Word: pasts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...puritans now. over the past two years, Americans have largely stopped spending more money than we had and running up credit-card tabs we couldn't pay off. To a great extent, we've been hectored into behaving more like our parsimonious Pilgrim forebears, whose expression of gratitude we celebrate Nov. 26. But the day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, and it's in need of all the consumption it can get: conspicuous, ridiculous, tasteless or otherwise. It could take a Snuggie Christmas to keep the economy on the mend. Last holiday...
...benefits have flowed in both directions. Take Walmart. By some estimates, over the past several years, the retailer alone has accounted for 15% of U.S. imports from China, which would mean in excess of $30 billion this year. As those goods enter the port of Long Beach, Calif., they require American workers to offload them, American trains and trucks to ship them and American workers to sell them. None of those facts are visible in the trade statistics, yet they are real. And take a company like Schnitzer Steel of Oregon, a once regional company that collects and sells scrap...
...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 the past three years...
Nationwide, employee insurance premiums have increased 131% over the past decade, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And it's well documented that smoking and obesity are associated with higher medical costs. That helps explain why 34% of respondents in a new Aon survey of more than 1,300 employers said they plan to introduce or increase financial incentives to encourage participation in wellness programs and why 17% plan to do the same for disease-management programs...
...supermarket chain implemented a voluntary wellness plan. Employees who take and pass tests for such things as blood pressure and cholesterol levels can reduce their annual insurance premiums by nearly $800. The company credits the plan with keeping its insurance costs flat on a per capita basis for the past five years...