Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Big-box checkout is quietly being rewired, and the cost of tapping a rewards card is at the center of the overhaul. Between a sweeping legal settlement involving Visa and Mastercard, a fierce fight in Congress, and new state rules on surcharges, the price of paying with credit at major retailers is poised to shift from…
Verizon has quietly rewritten the rules that once made it relatively painless to take your phone to another carrier. A long standing promise to unlock devices after a short period has been replaced with a far tougher standard that keeps new phones tied to Verizon for most of a year. The change arrives just as…
New York City’s latest attempt to shore up delivery worker pay has set off a fierce clash between regulators, gig platforms, workers, and customers. A new tipping rule, paired with an aggressive minimum pay regime, is forcing apps to change how they nudge users to reward couriers and how they structure fees. The result is…
Tesla is stripping key highway automation from new cars in the United States and Canada and shifting those capabilities behind a monthly subscription, turning what used to be a built-in selling point into an ongoing bill. The change affects familiar Autopilot behaviors on multi-lane roads and folds them into the company’s paid Full Self-Driving (Supervised)…
Shoppers who rely on plastic for their weekly runs at Walmart and Target are about to feel a new kind of sticker shock. A long running fight over credit card “swipe fees” is reaching a turning point, and the fallout is expected to land directly at the checkout counter. Instead of quietly absorbing rising processing…
Amazon’s chief executive is telling shoppers to brace for a new wave of higher prices, and this time the warning is not about temporary holiday surcharges or one-off fees. The company that helped train consumers to expect fast, cheap delivery is now signaling that a broad cost shock is building across its marketplace, its logistics…
Grocery shoppers are being greeted by a new line on their receipts, a small checkout fee that can quietly snowball into a meaningful hit to the monthly food budget. A 10 cent charge on paper carryout bags might sound trivial, but for households that rely on store bags several times a week, it can add…
President Donald Trump told Americans that by Jan. 20, credit card companies would be breaking the law if they charged more than 10 percent interest. Yet as that deadline passed, card statements still showed rates in the high teens and twenties, and banks kept business as usual. The gap between the promise and reality lies…
Across the United States, a quiet new line on grocery receipts is stirring loud frustration. A wave of carryout bag rules and checkout tweaks is turning what looks like pocket change into a recurring hit for shoppers who already feel squeezed by higher food prices. Many are discovering that the fee that seems trivial on…
The United States is marking 250 years with a fresh set of circulating coins, but the designs are already sparking debate over what, and who, is missing. Instead of spotlighting some of the country’s hardest fought struggles, the new images lean heavily on familiar founders and broad patriotic themes. That tension between commemoration and omission…