There is a link between high spending on children's apparel and number of senior residents, according to Pitney Bowes Mapinfo, a demographic research firm. Three of cities with high spending patterns on children's clothes have retirement homes for affluent grandparents. These are in Juneau, Alaska and West Palm Beach and Fort Myers in Florida.

Many restaurants have a policy of giving police officers free cups of coffee or discounted food but a Chicago police officer was suspended for 18 months and recommended for counseling after she demanded free coffee and pastries from area Starbucks. Most police departments have unwritten rules against officers either accepting or demanding anything free, although those rules generally aren't enforced. Many restaurants feel it enhances safety to have police officers stop in for coffee, a snack or a meal. But officers traditionally offer to pay before a restaurant tells them it's on the house or discounted.

A study by psychiatrists at the Erlangen University, in collaboration with researchers from the University of North Dakota, linked shopping addiction to an intense craving for attention. One in 10 consumers from wealthy western nations have varying degrees of shopping addiction, according to Martina de Zwaan, head of the Erlangen University's Department of Psychotherapy.

A birthday party invitation posted on the popular social websites Facebook and Bebo attracted some 400 guests and gatecrashers, who destroyed and robbed the plush celebration venue in Spain. The birthday celebrator, British 16-year-old Jodie Hudson, and her mother Amanda learned too late the disaster the online invitation would cause to their luxurious Marbella vacation villa, which suffered ruined walls, destroyed carpets, and broken banisters, doors and furniture.

The home and auto industries are two of the hardest hit sectors in the U. S. Rising foreclosures mark the housing sector, while closing car manufacturing plants are common in the auto plant. Given the parallel routes these two industries pass through, it is not surprising to hear American couples throwing in a used car as a freebie, just to unload on the market a debt-ridden home.