Author: Editor

Miguel Marquez has spent years making complex subjects easier to understand.Originally from Spain, the 47-year-old earned a Ph.D. in French linguistics from Indiana University Bloomington and now teaches French, Spanish, and personal finance at a university in Shenzhen, China.Through teaching personal finance and pursuing financial independence himself, Marquez has learned that saving for such a distant goal can feel either too intimidating to begin or too tedious to sustain over decades.He found a way to make the process more manageable by using “financial freedom milestones,” a concept he first discovered on the Money Flamingo blog. Rather than treating financial independence…

McDonald’s customers are looking for value. Some say they aren’t finding it there.Patrons of the Golden Arches told Business Insider that they’re not impressed with the chain’s prices lately. Some are reducing their visits and are critical of the food quality delivered for the cost. While McDonald’s still has fans, some diners are reducing their visits.McDonald’s executives have acknowledged that they’ve had trouble breaking through to customers. The company’s shares are down 9.6% this year.US sales growth slowed during the chain’s second quarter, it said Tuesday. CEO Chris Kempczinski pointed to trouble rolling out an under-$3 value menu — ranging…

PwC has canceled the signature finale to its summer internship program: a multi-day trip to Disney World.Managers at the Big Four firm told members of its 2026 summer intern class they wouldn’t be ending their internships with a trip to Orlando, according to three PwC interns who spoke to Business Insider.PwC confirmed that the traditional trip — a perk that has been running for all but five of the last 20 years — had been canceled.The multi-day event, which was for interns who received full-time job offers, was typically held in mid-August to celebrate the end of the summer internship.…

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sia and Mikael Lilja, who moved from Sweden to Japan, where they bought and are restoring an old house. It’s been edited for length and clarity.We’ve been together for 12 years and married for the last 4.In 2020, we bought a piece of land in a small town about 15 minutes outside Malmö in Sweden, and started building our dream home. We were planning for our long-term future: have kids and live close to family.By the end of 2023, we were able to move in, although there were still projects —…

Pedestrians pass by a Sweetgreen restaurant on Aug. 4, 2026 in San Francisco, California.Heather Diehl | Getty ImagesSweetgreen on Thursday cut its full-year outlook and is now projecting steeper same-store sales declines due to diner fears of eating fresh produce during the ongoing cyclospora outbreak.Shares of the salad chain fell more than 15% in extended trading.Sweetgreen has not been implicated in the ongoing outbreak that has sickened at least 10,000 people and led to two deaths, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Food and Drug Administration has pointed to iceberg lettuce supplied by a…

Savers Value Village is launching a new platform leveraging artificial intelligence to help optimize product pricing, the company told CNBC exclusively, as the tricky-to-price thrift segment gains traction around the world. The new platform, called ThriftIQ, uses AI to reduce the work needed to price items across the men’s and women’s apparel assortment and bring more consistency.”We’re getting clear sell-throughs, larger baskets, it’s helping our new stores ramp more favorably, and obviously there is the profitability improvements,” CEO Mark Walsh told CNBC.The tool has already been deployed in 58 pilot stores, according to the company, pricing more than 25 million…

An American Airlines Boeing 737-823 passneger aircraft moves along the tarmac at Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD) on August 23, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. Daniel Slim | AFP | Getty ImagesAmerican Airlines elite frequent flyers have to say goodbye to the free coach-to-business leap on several long-haul domestic routes.Starting Aug. 25, American said it will stop putting frequent flyers with elite status on the upgrade list for business class on some of its transcontinental and Hawaii routes. They’ll be put on the list for a complimentary upgrade to premium economy instead.The change is the latest sign of how American and other…

A self-described AI “enthusiast,” Moira Gilchrist, Philip Morris International’s chief global communications officer, said that audience personas the company has created to test its messages have been a valuable application of artificial intelligence.”Those personas are absolutely fascinating,” she said. “The feedback that we get really helps us to improve how we’re communicating.”In a video interview with CMO Insider, Gilchrist said that PMI, whose portfolio includes smoke-free brands like Zyn and Iqos, is focusing on optimizing its owned channels, including its corporate website, for large language models. Gilchrist, who spoke to us after the first quarter of the financial year, also…

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kelly Ehlers, the founder and CEO of The Evoke Agency. It has been edited for length and clarity.I’m the founder of a social media agency that brings in millions of dollars a year. I have a team of 45, and we work with incredible brands, from G.E. appliances to Henkel to KraftHeinz. We’ve had a lot of these brands as clients for 15 or 16 years.Early in my career, I was working an executive corporate job in a male-dominated industry. I had to hide that I was pregnant for five months,…

What do you do if you’re a big media company that owns a bunch of cable TV networks?In many cases, you try to get rid of them. Just this week, Disney dumped its half-ownership of A&E and other networks for $1.2 billion,Versant CEO Mark Lazarus doesn’t have that option: The bulk of his company is a collection of cable networks, spun out of Comcast earlier this year. Has to run them, not sell them.So Lazarus has to do three things at once: Manage his declining cable business, use the cash it still generates to build new businesses for a post-cable…