With trade associations forced by logistics to plan Washington “fly-ins” months ahead of time, all too often their members arrive pumped up to lobby on the big bill of the year only to find Congress has already passed it – or delayed it until next year. But that wasn’t the case with NRF’s annual Washington [...]
You could hear the anger rising in the voice of Representative Steve Womack as he stood before a Washington hotel ballroom jammed with retailers this week. He was explaining how customers in an electronics store back home routinely use smartphones to check online prices of merchandise, then click “buy it now” in plain sight of [...]
The Senate is set to take a final vote next week on one of the biggest high-tech public policy questions of our times – whether Internet retailers should be required to collect sales tax the same as local stores. But retail trade associations from across the country are using one of the most low-tech traditions [...]
Anybody’s who’s taken a high school history class knows how patents are supposed to work. Somebody like Thomas Edison spends years testing countless filaments in order to perfect the electric light bulb. He then obtains a patent that gives him exclusive rights to the invention, allowing him to make back what he spent on research [...]
The Queenstown Premium Outlets are about as far from Fifth Avenue or Rodeo Drive as you can get. Home to dozens of clothing stores ranging from J. Crew to Polo Ralph Lauren, the outlet center is located on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a rural area known locally for the World Championship Muskrat Skinning Contest and the [...]
It’s been a big week for sales tax fairness. First, the Senate voted 75-24 last Friday night to attach language to the federal budget resolution that would let states require online sellers to collect sales tax the same as local brick-and-mortar stores. The budget resolution itself is just a guideline for Congress, not actual law, [...]
The first time I ever wrote about health care reform was around 1980, when health maintenance organizations were becoming popular and I was a young newspaper reporter with a vested interest – I was making the move from my parents’ policy to getting health care benefits of my own. HMOs were the health care “reform” [...]
It’s the kind of nightmare retailers lose sleep over: customers are lined up out the door, their arms and carts bulging with merchandise and their wallets wide open. But there’s no tape in the cash register, none in the credit card machine and no fresh rolls to be found anywhere. With no paper to print [...]
When I first got “volunteered” to do PR on swipe fees half a dozen years ago, I thought this was a subject for what my old boss on Capitol Hill used to call “green eye-shaded accountants.” Who could care about a couple of percentage points on a credit or debit card transaction? But when I [...]