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Cleaning carpets isn't that hard when you consider the fact that 99% of all stains can be removed by one cleaning agent or another if they're taken care of in a few days. However, keeping carpets clean costs enough time and money for Olive Garden to scale back on its cleanliness. According to BloombergBusiness, Olive Garden's parent company, Darden Restaurants, has dispatched operations teams to the restaurants to pull "every single invoice" in an effort to find ways to trim about $100 million a year in expenses. Through this investigation, the teams have found that many locations are washing their carpets twice a month, which CEO Gene Lee thinks is far too often. The crazy part is, he's not entirely wrong. There are over 800 Olive Gardens. Paying a service to come in and wash each restaur...

More than two-thirds of home renovation businesses are seeing revenues and profits equal or greater to pre-recessional levels, according to a new analysis, and about one-fifth of firms are reporting that their revenues and profits are significantly higher. Online home design platform Houzz released on July 22 its Q2 2015 Houzz Renovation Barometer, which measures how confident home renovation professionals are regarding the strength of the industry. “A large majority of home renovation firms on Houzz report a return to pre-recession revenues and profits, irrespective of industry segment or firm size,” said Nino Sitchinava, Houzz principal economist, in a news release. The latest edition of the study also found that there have been very slight year-over-year gains and quite strong quarte...

Republicans may have just found the single most important weakness in President Obama's Affordable Care Act: the federal exchange plan set up on HealthCare.gov isn't able to detect fraud in its verification process. The Wall Street Journal reported that investigators at the Government Accountability Office created 11 fake applicants last year, in an undercover operation to test the strengths and weaknesses of the system. Each of the fake applications signed up for health coverage lacking the proper documentation; some applicants had fabricated documents, while others were missing essential documentation entirely. The real problem took place this year when HealthCare.gov automatically re-enrolled the fake applicants, even though they still had unresolved documentation problems. Some of th...

Humans typically view bacteria as pests -- we feel comforted by the fact that a disinfecting wipe will (in theory) kill the majority of the 25,000 bacteria covering just one square inch on a common item, such as a phone in an office. No one could have predicted that bacteria would be capable of controlling inanimate objects, essentially creating and controlling real-life robots. And yet, one scientist reported recently that this might actually be possible. According to Phys.org and Wired, scientists haven't discovered a way to give robots a "brain" so that the machines can think for themselves, but researchers have discovered that it might be possible for bacteria to control behaviors of inanimate objects. Published on July 16 in the academic journal Scientific Reports, Virginia Tech sc...

Amazon is having a mixed month, with multiple headline-grabbing releases but decidedly mixed-to-negative reviews on those offerings. First, the mega-retailer promised users that their "Amazon Prime Day" would offer online shoppers better deals than Black Friday. But on the day of the sale, users were disappointed to discover mediocre deals on unwanted products, like "a plate of ham" or "XXL Diane Keaton T-Shirt." And despite posting strong sales, Amazon got far more press from the hashtag "#PrimeDayFail" than from their actual deals. There's little more to say about Amazon Prime Day that hasn't already been said, which is perhaps why the event so overshadowed an earlier announcement that Amazon would be stepping into the mobile cloud storage arena. A week before the failed Amazon Prime D...

Facebook has been a huge driver of web traffic for years. Back in 2013, it drove 21.25% of all the traffic sites received, meaning nearly one-fifth of the consumers who visited blogs and retailers came from the social network. Now, Facebook is looking to cut right to the economic chase. It's turning its business pages into virtual storefronts. Buzzfeed reports that Facebook is testing new, miniature e-commerce sites embedded within select retailers' Facebook pages. New "shopping" tabs and "buy" buttons allow consumers to purchase an item they want, possibly completing the entire transaction right there. The idea of this test is to put the entire consumer experience into Facebook. On mobile, the new feature will appear in a "shopping" section, while on desktop, it'll appear as a separate...