Blog Posts by Lisa Scherzer

This year's presidential election was supposed to put a hold on retailers' usual onslaught of holiday ads. But one chain couldn't resist.

In what appears to be the first opening salvo of holiday shopping spots, Target (TGT) aired a Christmas-themed TV commercial over the weekend (AdAge's report), eliciting a few "too-soon" cries from consumers who are just starting to think about their Halloween costumes.

Though it feels as if they appear earlier and earlier each year, holiday TV ads typically start showing in early November. Online coupon site RetailMeNot.com recently issued a report dubbing the shopping season "OctoNovemCember," saying that 39% of consumers begin their holiday shopping before November, according to their survey.

But snow and Christmas lights in mid-October? Just for the record, there are 37 days until Thanksgiving, and 70 until Christmas.

The Target commercial features Bullseye, the company's canine mascot, running down the street with a shopping bag full of presents

Apple (AAPL) has taken quite a few hits since it rolled out its latest operating system update, the Maps debacle being the most egregious fumble.

Here's another item to tack on to the growing collection of iOS 6 complaints. Last week, MacRumors.com reported that one large company was urging its employees not to upgrade to iOS 6 because of a glitch with the Exchange calendar.

The problem was that when users declined a meeting invitation from a device that's been upgraded to iOS 6, instead of sending the notification only to the meeting organizer, cancellation emails were sent to the entire distribution list, effectively calling off the meeting for all attendees. At some point along the way, when the iOS device syncs the calendar via ActiveSync, it gets confused about who the "owner" (organizer) of the meeting really is. The iPhone works as if its owner is the meeting organizer. Corporate chaos ensues. (You didn't really want to go to that meeting anyway, right?)

A string about the

Older workers who stay at their jobs longer are holding positions that could otherwise be taken by younger workers. That's been a popular notion in the past few years as the recession and poor job market have devastated young adults. Some economists have even argued for an early retirement policy that would provide incentives for people to exit the work force at age 62 to open up positions for younger workers.

A new paper from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College hopes to put that idea to rest. After analyzing data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey from 1977 to 2010, co-authors Alicia Munnell and April Wu found nothing to indicate that older workers are "crowding out" younger ones.

"Our estimates show no evidence that increasing employment of older persons reduces the job opportunities or wage rates of young persons," they say. The study's results were true for both men and women, for groups with different educational levels, and even during the Great

Facebook (FB) hit a major milestone as it announced Thursday morning that, as of Sept. 14 (12:45 pm Pacific time, to be exact), it had reached one billion users. With a world population of nearly seven billion, that means just about one in seven people across the globe is on Facebook.

Note that those are what the company calls "monthly active users," which are users who log on via the site or a mobile device, or share content or activity with their Facebook friends or through a third-party site that's integrated in some way with Facebook — such as Twitter or Yahoo! Finance — in a 30-day time span. Facebook had 552 million daily active users on average in June 2012.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Facebook's web site that, as of this morning, "there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month." Zuckerberg, naturally, also posted the news on his own page, grouping the social network giant in among the everyday things — such as "chairs, doorbells, airplanes,

Girl Scout Cookies are getting a makeover. Don't fret, Thin Mint fans — the ingredients and recipes will remain the same. But for the first time since 1999, the Girl Scout Cookie Program, a $790 million a year business, has revealed packaging with a brand-new look.

Girl Scouts of the USA announced Friday that the iconic cookie package needed "to be more contemporary to reflect the new brand identity and to embody the spirit of Girl Scouting, while showing customers how they can reconnect with the organization," the news release said.

The new cookie boxes are meant to showcase the five financial literacy and entrepreneurship skills the program tries to teach its Scouts: goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills and business ethics.

"We have more than 50 million cookie customers across the country, and the cookie box is the most tangible and powerful way for us to communicate directly with consumers," Anna Maria Chávez, CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA, said in the

A record number of American households carry student loan debt, while the average outstanding loan balance is the highest it's ever been, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. The Pew analysis found that about one out of five (19%) households, or around 22.3 million, were burdened with student debt in 2010. That figure is more than double the 9% it was in 1989, and it marks a big jump from 15% in 2007.

Here are some of the more alarming figures from the report:

- The average outstanding student loan balance rose from $23,349 in 2007 to $26,682 in 2010.
- Most debtor households had less than $50,000 in outstanding student debt in 2010. But the share of households owing high amounts has climbed: In 2007, 10% of debtors owed more than $54,238. By 2010, 10% of them owed more than $61,894 (adjusted for inflation).
- Among households headed by someone younger than 35 years old, a record 40% owed student debt in 2010.

Student loan debt hit $904 billion in the first quarter

Yahoo! editors have selected this article as a favorite of 2012. It first appeared on Yahoo! Finance in September and was one of the most popular stories of the month. Readers joked about people who use the most common PIN codes, and shared how they came up with their own. "My pin number is my post office box number from my time in the Air Force 30 years ago on a base that no longer exists," wrote user Nick. "Feel free to hack that."

If you lost your ATM card on the street, how easy would it be for someone to correctly guess your PIN and proceed to clean out your savings account? Quite easy, according to data scientist Nick Berry, founder of Data Genetics, a Seattle technology consultancy.

Berry analyzed passwords from previously released and exposed tables and security breaches, filtering the results to just those that were exactly four digits long [0-9]. There are 10,000 possible combinations that the digits 0-9 can be arranged into to form a four-digit code. Berry analyzed those to

The poverty rate in the U.S. saw a slight dip last year from 2010, according to a report released by the Census Bureau Wednesday. There were 46.2 million people in poverty in 2011, down from 46.3 million in 2010. After three consecutive years of increases, neither the poverty rate (15%) nor the number of people in poverty were statistically different from the 2010 estimates, the report said.

Household income fared worse, however. For the second year in a row real median household income declined; between 2010 and 2011 it dropped 1.5% to $50,054.

Here are some other highlights from the report:

-The West experienced the sharpest decline in real median household income -- down 4.1% -- between 2010 and 2011 compared with the other regions.

- In 2011, the percentage of people without health insurance decreased to 15.7% from 16.3% in 2010. (In 2010 48.6 million people were uninsured, down from 50 million in 2010.)

- The percentage and number of people covered by employment-based health