Comment on U.S. has skirted a recession, but watch for big shifts in trade and immigration policies, economist advises

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence tools that allow people to efficiently produce novel and detailed online reviews with almost no work has put merchants, service providers and consumers in uncharted territory, watchdog groups and researchers say. Phony reviews have long plagued many popular consumer websites, such as Amazon and Yelp.

Macy’s and Kohl’s are closing one store each in Colorado as part of the department store chains’ plans to dump underperforming stores this year. Macy’s released a list Thursday of 66 closures that includes the store at the Northfield Stapleton shopping center in Denver. The company said the majority of the locations on the list will be shut during the first quarter. Macy’s earlier closed the Streets at Southglenn Furniture store in Centennial. Kohl’s disclosed Thursday which 27 of its roughly 1,150 locations nationally it will shutter.

PHOENIX — After Helen Wang finishes work at the new microchip plant looming over the Arizona desert, she drives home to start her side hustle: cooking pots of spicy beef soup and pork noodles for Taiwanese colleagues who are hungry for a taste of home. There were almost no Asian groceries or Taiwanese restaurants nearby when the first workers began landing on the northern edge of Phoenix two years ago to work at a chip factory operated by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Since then, the workers and their families have turned a mostly white corner of strip-mall suburbia into a Tiny Taipei. Taiwanese businesses are popping up near taquerias and nail salons.

Economist Elliot Eisenberg makes a yearly trek to provide the Denver Metro Association of Realtors with a forecast. On Thursday he provided a mea culpa to his audience for telling them last January to prepare for a recession that never came. “I was wrong,” he said, noting that U. S. consumers have proven “remarkably resilient” and that he is optimistic the country can pull off something rarely seen — a sharp hike in interest rates without a downturn, also known as a “soft landing.” He and other recession forecasters expected consumers would run out of spending steam as their pandemic savings cushion, which hit $2.1 trillion in August 2021, dwindled.

For years, an at-home beauty device meant a hair dryer or maybe an electric toothbrush. Today, they have never been more omnipresent or more advanced, with heavily marketed products that range from $500 LED masks that promise to reduce fine lines, pigmentation and redness to laser wands that permanently (or so they claim) remove unwanted body hair. The appeal, in part, is the idea of being able to bring home medical-grade self-care without stepping into a dermatologist’s or plastic surgeon’s office.

Neighborhood retail center Edgewater Public Market has been acquired for $25.5 million by Denver-based commercial real estate investment firm CentrePoint Properties. Colorado-based property management firm LCP Management made the deal with CentrePoint. Its sister company, LCP Development,  opened Edgewater Public Market in a former King Soopers grocery store in November 2019.