Dan Bobkoff

There are so many mattress stores in America, and they always seem to be empty. So how can they afford the real estate? And how do they stay in business?

Tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians live in New York City, and many with close ties to their countries are on edge over what's happening back home.

We're used to rounding up the total on our taxi ride or dropping a buck or two in a jar at the coffee shop. Now, new high-tech ways to pay are nudging us to tip more generously and more often.

Cartooning was his passion as a kid, and he enrolled in the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture to become better at drawing backgrounds. Now, some call Ingels a "starchitect," because his challenging designs are getting built.

As the volume of online orders surged, some retailers and package delivery companies were unable to fulfill promises to deliver gifts by Christmas. UPS acknowledged it was overwhelmed by all the late traffic. In response to complaints, Amazon says it is offering gift cards and refunds for shipping charges.

For freelancers and artists living in expensive cities like New York, the home-sharing site Airbnb has become a way to subsidize their rents. It's also often illegal. With the site's users in the crosshairs of New York's attorney general, and questions elsewhere, some now wonder if the good times are going to end.

New York City Mayor-Elect Bill deBlasio named William Bratton to head the city's police department Thursday. Bratton was New York's police commissioner in the 1990s, and was police chief in Los Angeles and commissioner in Boston. He'll return to the role as head of the nation's largest police department as the NYPD faces a crossroads. Despite unprecedentedly low crime rates in the city, the department has come under scrutiny in recent years for its controversial stop-and-frisk policy — tactics the mayor-elect has strongly criticized for souring relations between police and minority communities.

At least four people are dead after a Metro-North Railroad train derailed in New York on Sunday morning. This past summer, a freight train carrying trash derailed on the other side of the curve. And in May, two Metro-North trains collided in Connecticut, injuring more than 70 people.

The value of a brand doesn't include anything physical. It's just the name of the company — and all of the customer loyalty attached to that name.

Activist investor Carl Icahn has increased his stake in Apple and is pushing the company to replace its own stock buyback plan with a much more ambitious proposal. In a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Icahn said that, given the size of Apple's cash holdings, its stock buyback should be $150 billion instead of the planned $60 billion.