Business

Perhaps Starbucks has gotten so good at making coffee without people that it sees brick-and-mortar coffee shops as a thing of the past - much how Redbox’s automated DVD dispensing helped usher in the demise of the video store.

Or, perhaps the deal it has struck with Bellevue-based Coinstar (which owns Redbox) to dispense Starbucks' Seattle’s Best brand coffee for a buck at every convenience store and street corner across the nation is just a way to make a … buck.

BELLEVUE, Wash. — The AAA auto club reports the average price of a gallon of gasoline in Washington is $3.64.

That's up 11 cents in a week, 17 cents in a month and 29 cents in a year. It's 7 cents higher than the national average.

Speaking in Everett in the massive building where Boeing 787's are assembled,  President Barack Obama praised the aerospace company for succeeding at keeping jobs in the United States.

OLYMPIA, Wash. – Democrats in the Washington legislature are suddenly hopeful they can rebalance the state budget without asking voters to approve a tax hike. Their optimism comes even before they see the latest revenue forecast out Thursday.

For majority Democrats the budget stars could be aligning. A new caseload forecast shows demand for state services is down. That means the current $900 million budget hole drops to less than $600 million. Plus, House Republicans have reversed their position and now support ending a tax break for out of state banks.

A downtown Seattle property owner says Amazon.com has agreed to buy three blocks where it could build three office towers.

When your products sell for more than $80 million, selling one of them is a big deal. Selling hundreds of them in one deal means they're probably feeling pretty good over at Boeing right now. The aircraft company has finalized a deal to sell 230 jets to Lion Air of Indonesia, with a total list price of $22.4 billion — a record for Chicago-based Boeing.

The deal, which was first announced in November during President Obama's multi-country tour of Asia, includes 201 737 MAX jets and 29 of Boeing's extended range 737-900ERs.

In an effort to protest the working conditions in the Chinese factories that make Apple products, demonstrators delivered a petition to six different Apple stores in four different countries.

The petition, which asks the country to make "ethical" products, included about 250,000 signatures. Organizers said they were delivering them to Apple stores in Bangalore, London, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Sydney and New York City.

NPR's Margot Adler was at the Apple store at Grand Central Terminal in New York. She reports that Shelby Knox, the director for Change.org, the website used to collect the signatures, delivered the petitions to the store manager.

KALAMA, Wash. — Workers have jackhammered out tons of glass that hardened in an electrical furnace after it failed at a wine bottle plant at Kalama.

The old furnace has been removed and the Bennu Glass company is installing a new furnace that will be fueled by liquid oxygen to heat molten glass to 2,800 degrees.

Yale University student Marina Keegan received an email last May from Bridgewater Associates, one of the world's largest hedge funds, offering her $100 if she said why she didn't apply for a summer internship.

Keegan, an English major, decided to take Bridgewater up on its offer.

"It was only sort of once I was inside the room when I realized ... maybe I'm helping them perfect their recruiting machine, which is exactly what we were doing," Keegan tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

Bridgewater confirmed that it does hold these focus groups. It's a small but telling window into the way big banks and consulting companies recruit at top-tier schools.

Now that Facebook has filed to go public, there's a lot of reflection on how the social media site became the mammoth it is today. The site has gone through a lot of changes in its eight years. Remember when you had to have a college email address to join? Remember when you had to type "thefacebook.com"?

The unemployment rate is at its lowest level in three years. The stock market is up.  But, are you feeling better about the economy? 

Maybe it was the economic news. Maybe it was the sun coming out for the first time in a while, but most people we talked to on the streets of downtown Seattle this afternoon said they were feeling positive.