Things can't get much worse for many of the world's top luxury brands. This week Coach, the high-end handbag seller, announced that profits slumped 32% for the quarter. Same-store sales at Saks were down 23.2% in the first five months of this fiscal year. BMW's U.S. sales are off 28.9%. Bain & Company, the consulting firm, is forecasting a record 10% drop in the overall U.S. luxury market this year. According to Bain, luxury won't fully recover until 2012. ...

Think you should haggle only when buying a car or shopping in the streets of Morocco? In this recession, if you're not bargaining for everything everywhere, you're needlessly draining your wallet. According to the consulting firm America's Research Group, in October, 56% of consumers said they had recently tried to negotiate at retail outlets other than car dealerships. Of those hagglers, 50% got deals. When the company repeated the survey in May, 72% of consumers said they had tried ...

Should struggling boat dealers get the same sort of bailout from the federal government that is being doled out to the flailing auto industry? The Small Business Administration thinks so. It has just started a program that offers loans to help boat dealers to finance their inventory. But at least so far, few dealers seem to be interested. The National Marine Manufacturers Association says the U.S. recreational boating industry contributed $33.6 billion to the U.S. Economy ...

You've heard the propaganda: Zombies Are the New Vampires. Once relegated to back-list B movies like I Walked With a Zombie and Night of the Living Dead, those slow-moving, post-mortem drudges of West African mythic origin are now the hot horror creature. The PR is positively zombastic. They have their own anthem — Zombies Are the New Black, by the Philly pop-punk sextet The Wonder Years — and their own music video, which you may have seen in ...

John Spieker stood on the back porch of his newly rented Bailey, Colorado, home, thankful for his Good Samaritan landlord and worried that his previous home, parked in the driveway, wouldn't get him to work the next day. His 1977 Toyota Dolphin camper, which Spieker rescued from a salvage yard, had carried him, his wife, Katie, and 4-month-old son, Jacob, from Florida to Colorado earlier this summer, a cross-country sojourn in search of work. He was uncertain it could ...

Nobody can blame Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn for smiling this past week. VW has just turned the tables on would-be raider Porsche, placing Europe's biggest carmaker in the driver's seat for a planned merger with the much smaller and sportier firm. And while colleagues at rivals like Daimler, Fiat, General Motors and Peugeot are busy trying to survive the current economic storm, Winterkorn seems poised to throw VW into high gear. Compared to its battered competition, VW ...

In Washington there are bailouts to be had for banks and car companies, but what about Portland's Oregon Ballet Theatre? OBT's 20th anniversary season is around the corner, but its budget has dropped 28%. It's hard to celebrate in style when faced with a "very serious cash crunch," says executive director Jon Ulsh. And it's forcing arts groups to be ever more creative about where and how they look for support. President Barack Obama has asked the ...

The fortunes of Six Flags, the country's largest regional theme-park operator, have fallen more steeply than its roller coasters. It's not that the company's 20 parks across North America are all that bad. The current management team has worked hard to give the facilities a makeover and offer more family-friendly options. Attendance and revenues actually rose in 2008, despite the onset of the recession, and high gas prices, last summer. But the company's crippling $2.4 billion debt load led ...

The office of the wife of former British prime minister Tony Blair refused to comment Thursday on UK media reports that she has swine flu. A spokeswoman for Cherie Blair told CNN: "This is a private matter and we will not be making a comment." Blair was reported to have contracted the H1N1 virus, commonly known as swine flu, on Tuesday, according to the British Press Association and various media reports. PA reported that she has been given a ...

In the latest episode of Protesting French Workers Do the Darndest Things, laid-off employees at the New Fabris car-parts factory have come up with a novel method of negotiating their severance pay. Either they're given $41,000 per employee as part of the company's closure, they warn, or they'll blow the entire plant to smithereens. "We burned these machines here a couple of days ago as proof we're ready to go all the way," New Fabris employee Daniel Thébault told ...