In a recent post, I discussed how Macy's holiday sales fell well below expectations, prompting it to close 68 stores nationwide. The Limited, a once-popular women's clothing brand that offers workwear and casual attire, has met an even darker fate: It shuttered all of its stores around the country. Only its website will remain up and running, and it will continue to ship nationwide. Despite owning such popular companies as Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch, the brand fell on hard times in the mid-2000s. Sun Capital Partners, a private firm, took over its management in 2007. Still, like Macy's and other brick-and-mortar retailers, The Limited has had a hard time fending off e-commerce giants like Amazon, not to mention fast fashion stores like Forever 21 and H&M. The news comes as a shock to many people who have been shopping at The Limited for a long time, including my sister and wife. In my view, The Limited and Macy's chief problem bo...

In many of my posts, I muse about what life must have been like in the 18th century and express a burning desire to travel back to colonial times. One of the things I can't imagine, though, is living in an era devoid of the technology we've come to rely upon today. Indeed, the internet has revolutionized the world like nothing else. Who would have imagined we'd be availing of it to do so many things -- from buy groceries and find love to speak with friends and family in different corners of the world? But the internet wasn't always as vast as it is today, with more than one billion websites. In fact, on August 6, 1991, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee published the first-ever website while working at CERN, a physics lab in Switzerland. Appropriately, the site described the Web and how to use it. We should feel blessed to live in a time when technology affords us the opportunity to do things our ancestors could only dream of. You can buy virtually...

If there's something I love to do, it's to go to concerts. I actually went to one last night and had a whale of a time. Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels this way, and opportunistic individuals looking to make good money have taken notice. I read an article this morning stating that concertgoers have taken to eBay to sell sealed plastic bags containing air collected at the venue during the concert! I assumed that it had to be some kind of joke, but upon deeper research, it became clear this was no hoax. In fact, some of these air-containing bags are going for hundreds -- if not thousands, and people are actually placing bids! You're probably wondering how someone would even know for sure whether the air was really collected at the time of the event, or just done at, say, that person's house. I raised the same question, but I can only surmise that there's a way to certify the air as being authentic. Perhaps the seller photographs himself or her...