PriceIncrease

Sirius XM Radio raised its prices in January and totally got away with it. Last summer, Netflix tried it and got burned. So what did the satellite radio giant do smarter than the streaming video king?

Colgate-Palmolive, stung by higher costs, saw fourth-quarter net income decline more than 5 percent but said Thursday that it had raised prices in North America for the first time in two and a half years.

The warning came in April 2009, a Starbucks representative tells me: during the analyst call to review the second fiscal quarter results for 2009. CEO Howard Schultz issued the bland-seeming statement, saying price "fine-tuning" would occur, "minor changes that will lower prices on some of our...