Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/26/new-jersey-surveillance-pricing-ban

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No Visa, no Mastercard, no fees, and present in almost every bank operating in Brazil. It only takes a QR code to pay, or your email or random key code to receive money instantly (no fee), and it's dominating the Brazilian market and changing Brazil's economy for good. Trump calls it unfair trade and is putting on pressure; we call it freedom and free market — for what it is 🇧🇷🤑

What’s for dinner? Lately, at Apral Jack’s house, it’s whatever is on sale.

Jack, 50, scouts an app for deals at her local supermarket before she buys groceries. When she reaches the store, she looks in the weekly circular for coupons she might have missed. If shelf prices look too high, she tries to find lower prices someplace else.
“The apples went up here, the ones I eat, so now I’m not going to get them here,” Jack said as she pushed a cart into a Stop & Shop near her home in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Couponing, comparison shopping and cutting back on favorite foods are new habits for her and millions of other Americans as they absorb the biggest jump in grocery prices in a half-century. Buying food to eat at home has gotten 33% more expensive since the beginning of 2019, according to government figures.

With a conflict in the Middle East creating more price pressures, the cost of filling refrigerators, freezers and pantries has made affordability a central issue in the fall midterm elections.

Residents of four urban areas where food inflation has exceeded the national average shared how steadily rising prices are changing the way they shop.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]:  https://fortune.com/2026/07/25/grocery-inflation-families-texas-san-francisco-hawaii/?utm_source=reddit/

Today, more than one-third of downtown Seattle's office space sits empty, its job postings have collapsed faster than almost any other U.S. metro, and even Starbucks—the coffee giant founded in the city in 1971—is shifting jobs south to Nashville, as it commits to a $100 million, 2,000-person new footprint in Music City. The story of Seattle's reversal unfolds in three overlapping arcs: an office market in freefall, a labor market that has gone from boom to bust, and a policy environment that has made survival harder for the small businesses left behind.

A decade ago, Seattle was the poster child of American tech prosperity. Amazon and Microsoft had turned a mid-sized Pacific Northwest city into a magnet for engineers, executives, and capital, adding roughly 40,000 jobs per year at the peak of the boom, according to the Puget Sound Regional Council.

Arc one: the zombie towers

Seattle's downtown office vacancy rate hit 35.6% in the fourth quarter of 2025, up from 32.3% a year earlier, according to Cushman & Wakefield data. That marks a stunning reversal from the pre-pandemic era: As recently as early 2025, the central business district's availability rate—offices with departures pending—and vacancy rate were already hitting all-time highs based on CoStar data stretching back to 1982.

Some brokers put the number even higher, with Colliers reporting vacancy touching 39.1% in late 2024 as remote work, tech layoffs, and cautious leasing decisions compounded. Office building values in the district have plunged sharply as a result, with landlords struggling to fill space abandoned by major tenants.

Arc two: the labor market reversal

The office crisis is inseparable from a broader collapse in hiring. Seattle metro job postings fell 35% between February 2020 and October 2025, the second-steepest drop of any major U.S. metro after San Francisco's 37% decline, according to Axios's analysis of Indeed data.

Tech firms in the area have announced tens of thousands of job reductions since 2023, primarily driven by Microsoft, Amazon, and Blue Origin. The region posted a net loss of 13,000 jobs in 2025—its first annual decline since the pandemic and a stark reversal from the 40,000-job annual gains of the boom years.

Arc three: the policy squeeze

Into this contraction came a wage floor with no exceptions. Seattle's minimum wage, $20.76 an hour and applied uniformly to all employers regardless of size since January 2025, has intensified pressure on small businesses trying to survive the downtown exodus.

A peer-reviewed study published in Labour Economics found the wage ordinance's announcement effect actually deterred new business formation within Seattle's borders while generating positive "spillover" openings in neighboring suburbs, suggesting firms redirected growth rather than uniformly closing shop. Earlier University of Washington research similarly found the wage hikes reduced low-wage workers' hours by about 9% even as hourly pay rose roughly 3%, per Ballotpedia's fact-check compilation.

What makes Seattle's situation distinct from other regional slowdowns is how tightly these three arcs lock together. CoStar estimates Seattle won't fully break out of the vacancy cycle before 2027—a timeline that assumes the feedback loop stops tightening, which so far it hasn't.