Business

American Apparel has fired CEO Dov Charney six months after suspending him for alleged misconduct.

The clothing retailer said on Tuesday that it had appointed Paula Schneider, a veteran fashion executive, as his replacement. Schneider has previously worked at clothing group Warnaco and women’s apparel company Big Strike, will take the reins of the struggling clothing retailer on January 5, 2015.

American Apparel says it has terminated Charney, who was removed from the CEO role in June after the company alleged he had misused corporate money and violation of sexual harassment policies. Over the years, Charney has faced repeated accusations of sexually harassing employees and of discriminating against less attractive staff on the grounds that they undermined the corporate aesthetic.

Charney had been serving as a consultant to the company in recent months, but American Apparel said on Tuesday that he has been terminated for cause.

Charney, who founded American Apparel 25 years ago, was initially replaced by interim CEO John Luttrell, who also served as the company’s chief financial officer. But, Luttrell was removed from both roles in September, when turnaround expert Scott Brubaker of restructuring firm Alvarez & Marsal took over as the new interim CEO. Brubaker will continue in that role until Schneider takes over in early January.

David Danziger, co-chairman of American Apparel’s board, said in a statement that the retailer “needs a permanent CEO who can bring stability and strong leadership in this time of transition, and we believe Ms. Schneider fits the bill perfectly.”

Once one of the trendier, youth-focused retailers in the industry, American Apparel has seen its sales fall off in recent years. The company’s same-store sales declined 7% last quarter and it reported another net loss.

In a statement, Schneider said “My goal is to make American Apparel a better company, while staying true to its core values of quality and creativity and preserving its sweatshop-free, Made in USA manufacturing philosophy.”

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

Carriers like Verizon, ATT&T and T-Mobile are fighting a price war that could last months

This hasn’t exactly been a banner year for wireless carriers’ stocks. While the S&P 500 Index has risen 8% this year, AT&T and Verizon, which together control about 83% of the wireless market, are down 8%.

The two companies have fared especially poorly in the last month: AT&T is down 10% and Verizon is down 12%, while the S&P is down only 2%. The reason is one that may delight consumers and concern investors: A price war, in which rivals cut prices to steal market share from one another, has broken out among carriers, and it’s only likely to get more intense next year. The longer a price war endures, the more choice consumers will have, though it means financial pain for carriers.

Verizon issued a press release last week with a headline touting “strong wireless customer growth” this quarter, but contained less sunny news further down: the “impacts of its promotional offers . . . will put short-term pressure” on Verizon’s profit margins. When companies issue statements about earnings before they’re officially reported, there’s usually worrisome news tucked inside. The following day, Verizon CFO Francis Shammo offered more spin.

“What we’re seeing is a pretty exciting period here at Verizon Wireless,” he said at an investors’ conference, “where we saw an increase in the activations but we’re also seeing some increase in the churn as well.”

Churn, which measures customer attrition, is a scourge to companies that rely on subscribers because it can signify customer dissatisfaction or the impact of rivals’ lower prices. A recent survey by Consumer Reports suggests customer satisfaction is comparable among AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile (not so much Sprint, which is having issues in upgrading its network). In previous surveys, Verizon had a clear lead and T-Mobile had lagged. That’s a sign Verizon owes its churn problem to competitors’ lower prices.

Still, Verizon’s Shammo argued that talk of a price war was overstated and that “the revenue of the industry . . . has come down slightly but not as much as everybody is making it out to be.” The market disagreed. Verizon’s stock fell 4% as Shammo made his comments. Two securities firms downgraded Verizon’s ratings, while two others lowered their price targets for the stock.

It didn’t help that at another investment conference that same day, AT&T CFO John Stephens was saying something similar in starker terms.

“The current impact — the current environment is impacting churn,” said Stephens. “In fact, we expect postpaid churn to be higher than it was in the year ago fourth quarter. This will impact fourth-quarter adjusted wireless margins.”

That’s especially good news for T-Mobile, which, under the banner of the “uncarrier,” has run promotions that remove two-year lock-ins and data caps and offer lower-price plans to steal customers away from its bigger rivals. AT&T and Verizon have responded with their own lower-priced plans, but the advantage seems to be going T-Mobile’s way.

Last week, T-Mobile CEO John Legere boasted to the Wall Street Journal that it’s taking in more customers than it’s losing, meaning it isn’t being hit by the same churn striking Verizon or AT&T. T-Mobile upped the ante yet again Tuesday with its eighth “uncarrier” promotion, which lets users roll over unused LTE data from one month into the next for free. Mobile carriers once offered similar roll-over offers for phone calls when it became clear that data networks were displacing voice calls, but until now data plans had no such perk.

None of this means T-Mobile and Sprint’s investors are necessarily any happier than those who own AT&T and Verizon stock. In fact, they’re probably less happy. T-Mobile’s stock is performing as badly as Verizon and AT&T’s this month, and year to date it’s down 26%. T-Mobile is pursuing subscriber growth and revenue with its low prices, but that strategy pushes down profits — the “uncarrier” has posted a loss for three of the last four quarters. Sprint’s stock is doing even worse: It’s down 62% so far this year.

From the looks of things, the carriers’ fierce competition may continue into 2015. This month, Sprint began offering to halve the monthly bills of AT&T and Verizon subscribers who switch to similar plans on Sprint. Not to be outdone, T-Mobile offered an unlimited data plan with two lines for $100 a month.

Verizon’s Shammo predicted the price war will pass in a matter of months. “I think that things will settle down in 2015,” he said at the UBS conference. “Some of this is just temporary promotion-type stuff to stimulate some growth . . . You can’t do that long term. You can do that for a quarter or two, but then you have to get realistic.”

There’s reason to think that may not happen. When price wars break out, investors often watch who is gaining market share and revenue. Right now, that’s T-Mobile, despite its struggling performance on Wall Street. Its CEO has taken on activist shareholders in the past and has the grit to do so again. As for Sprint, investors may come to see that fighting on price may be the best option as long as customer satisfaction remains low.

At the same time, niche carriers are beginning to win over some customers as well. In Consumer Reports’ recent ranking of carriers, the two clear winners were tiny ones: Consumer Cellular and Ting, both of which ranked high on value and network quality. Last quarter, according to Cowen & Co., smaller carriers like them made up 5.2% of the postpaid mobile market, up from 4.2% only a quarter before.

For subscribers weary of having only two comparably priced mobile carriers to choose from, price competition from smaller players is welcome, even if network quality has long been an issue. When industries go from being uncompetitive to more competitive, there is often a period of declining margins across the board as consumers are given a broader range of choices.

The current price wars are coming at a time when carriers need to bid on costly spectrum auctions and spend money upgrading their networks. That suggests a tough time ahead for wireless carriers and their investors in the short term. But if price competition becomes a long-term phenomenon, it could eventually bring big returns for whichever companies emerge as the victors.

Everyone loves John Green, basically

Book sales are booming, according to statistics released this week by the Association of American Publishers, which showed that in the first three-quarters of 2014, overall book sales increased by 4.9%.

But the real page-turners that flew off the shelves were for children and young adults–those categories increased by a whopping 22.4% from Jan.-Sept. 2013 to the same period in 2014, Media Bistro reports. To put things into perspective, adult fiction and non-fiction sales were down 3.3%.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean that adults stopped reading. They might just be expanding their palates to healthy servings of John Green and other YA heavy-hitters.

Adults reading YA wouldn’t be a new phenomenon. According to a 2012 survey by Bowker Market Research found that 55% of young adult novels are bought by adults — 28% of which are made up of the 33 to 44 demographic. That statistic drew some criticism aimed at YA-loving adults this summer–balanced by an overwhelming wave of pieces defending adults who love the genre.

While the AAP didn’t track who bought what books, it did note that children and young adult ebooks increased a total of 52.7% in the first nine months this year. And a December study by Nielsen found that even though teenagers are tech savvy, only $20 of them buy ebooks and express a strong preference for print.

Although no need to hide The Fault of Our Stars in that Kindle — it’s no 50 Shades of Grey, after all.

The reason you're paying less at the pump

Two former employees claim the company didn’t do enough to protect their personal information

The ongoing fallout from last month’s cyber attack at Sony Pictures Entertainment continues this week as two former employees are suing the company after their personal information was exposed as part of the high-profile hack.

Michael Corona and Christina Mathis haven’t worked for Sony Pictures for years, but the former employees both claim that their sensitive personal information — including their names, Social Security numbers, former addresses and other info — was made public in the past month due to “security weaknesses in Sony’s Network.” That’s according to a lawsuit the two filed on Monday in California federal court in which they claim Sony Pictures failed in its legal duty to protect the personal information of current and former employees affected by the hack.

A group identifying itself as Guardians of Peace, or GOP,shut down Sony Pictures’ computer system just before Thanksgiving and have been releasing sensitive company documents on the Internet in subsequent weeks. The hackers posted documents revealing salary information and personal identifying information for thousands of the company’s employees along with other confidential financial documents and passwords for company accounts and computer systems. Over the past few weeks, the hackers have also leaked a mountain of embarrassing e-mail correspondence involving Sony executives — to the point that the company has asked the media to stop publishing excerpts from the once-private messages.

In their lawsuit, Corona and Mathis claim that their personal information was included in the documents the hackers revealed to the world, despite the fact that Corona left the company in 2007 and Mathis has not worked there for 12 years. (The complaint does not specify what the plaintiffs’ roles at Sony were, though it notes that Corona worked for Sony Pictures Entertainment while Mathis was employed by the company’s consumer products arm.) Both Corona and Mathis claim that the release of their information has forced them to spend hundreds of dollars on identity theft protection.

TIME’s Sam Frizell wrote last week about the possibility of employee lawsuits against Sony Pictures, noting that the company’s defense in such a legal action would hinge on whether the company could prove it took the appropriate steps to protect its employees’ personal data.

Monday’s lawsuit alleges that Sony Pictures failed to improve its security after what it describes as a history of data breaches. The suit refers to the 2011 hack of Sony’s PlayStation Network and calls the company “a longstanding and frequent target for hackers.” The complaint also references a recent Gizmodo report that Sony Pictures’ own corporate audit department warned the company about problems with its IT security just months before the November hack. Despite the alleged risk Sony Pictures faced, the company “made a business decision” to not step up its security, the lawsuit claims.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to certify the lawsuit as a class action, which would allow other current and former Sony Pictures employees to join the lawsuit. Corona and Mathis are seeking various damages from Sony Pictures, including at least $1,000 for each class member eventually attached to the lawsuit. They also want the company to pay for five years of credit and bank monitoring services as well as identity theft insurance for all class members.

Sony Pictures declined to comment on the lawsuit.

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com