Consumer

The US Open, which kicked off on Monday, is offering the largest purse in tennis history – $75 million. Both singles champions will take home $3.6 million, while first round losers take home $100,000 for the first time. Professional tennis  players are essentially self-employed, covering their own expenses, including travel, accommodation and wages for coaches and other staff. Those who ...

Yesterday was National Radio Day. Austria and Germany are, according to a Statista Consumer Insights survey, the countries where people are most likely to switch on a radio. 17% of Austrians and 16% of Germans say they listen to the radio for at least 11 hours a week. By contrast under 5% of the citizens of  Mexico and  Korea considered themselves ...

During ing the coronavirus pandemic, the share of people doing no traveling at all rose globally, but save for a few exception, the market has normalized now. In 2021, the share of people saying they had done no traveling in the past 12 months grew as high as 29 percent in the United Kingdom and South Korea, up from just ...

In 2023,  the EU countries with the highest proportions of citizens at risk of poverty or social exclusion were: Romania (32 percent), Bulgaria (30 percent), Spain (26.5 percent) and Greece (26.1 percent). The definition of those at risk of poverty or social exclusion is people living in households facing at least one of the three risks of poverty and exclusion: ...

Inflation has outstripped wage growth in Finland, Italy, Canada, Australia, Japan, the Czech Republic, Sweden and New Zealand according to the OECD Employment Outlook 2024, with  real wages decreasing by more than 5% and Sweden seeing wages fall 7.5% The United States fared better than others as real wages were 0.8% lower in Q1 of 2024 than in Q4 of ...

It was International Friendship Day on July 30. Germans, and to a slightly lesser extent the Spanish, are particularly likely to include spending time with others as one of their main personal pastimes, according to data from a Statista Consumer Insights survey. By contrast, respondents in the US and in urban India were far less likely to consider socialising as ...

In 2023, world beer production decreased by nearly 17m hectolitres (hl) to 1.88 billion hl. In Europe, production fell by 9m hl, largely driven by a drop in output from the UK (-3.3m hl), Germany (-2.9m hl) and Poland (-2m hl). In the Americas, output fell by 7.2m hl with  U.S. production dropping 9.9m hl while South American production rose 2.4m ...

My friend and colleague Alun Williams points me to the term “Enshittification” to describe the process by which a once-useful Internet service becomes corrupted by commercialisation. The term was invented by tech writer Cory Doctorow, who describes enshittification like this:  “First they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; ...

With the recent Anbani wedding allegedly costing over $500 million, data from The Knot represents a return to sanity, estimating that an  average wedding in the US cost $35,000 in 2023, or around $300 per guest, when not accounting for jewellery, engagement rings or a honeymoon. It was followed by the UK at $28,500 or $320 per head, Spain at ...

Emojis have become a staple of electronic communication since their inception in the 1990s and people of all ages and on all continents love to use them. While their number keeps on growing every year due to new releases by the Unicode Consortium, the pictograms are increasingly competing with gifs, stickers and avatars for users’ attention Emoji generation has been ...