Halloween is all fun and screams, but the dark reality of our festival of the spooky and the sweet is this: Behind most of the chocolate you hand out, there are Third World workers -- many of them children -- suffering real horrors of their own.
Warren Buffett was clearly in a selling mood during the second quarter: He unloaded big stakes in consumer products companies and put Intel outside his portfolio altogether. But he didn't just sit on the cash.
Organic foods used to be niche products: hard to find and with limited selections. Now, organic is booming, and it's everywhere from Safeway to Costco. But the standards for what can be called "organic" have changed.
If you feel like your morning cup of coffee has gotten more bitter lately, its not a gustatory illusion: Many of America's major brands have been quietly tweaking their blends to keep their prices level.
Wal-Mart, the world's No. 1 retailer and the biggest seller of firearms in the United States, is dropping out of a U.S. conservative advocacy group that has been a lightning rod over voting and gun laws.
How much would you pay for a cup of Starbucks coffee? Starbucks hopes it's a lot, because it has been hiking prices on its brewed beverages. Meanwhile, everybody else in the coffee biz seems to be doing the exact opposite.
Kraft just celebrated the Oreo's centennial. But with sales at a stunning $2 billion a year, the Oreo is no longer just "Milk's favorite cookie," or America's, for that matter -- it's a global powerhouse.
He famously wears a hoodie, jeans and sneakers, and he was born the year Apple introduced the Macintosh. But Mark Zuckerberg is no boy-CEO. Facebook's chief executive turned 28 on Monday, setting in motion the social network's biggest week ever.
When the new Verismo coffeemaker shows up later this year, java buffs will be able to make Starbucks-quality espresso, cappuccino and latte beverages at home. But will the fancy European coffee drinks it'll crank out really be as good as Starbucks? Starbucks probably hopes so.
Executives ask themselves daily: "What can I do to give my company an edge?" Studies show that the answer may be as simple as hiring more women for executive and board of director roles. So you just might want to invest in these six companies that have done just that.
Hershey has been disturbingly lax in addressing abusive child labor practices in the Africa's cocoa industry, and recently, over 100,000 consumers let the company know they're not pleased. Now the chocolatier is changing its ways -- just in time.
Just a few months ago, coffee-related companies were as hot as a steaming cup of joe. Buoyant coffee bean prices, a growing consumer appetite for premium coffee, and a few company-specific events fueled a rally in the niche. But the hype has lost it caffeine buzz, and prices are way down.
For most of the past decade, buying Oreos or Trident gum for your kids meant sending money to the Marlboro Man. Those brands have gone their separate ways, but there are still many odd matches in the wild world of conglomerates, where companies own siblings that don't really look like one another.
If you're new to stock investing, you're probably looking for a slam dunk: a company you've heard of, with a business that's not hard to understand, a great reputation -- and great prospects for growth over the long term. Here's one tasty stock that offers all of that.
