The bottom line

Music album sales see lowest level since 1994; Wal-Mart to help employees with tuition costs; McDonald's recalls Shrek glasses; Freebies from Pfizer and other drugmakers; Coulomb Technologies plans more charging stations

Music album sales see lowest level since 1994

For the week ending May 30, the U.S. music industry sold a total of 4,984,000 albums, according to Nielsen Soundscan. That’s the lowest one-week number since Soundscan began compiling sales data, in 1994.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Wal-Mart to help employees with tuition costs

Wal-Mart will offer its 1.4 million U.S. employees 15 percent reductions on tuition at American Public University, a for-profit online educational firm. With the price cut, a bachelor’s degree would cost about $24,000.

The New York Times

McDonald's recalls Shrek glasses

McDonald’s has recalled 12 million drinking glasses sold to promote the animated film Shrek Forever After. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said the glasses, decorated with paintings of Shrek characters, contain cadmium, a heavy metal linked to cancer, osteoporosis, and kidney disease.

The Christian Science Monitor

Freebies from Pfizer and other drugmakers

U.S. drugmakers distributed about $3 billion in free samples to physicians in 2007, according to the first-ever comprehensive survey of the marketing practice. The vast majority of the freebies was handed out by Pfizer, which distributed $2.7 billion in samples.

The Wall Street Journal

Coulomb Technologies plans more charging stations

Coulomb Technologies plans to install 4,600 charging stations for electric vehicles nationwide—one-third of them in California—by the end of 2011. The installations could ease worries among potential buyers of electric vehicles that they won’t be able to recharge their batteries.

LATimes.com