CYBER MONDAY BIGGEST ONLINE SALES DAY — BARELY

Cyber Monday barely retained its status as the biggest online spending day of the year after a surge of shoppers hit computers and phones instead of stores on Black Friday to chase deals earlier in the season.

Online spending on Monday rose 12 percent to a record $3.45 billion, according to Adobe Systems. Black Friday almost caught up, with $3.34 billion spent online, a gain of 21.6 percent from a year ago and another record. The narrowing gap highlights the capitulation of brick-andmortar stores to the spending habits of their shoppers, who prefer the convenience of scouting deals from home to the challenge of battling fellow consumers at a store for limited bargains.

E-commerce sales in November and December will grow 17.2 percent to $94.7 billion, more than five times the pace of total retail sales growth of 3.3 percent, according to EMarketer.

Patagonia giving $10M to charity. Patagonia says

its Black Friday “fundraiser for the Earth” has shattered expectations by bringing in $10 million in sales that will be donated to nonprofits focused on helping the environment.

The outdoor clothing maker previously announced it would donate 100 percent of its global retail and online sales on Black Friday. It says it expected to reach $2 million in sales, but generated five times more.

Home prices recovered from Great Recession plunge. U.S. home prices

have fully recovered from their steep plunge during the housing bust and Great Recession, according to a national measure.

The Standard & Poor’s CoreLogic Case-Shiller national home price index is slightly above the peak it set in July 2006, after rising 5.5 percent in September from a year earlier. The milestone comes after more than four years of steady gains.

Still, prices have not fully recovered in many cities and other gauges show that home prices remain below their peaks.

Seattle, Portland and Denver reported the largest annual gains in September for the eighth straight month.

U.S. economy grew at 3.2 percent in Q3. The

gross domestic product, the country’s total output of goods and services, expanded at an annual rate of 3.2 percent in the July-September period, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday. The 3.2 percent increase was expected to be the best showing for the year.

Economists believe growth has slowed to around 2 percent in the current quarter.

At the moment, they forecast growth of around 2 percent to 2.5 percent for 2017.

McDonald’s testing never-frozen beef. McDonald’s

is testing the use of fresh, never frozen beef for its Quarter Pounder hamburgers.

The tests are being carried out in 75 of its restaurants in the Tulsa, Okla., area, where Quarter Pounders will be made with fresh beef that’s cooked when ordered.

McDonald’s says it has making “significant enhancements” to its food as it is trying to stage a comeback after losing customers in recent years.