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Etsy’s employee costs have grown even as gross merchandise sales have been near flat, CEO says.. Etsy Inc. shares fell more than 7% in Wednesday trading to place among the S&P 500 index’s biggest laggards after the e-commerce company announced layoff plans. The company intended to cut about 11% of its staff, or roughly 225 employees, as it embarks on a broader restructuring. ... We are operating in a very challenging macro and competitive environment, and [gross merchandise sales] has remained essentially flat since 2021. This means we are not bringing our sellers more sales, which is the single most...

VIDEOBill Mitchell's big grift is apparently over. His Ron DeSantis money well has apparently dried up leaving poor Shill Bill not only broke but severely constipated as well. As an excuse for pulling out of the DeSantis shill racket, Shill Bill recently claimed he conveniently stubbed his toe while watching a football game which sent him to the hospital. Which is more ridiculous? Getting hospitalized for a stubbed toe or for having an ingrown toenail? While in the hospital, Mitchell whined that shilling for DeSantis sent him to the poorhouse with a horrible case of constipation to boot. His GiveSendGrift...

Woke books that were bought for huge advances by 'inexperienced' editors have flopped commercially, insiders say. 'Ideological fanatics' allowing their politics to dictate professional decisions have seen profits slump, according to industry experts. Among the works responsible for huge losses is a hotly anticipated memoir by the actor Eliot Page about his journey transitioning. 'Pageboy' sold for a $3 million advance but has sold just 68,000 copies. Industry standards suggest for publishers, paying roughly $7 per book sold is considered a good deal It means that even novels that sell tens of thousands of copies such as Page's can still...

The US chief marketing officer of Anheuser-Busch InBev is stepping down amid the company's continuing slump in sales, following Bud Light's disastrous collaboration with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney earlier in the year. Benoit Garbe is set to leave his role at Bud Light's parent company at the end of the year, it was announced Wednesday, 'in order to embark on a new chapter in his career.' Serving as the company's CMO for just over two years, his tenure was marred by an April marketing debacle where a Bud Light partnership with Mulvaney led to a boycott by the brand's customers...

***[T]he ESG movement, which pushed big investors and money management firms to consider progressive environmental responsibility, social justice issues and corporate governance policies when making investments and voting shares at stockholder meetings. This is a legitimate, if not necessarily successful, investment strategy for the individual investor. Still, it creates conflicts for large asset managers such as BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street which — until the onset of the Biden administration, at least — the law and convention dictated should consider only the need to generate the maximum return on investment possible for their clients when making investment decisions. *** Eventually,...

Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary said Tuesday that clean energy funds and stocks are dropping because investors realized that clean energy companies can not make a profit. Several stocks and exchange-traded funds in the “clean energy” sector, including Enphase Energy, the Invesco Solar ETF, the iShares Global Clean Energy ETF and the First Trust Global Wind Energy ETF have seen substantial drops in their share prices in the last year. .. Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, spends $370 billion to combat climate change and is loaded with green energy provisions, including a $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles,...

President Biden is weighing a wide-ranging supplemental funding request for roughly $100 billion that would include funding for Israel and Ukraine, according to people familiar with the matter. The sweeping measure would also include funding for border security and assistance to countries in the Indo-Pacific region, including Taiwan, the people said. Biden administration officials said the package, which would include funding for the full fiscal year, hasn’t yet been finalized. The administration is expected to send the package to Congress in the coming days. Bloomberg earlier reported the $100 billion funding figure.

Link only, Gannett News: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/08/31/trump-lawyers-save-america-indictments/70648789007/

On Aug. 14, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law. Eighty-eight years later, our Social Security system is among the most successful and popular government programs in history. Nearly every worker pays premiums (Federal Insurance Contributions or FICA) for Social Security. In return, they receive insurance benefits when they retire, become disabled, or lose a family breadwinner. Social Security is secure, efficient, and the most important source of retirement income for the vast majority of Americans. Social Security does have one major flaw, though: Its benefits are too low. The average Social Security benefit is only $1,700...

Former President Donald Trump’s political action committee, which began last year with $105 million, now has less than $4 million left in its account after paying tens of millions of dollars in legal fees for Trump and his associates. The dwindling cash reserves in Trump’s PAC, called Save America, have fallen to such levels that the group has made the highly unusual request of a $60 million refund of a donation it had previously sent to a pro-Trump super PAC. This money had been intended for television commercials to help Trump’s candidacy, but as he is the dominant front-runner for...

Ghislaine Maxwell is so broke she may have to represent herself in her legal appeal against her conviction on child sex-trafficking charges, it was claimed last night. The disgraced socialite has told friends she is penniless and has no money to hire lawyers. Maxwell's former marital home in Manchester-by-the-Sea in Massachusetts was sold last week for £4.5 million but it is unlikely that she will see a penny from the sale. While she alleges that her money was used originally to buy the property, it was in the name of a company controlled by her ex-husband Scott Borgerson, who has...

Unilever is a £100 billion company, one of the biggest beasts on the London stock market ... But have its bosses gone off their trolley in their mania for 'woke' values? Terry Smith, a leading fund manager and long-term shareholder in Unilever, thinks so. He used his annual letter to his own investors as the forum for an extraordinary broadside at the company's top executives, accusing them of having 'lost the plot'. ... Critics have been uneasy for several years about Unilever's politically correct antics. At times, its posturing would have seemed more at home in an undergraduate common room...

The Westfield mall used to be the beating retail heart of San Francisco. Westfield stopped paying the mortgage on this shopping mall .. Foot traffic has plunged ... life becomes untenable for some residents. They leave, like some did in the pandemic, or they live in RVs or on the street. ... the cracks are beginning to show. One of the biggest fissures so far was.. the news that Westfield stopped paying its $558 million mortgage and is surrendering its namesake shopping mall to lenders. This is the biggest mall in San Francisco. When tourists come to experience this famous...

Walt Disney's Pixar Animation Studios has eliminated 75 positions including those of two executives behind box office flop Lightyear in what are the the first significant job cuts at the studio in a decade. The cuts included Lightyear director Angus MacLane, a 26-year animator who was part of the senior creative team on such acclaimed films as Toy Story 4 and Coco. Michael Agulnek, Pixar's vice-president of worldwide publicity since 2015, was also laid off. Also departing the studio is Galyn Susman, a producer on Lightyear.

Bud Light and its parent company Anheuser-Busch are sponsoring at least three different upcoming Pride events despite backlash over the partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, a social media influencer who identifies as transgender. Bud Light is listed as a sponsor on the Cincinnati Pride Parade website. Planned Parenthood and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, which medically transitions minors, are both also listed. Meanwhile, in St. Louis, Missouri, where Anheuser-Busch is headquartered, the company is listed as the presenting sponsor of the St. Louis Pride Parade. A sponsorship packet explains that there are only four “presenting sponsor” slots available. The “Rainbow” sponsorship tier,...

Disney (DIS) CEO Bob Iger revealed that more price hikes will be coming to the company's streaming services. "The pricing changes we've already implemented have proven successful, and we plan to set a higher price [for] our ad-free tier later this year to better reflect the value of our content offerings," Iger said during Wednesday's quarterly earnings call. Disney currently offers ad-free options for Hulu and Disney+. He added the company will "continue optimizing our pricing model to reward loyalty and reduce churn, to increase subscriber revenue for the premium ad-free tier and drive growth of subscribers who opt for...

Retailers abandon downtown San Francisco in droves. Nordstrom is the latest, signaling the death of the area. .... Nordstrom closes two stores and Saks Off 5th says goodbye as well. ... Walgreens and Whole Foods Leave ... San Francisco’s Dying Downtown The San Francisco Standard says Nordstrom’s Exit From San Francisco Calls Downtown Mall’s Future Into Question The Nordstrom at Westfield will close at the end of August, the company confirmed on Tuesday. The retailer’s exit will leave a gaping vacancy that could be very difficult to fill: the store sprawls across 312,000 square feet and five floors. A Nordstrom...

Cuba's communist government has cancelled Monday's traditional May Day parade because of acute fuel shortages. Every year hundreds of thousands of people are bussed in from across the island to fill Havana's Revolution Square on International Workers' Day. It is the first time since the 1959 revolution that the celebrations have been cancelled for economic reasons. In recent weeks long queues have formed at petrol stations, with drivers often waiting for days. Earlier this month, President Miguel Diaz-Canel said Cuba was only receiving two-thirds of the fuel it needs, adding that suppliers were failing to fulfil contractual obligations. While Cuba...

Maybe he’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline 💄 Dylan Mulvaney! The new face of Maybelline, ladies! VIDEO AT LINK!.......................

Bed Bath & Beyond didn't pay severance to thousands of workers. The company laid off more than 1,000 workers in New Jersey days before a new severance law took effect. In early February, Diane Zaccagna learned that the Bed Bath & Beyond store in New Jersey where she had been working for 18 and a half years was closing and she would be laid off. "We knew Bed Bath was in trouble, but we thought we would have at least a couple more years," said Zaccagna, 50, who started out as a part-time employee and climbed her way to a...