Some shoppers have felt the need to stealthily scan items in stores with their smartphones. They'd rather not be accused of "showrooming," the practice in which one scopes out merchandise in a brick-and-mortar store, only to purchase it online—at Amazon, likely—for less money. This week, though, Target began actively encouraging mobile phone scans nationwide.
Imagine if you could pay for parking with a few taps of your phone, or after you’re done eating a bag of chips you could scarf down the perfectly edible packaging, too. Engineers and designers have been imagining these things, and more.
Apple fans can be a little crazy in their devotion to anything with an “i” tacked onto the front of it, but a new survey shows just how far that cult-like following stretches: Nearly half of people who use Apple devices would be willing to trust the computer giant with their savings.
AT&T no longer offers new subscribers the option to have unlimited data on their phones. So many subscribers feel lucky if they have been grandfathered in with their old plans and still pay $30 per month for unlimited data. But a new study indicates there’s about a 50-50 chance these customers are paying more than [...]
It happens all the time: You buy an item at one price, and then see others buy the same item a little later on for a much cheaper price. This is standard practice nowadays, but it still gets customers angry. How angry? A new study demonstrates the “boycott effect,” in which consumers who pay full [...]
Why is it that some consumers are constantly driven to possess the newest and hottest gadgets? The lure of the new applies to consumers with a particular personality style.
Each time a hot new Apple product appears, it causes a ripple effect in the marketplace, with a flurry of consumers buying, trading, selling, and reselling all versions of the item. The expected introduction of the iPad 3 on March 7 has already caused a mass trade-in of older iPads, and all signs point to [...]
A new report estimates that the average American worker drops nearly $1,100 annually on coffee. That’s not much less than what the average worker spends to commute to the job.
Updated: Thursday, 3:35 p.m. AT&T just announced that new data plans for smartphones and tablets will “give customers more data and value.” That’s true, technically. It’s also true that when the new data plan pricing system takes effect starting this Sunday, wireless bills for new AT&T customers will cost more.
Each holiday season, an especially hot, must-have gift emerges, often triggering behavior by desperate consumers that seems wacky and ugly at the time — and even more so in retrospect. (Example: Some guy made $6,000 selling Zhu Zhu pets on eBay last year.) This year, the behavior surrounding one hot item seems especially extreme — [...]
As BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion prepares to report its latest financial results, the device once so ubiquitous in business circles has been eclipsed.
