumers to offerings that are suited to them. Better algorithms, visual...
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5.5KRetailWhat ‘The Simpsons,’ Art And Millennials Have In Common
The art world can be a strange place. While this is a fact well-known to art collectors, even non-collectors got a taste of just...
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5.3KRetailPutting A Famous Face To A Product
Celebrity-backed brands are nothing new. As PYMNTS has previously reported, the original celebrity-endorsed products date back as the far as the 1760s, when the...
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3.5KRetailSpace: The Final Travel Commerce Frontier
“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek...
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6.1KInternet of ThingsThe Great Facebook Fumble – And The Economic Damage Done
Every day, in nearly every corner of the world, 1.4 billion people log onto Facebook and 500 million people log onto Instagram. On Wednesday (March...
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4.8KInternationalThe Tie That Binds? The Royal Instagram And Brexit Preppers
Over the centuries, the British have gained a reputation for a certain steadiness of character, best epitomized via the “Keep Calm and Carry...
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5.1KRetailCracking Down On The Counterfeit Culture
All Deborah Copaken really wanted was a warm coat. A good coat. A Canada Goose coat. Sure, it cost more than $900...
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8.6KNewsVenmo, Girl Scouts And Bitcoin: The Week In Unexpected Upsides
Usually when we talk about unintended consequences here at PYMNTS, we are talking about something that has gone terribly wrong, or at...
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4.3KNewsAmazon HQ2, JPM Coin And The Weird, Wild Week Of Payments’ Left Turns
There is no such thing as a boring week in payments, of course. Every seven-day period is good for at least one unexpected twist....
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4.2KPayments InnovationBeyond Flying Cars: Predictions That Weren’t Necessarily On The Money
Welcome, valued PYMNTS readers, to the weekend. No doubt you worked hard, and chances are you put in more than 40 hours...
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4.3KRetailWhy The Dollars Are Actually The Greatest Show On Turf
Rumor has it, there is some sort of football competition happening in Atlanta this weekend. We are mostly kidding about that. As PYMNTS is Boston-based,...
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4.8KInnovationBitcoin And Dented Radishes: This Week’s Hype Penalty Box Nominees
“Hype” is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “to promote or publicize (a product or idea) intensively, often exaggerating its importance or benefits.”...
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4.6KRetailWhy The Sweet Smell Of Tech Success Can Be Rife With Failure
In 1946, a few weeks before Christmas, Frank Capra’s Christmastime classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” was released in theaters. It was mostly...
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5.3KRetailBots And Outside-The-Bots, CES 2019: Payments And Commerce Highlights
There was a lot about CES in Las Vegas last week that was predictable. Google and Amazon competed for voice-activated mindshare. There...
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7.8KRetailHow Fortnite Turned ‘Free’ Into $3B In Profits
Until extremely recently, the word “fortnight” was a fancy way to say “two weeks” – and it wasn’t likely to come up...
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5.5KEconomy2018: The Year Of The Confident Consumer
What a difference a decade makes. Ten years ago, consumer confidence had slipped to an all-time low, and consumer spending followed it...
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6.2KRetailThinking Outside The Holiday Gift Box
The Christmas countdown is upon us. And with just single-digit shopping days left, the countdown is on to find that perfect gift...
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6.4KGig EconomyCan The Gig Economy Stress-Bust The Holidays?
While the holiday season is officially known as the most wonderful time of the year, for the majority of American consumers, it...
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5.4KPayments InnovationAre QR Codes The Salvation Army’s Digital Salvation?
Pull any list of “top 10 Christmas carols” from the web, and it will quickly become obvious that bells are deeply important to people...
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9.7KeCommerceThe Art And Science Of Making Embarrassing Purchases More Private
These are amazing times to be a consumer who suffers from retail embarrassment. Both science and digital technology are making it easier...
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6.0KRetailGuess What? Black Friday Started The Day After Halloween.
Once upon a time, the holiday shopping season had a very, very well-defined start date. The day after Thanksgiving has been known...
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5.8KRetailThis Weekend’s $25B Shopping Event
When Singles Day launched nearly a decade ago, the then-fledgling eCommerce brand Alibaba didn’t really think they were changing the face of...
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6.2KDataThe $5B Midterm Elections And The Big Costs Of Big Data
Politics is not our normal beat here at PYMNTS. But the 2018 midterms has changed our thinking, and for one reason: 2018 will...
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5.4KCommerceTrick Or Treat (Payments And Commerce Style)
Halloween is the scariest day of the year for children and parents alike – though for very different reasons. For kids, the proliferation...
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5.3KCommerceHappy Birthday To PYMNTS
On this day in history in the year 2009, the world of payments and commerce was changed forever. The skies parted, the...
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5.0KArtificial IntelligenceIt’s Not Smart Tech If It’s Foolish
When English mountaineer George Mallory was asked in 1923 by The New York Times why he wanted to attempt to climb Mount Everest...
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4.6KMerchant InnovationWhy Tech Fails Can (Sometimes) Be Inconveniently Fun
Some failures of technology are very serious. On Jan. 13, 2018, an emergency alert text went out all over Hawaii telling residents...
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3.7KDataData’s Influence And Contactless Vending, In Style At Fashion Week
This week, New York celebrated its 75th fall Fashion Week, with all the pomp, glamour, celebrity and hype that defines the event. The city was...
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5.2KRetailThe Kaepernick Controversy And Nike’s High-Risk Strategy
With 12 words, one photo and a tweet, Nike has managed to capture the news cycle this week – and much of...
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4.5KRetailDriving, Grilling And Surfing (For Deals) — Labor Day Weekend’s On
The unofficial end of summer is upon us. But before everyone can contentedly begin sipping their pumpkin spice latte and start Christmas...
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4.6KRetailThe Esoteric Economics Of Feeling The Burn
The Burn is upon us. This weekend, the hippest, coolest, most connected and most creative will converge on Nevada’s Black Rock desert...
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5.1KCashWhy Cash Was King For The Queen Of Soul
“Oooh, your kisses, sweeter than honey/ But guess what? So’s my money.” Writing about Aretha in a 2016 profile for The New Yorker, writer...
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4.6KArtificial IntelligenceThe Rumor-Filled Race For The Connected Car Future
Americans do a lot of driving. According to the latest edition of the American Driving Survey, each Americans spends about 290 hours a...
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4.2KSubscriptionsIs There Still A Happy Ending For MoviePass?
For the team at MoviePass, it’s been an interesting few weeks – or few months, depending on how one looks at it....
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5.8KRetailThe Shopper’s Brain On Bargains
Everyone loves a bargain, and there is something uniquely satisfying about not only getting whatever product one is after, but also getting...
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3.9KRetailWhy Publicity Stunts Go Wrong So Easily
When planning a large-scale marketing push or publicity stunt, it can be easy to overlook the fact that getting attention is hard,...
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6.6KRetailPutting A Price On Puppy Love
Here at PYMNTS, we see it all, often in the form of press releases – most of which claim to be the next big thing...
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4.4KRetailThe Lebron Effect On Payments
PYMNTS may not have the greatest sports experts in the world, but even we understood the big deal concerning the addition of Lebron James to the...
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4.9KMerchant InnovationThe Sounds Of Summer Gone Subscription
Every summer needs at least one song. In 1960, it was the Brian Hyland classic “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini.”...
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9.8KMobile CommerceIn Praise Of The Selfie And The Commerce It Drives
National Selfie Day has passed into the history books once again. For those us who need a few days to let go...
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4.6KRetailFather’s Day Commerce: Shopping For, With And To Be More Like Dad
Father’s Day has always had some trouble engendering the kind of enthusiasm for gift giving that Mother’s Day does — and we mean always....
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4.2KInternationalAround The World With World Cup Commerce
In one week, the FIFA World Cup Men’s Soccer competition will kick off in Russia. For most of the world that is big...
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4.5KRetailQ12018’s Big Retail Chill
“Blame It On the Rain” is more than the song that ended the musical career of early 90s sensation Milli Vanilli. The...
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4.2KMerchant InnovationMayochup, Beet-B-Qs And Rosé Marshmallows — The Summer Of 2018 In Strange Eating
It’s been called many things: Fry Sauce, Go Sauce, Russian Dressing, Dutch Sauce, Golf Sauce. On occasion, it’s called nothing in particular....
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6.0KRetailHow Toys R Us Kids Became Amazon Adults (And What’s Next)
There have been a number of great commercial jingles in the history of commercials — tunes so catchy that they stick, almost forever,...
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4.7KeCommerceDigital Magic And The Modern Mom
Mothers are special people. Moms kiss scraped knees, edit term papers, cook meals, clean rooms and listen to Disney soundtracks on repeat...
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5.4KMerchant InnovationTesla, Elon Musk And Much Ado About Earnings
Some things in life are predictable. The passage of seasons, the flow of time and, of course, quarterly earnings reports. Rain or...
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3.5KRetailBritain’s $2B Royal Commerce Boon
Spring has been called the season of renewal — new birth and new life — and it doesn’t get much better than the announcement...
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5.6KAmazonWeird Stuff People Buy On Amazon
In 2012, American internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and blogger Jason Calacanis gave a pretty bold prediction about Amazon Prime — then in...
