Pfizer drops on weaker sales of specialty care drugs and emerging market slump, plans to buy back up to $10B in shares.

UK lawmakers prepare to grill Starbucks, Amazon and Google on taxes.

Con Edison makes progress in restoring NYC neighborhoods' power, while MTA offers free fares in bid to get New York moving again.

Apple's Cook fields his A-team before a wary Wall Street.

Avon sees sales drop in China and the U.K.

Barclay's hit with record U.S. fine.

Burger King tests delivery service in Florida.Continue reading...

New York City’s subways and buses have about 8.5 million riders every day. Transit cards are carried by everybody from construction workers to hedge-fund managers and tourists from across the globe, to nannies minding children and rap stars who own basketball teams and concert/sports venues. And now the MTA has finally debuted a way for marketers to reach that card-clutching audience by placing advertisements on both sides of the MetroCard.

In the launch campaign for the two-sided branding opportunity, New Yorkers may find themselves swiping cards with Gap ads across the front of them that not only spread the Gap name but offer 20 percent discounts for those that visit the retailer’s new flagship store — the first ad to appear on the front of a MetroCard, the fare payment medium on all New York City subways and buses, since the mid-1990s.Continue reading...

Everybody is looking for cash these days, but how to drum it up when everybody is also paying extra close attention to where a wallet’s contents are disappearing to. Cities are no different. Government services are hurting for cash and there are only so many ways to generate more dough.

So cities are getting creative, the New York Times reports. Baltimore is currently trying to sell space on its fire engines to raise some extra pennies. And why not? The city’s current budget has made the elimination of three city fire companies necessary this summer.

Philadelphia is selling ad space on its subway fare cards and one of the city’s main train stops is now named for AT&T. Chicago is selling naming rights to its eleven "L" subway stations. As for the Times' hometown, the naming rights for the Atlantic Avenue subway station at the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn were sold in 2009, and the MTA implemented the Barclays name change in May.Continue reading...

New York’s Grand Central Station doesn’t turn 100 until next year but it is already throwing itself a party. The Big Apple's landmark train station this week unveiled a new logo. Yes, we know — who knew it even had an old one?

You can bet that a few of the 750,000 daily commuters that come through the 80,000-square-foot place had some idea. The new one features “an image of the big clock that's a popular meeting spot in the marble-paved main concourse,” the AP notes.

Grand Central currently is home only to the Metro North train line as well as sitting on top of a slew of subway lines. However, even more folks will be coming through the terminal in 2016, when the new tunnels that will allow LIRR (Long Island Railroad) trains to come there will be completed.Continue reading...

Apple is promoting its Dec. 9th store opening in New York's Grand Central Station with a fun interactive graphic on its website that mimics the old school train station signs that flip tiles with each update. Click here to check it out.

While it was rumored to open before Thanksgiving, the Big Apple's shiny new Apple store will open at New York City’s famed Grand Central Terminal on Dec. 9 just in time to rake in the holiday-season bucks as stressed-out commuters make their daily runs to and from the train.

But the New York Post reports that there are a few government officials who are thinking an investigation is in order after the technology giant got itself the deal of the century with the 140-year-old station’s owners, the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

Of the more than 100 retailers in the station, Apple's store — the brand's biggest sales outlet to date — will be the only one that “won’t be required to share with the MTA a portion of its revenues above a certain threshold,” the Post reports. Plus, most rents in the station go for $200 or $300 per square foot while Apple is paying $60.

Those kinds of numbers have raised the eyebrows of New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli as well as State Sen. Tony Avella, who asked on Thursday for an investigation to take place.Continue reading...

New York's Grand Central Terminal is about to become a whole lot busier, and branded.

In a final vote today, New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority gave the go-ahead to Apple to a 23,000 square feet store in Grand Central. The retail deal will create of the largest stores to ever be built in the iconic station’s main concourse, and the largest in the Apple brand’s retail footprint, bumping its current largest retail location, in London's Convent Garden, to second spot.Continue reading...

The problem with making a bad PR gaffe is that subsequent PR gaffes become magnified in significance. Take United Airlines, which has run into its second 9/11-related oops in a week.Continue reading...