In 2012, while analyzing the end of the era of big-box store dominance, Bloomberg News reported: “After 50 years of putting mom and pops out of business, big-box retail is having a mid-life crisis. A slow economy has hurt same-store sales, narrowing margins at big stores. Meanwhile, consumers, armed with price-comparison technology, are visiting more stores...
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Wise guys
When life lessons become trend lessons
There is more to trends than forecasting them to find business and investment opportunities. For me, I do my best to live them. One of the biggest, most important lifestyle trends I learned in my early days of forecasting is Whole Health Healing. My ex-wife had long been suffering from ulcerative colitis and was hospitalized several times....
Welcome to your new magazine
With this edition of the Trends Journal, we are debuting a number of features and a fresh new look designed to connect your lives — your passions, interests and needs — to the trends evolving all around you. It is an exciting time for the Trends Research Institute. The improvements we are debuting with this...
Inside San Diego’s fab lab
Engineer Dylan Drotman loves robots. He’s been building them for years — and he wants to share that love. His vision: a build-your-own robot kit for kids that would cost less than $500. Kids would assemble the parts, wire the robot, program it, and, in the process, learn about servos, LEDs, computer code and other...
Fabricating our future
The sign should read: Caution — revolutionaries at work. But the people who come to this reclaimed art studio on the campus of the University of Illinois in Champagne aren’t making gasoline bombs or arguing political theory. On a typical Tuesday evening, one might be testing a prototype of a new design for a wind...
Looking for garbage? Turn on CNN.
• VIDEO: Objects spotted in missing plane search• VIDEO: MH370: China rules out 11 locations• VIDEO: Malaysia: Flight 370 went down in ocean• VIDEO: Searching for plane… and answers• VIDEO: Iranian MH370 passenger ‘wanted freedom’• VIDEO: Looking to past for Flight 370 answers• VIDEO: Still no results in MH370 search• VIDEO: Communication issues hurt plane...
The search for flight MH 370
The hunt for missing flight MH 370 proved quite the media-frenzy fodder for CNN. What a marathon that network put on, despite the scarcity of any real news. That didn’t stop CNN from tagging every insignificant nuisance “breaking news” or from reaching out to drag every retired aviation “expert” back into the talking-heads fray, and asking them the...
Angry. Desperate. Outraged.
The demonstrations are invariably reported as a reaction to government austerity initiatives, as if the absence of those measures would leave demonstrators with no reason to protest. But look at these photos. Look at the faces. From the young, who have virtually nothing to lose — no jobs, no savings, no future — to pensioners,...
Venezuela
This South American country of 29 million, which the American public knows little about but learned to dislike during the 14-year rule of the late Hugo Chávez, is in the midst of economic calamity, political violence and social unrest. Inflation is galloping along at nearly 60 percent. There are widespread shortages of basic foods and...