By Maxine Shapiro, KERA 90.1 business commentator
Dallas, TX – Numbers are a very powerful tool when telling a story. How old are we, how much weight have we lost or gained, or how many people are still out of work? Figures can tell it all. I'm Maxine Shapiro with KERA Marketplace Midday.
He's 55 years old, and was sentenced to 7 years, 3 months in prison for insider trading. Sam Waksal, ex-CEO of ImClone, also must pay a fine and back taxes of $4.3 million within the next three months. He's the first chief executive of the many high-profile corporate scandals to be sentenced to prison.
Tommy Hilfiger can't believe it. Its men's wear sales dropped almost 12% last year. Retailers all across the board are either downsizing their men's apparel departments or eliminating them altogether. According to NPD Group, a market research firm, just three years ago, women shopped for 76% of the men. Well, now that more women work, they can only buy for less than half of them. And when left to shop for themselves, men do just fine without all the choices women are accustomed to.
The working woman is also a growing trend across the ocean. Unemployment for British women hit an all-time low of 4.4%. Britain's national unemployment went up a scant for the February-April period to 5.1%. And coincidently, that's the exact number of adult women unemployed in the U.S.
And both sexes must be very concerned about how we look - at least how our hair looks. Would you believe, according the Wall Street Journal, Americans spent $50 billion on haircuts, shampoos and other beauty products last year?
And it's got to be more than how good her hair looks on the front cover, because Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's sold 200,000 copies of her memoir yesterday. Publisher Simon and Schuster announced it set a record for first-day sales of a non-fiction. For KERA Marketplace Midday, I'm Maxine Shapiro.
Marketplace Midday Reports air on KERA 90.1 Monday - Friday at 1:04 p.m.
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