Alina Selyukh is a business correspondent at NPR, where she follows the path of the retail and tech industries, tracking how America's biggest companies are influencing the way we spend our time, money, and energy.
Once a formidable fast-fashion mall staple, Forever 21 has filed for bankruptcy. The retailer has been a shell of its former self since it first filed for bankruptcy in 2019.
The Federal Trade Commission is in a "dire resource situation," a federal lawyer said on a call about its major lawsuit against Amazon. Within hours, he retracted the claim.
The department store chain, founded in 1670, can't pay its debts and says the pandemic, inflation and now trade tensions have hurt its financial future.