Word: firmly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Black Friday alone, preliminary figures indicate that sales rose a modest 0.5%, to $10.66 billion from $10.6 billion a year ago, according to ShopperTrak, a research firm that tracks activity at more than 50,000 retail outlets. Sales fluctuated by region, with the West scoring the biggest increase at 4.7%. This was followed by the Midwest, where sales rose 1.3%, and the South, which posted a 0.6% gain. The Northeast took the biggest hit, with sales tumbling 4.9%. ShopperTrak co-founder Bill Martin reiterated his earlier projection of a 1.6% sales increase for 2009's holiday season...
Online sales fared considerably better this past weekend. ComScore, a digital research firm, estimates that cyber sales on Black Friday totaled $595 million, making it the second heaviest online spending day so far in 2009 and up 11% from Black Friday 2008. PayPal said it saw a 20% increase in the amount of money people spent using PayPal to purchase items this Black Friday from last year and a 140% spike in the volume of payments made by mobile phones. The mobile-phone transaction increase indicates that buyers shopping at brick-and-mortar sites were likely price-checking items with...
...Money Tree Ulu Masen received a boost last year when U.S. bank Merrill Lynch pledged to invest $9 million over four years. "That gave the project a lot more certainty," says Dorjee Sun, chairman of Sydney-based firm Carbon Conservation, which is helping Aceh's provincial government devise the scheme. "It showed there was appetite from investment banks to buy these credits." Merrill Lynch calls Ulu Masen "the world's first commercially financed avoided deforestation project." Money has been followed by political muscle: a year later, Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, along with the governors of Wisconsin and Illinois, signed...
Barack Obama wrapped up the first Asia trip of his presidency after meeting with several key allies during a seven-day, four-nation tour. While critics called Obama overly deferential and said he did little to advance U.S. interests, the White House said the trip established a firm foundation for progress in the region...
...branded frozen meals. The idea that hard-core fans who study contestants' knife skills every week would choose to order from a giant company that's been delivering frozen food to rural America for 57 years doesn't surprise Harry Balzer, who tracks food trends for the market-research firm NPD Group. "You're going to eat four to five times today, and the one thing I know you're going to do is try to get someone else to prepare those meals," he says, noting that after two decades of no growth, microwave use has gone up 20% during...