Investments and Business

Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, is raising salaries and benefits for store managers as it looks for ways to retain them.Walmart said on Monday that managers of its U.S. stores would be eligible for grants of up to $20,000 in company stock every year. The stock will vest over a three-year period, with a percentage vested each quarter.Earlier this month, Walmart said it would increase the average salary for store managers to $128,000 from $117,000. The big-box retailer also said bonuses for store managers could reach up to 200 percent of base salary, with a store’s profitability becoming a…

Four mothers sat quietly in the nursing room around midnight, breastfeeding their newborn babies. As one mother nodded off, her eyelids heavy after giving birth less than two weeks earlier, a nurse came in and whisked her baby away. The exhausted new mom returned to her private room to sleep.Sleep is just one of the luxuries provided by South Korea’s postpartum care centers.The country may have the world’s lowest birthrate, but it is also home to perhaps some of its best postpartum care. At centers like St. Park, a small, boutique postpartum center, or joriwon, in Seoul, new moms are…

Boeing hoped 2024 would be the year it would significantly increase production of its popular Max jets. But less than a month into the year, the company is struggling to reassure airline customers that it will still be able to deliver on its promises.That’s because the Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday that it would limit the plane maker’s output until it was confident in Boeing’s quality control practices. On Jan. 5, a panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 body shortly after takeoff, terrifying passengers on an Alaska Airlines flight and forcing the pilots to make an emergency…

No profit grows, Shakespeare once wrote, where no pleasure is taken. And so in the tedious march of life, we find joy in small things: The rising of the sun. A fine glass of wine. The greasy snap of a well-dressed potato crisp.But soft! Not so fast. Life affords no simple pleasures, and even that delectable crunch comes with a weighty debate: How much potato doth a true crisp — chip, to the Americans — contain?This — and several other probing questions of the crisp aficionado — was immortalized by a British tax appeals court last week, which ruled that…

In the Red Sea, attacks by Iranian-backed Houthi militants on commercial ships continue to disrupt a crucial trade route and raise shipping costs. The threat of escalation there and around flash points in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and now Iran and Pakistan ratchets up every day.Despite the staggering death toll and wrenching misery of the violence in the Middle East, the broader economic impact so far has been mostly contained. Oil production and prices, a critical driver of worldwide economic activity and inflation, have returned to pre-crisis levels. International tourists are still flying into other countries in the Middle East…

In his 40-year career, William Lucas has seen nearly every step in the erosion of the American garment industry. As general manager of Eagle Sportswear, a company in Middlesex, N.C., that cuts, sews and assembles apparel, he hopes to keep what’s left of that industry intact.Mr. Lucas, 59, has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars training his workers to use more efficient techniques that come with financial bonuses to get employees to work faster.But he fears that his investments may be undermined by a U.S. trade rule.The rule, known as de minimis, allows foreign companies to ship goods worth less…

When Jan Sramek walked into the American Legion post in Rio Vista, Calif., for a town-hall meeting last month, everyone in the room knew that he was really just there to get yelled at.For six years a mysterious company called Flannery Associates, which Mr. Sramek controlled, had upended the town of 10,000 by spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to buy every farm in the area. Flannery made multimillionaires out of some owners and sparked feuds among others. It sued a group of holdouts who had refused its above-market offers, on the grounds that they were colluding for more.The…