This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

There are many contrasts between The Home Depot (NYSE: HD) and Lowe's (NYSE: LOW), both of which sell a broad range of tools, fixtures, fittings, garden supplies, and construction materials to do-it-your selfers and professional contractors alike. Home Depot is the original big-box category killer of a hardware store that displaced many a mom-and-pop shop, as well as its predecessors, like Builders Emporium. Lowe's, the new kid on the block has been growing like mad with Home Depot's business in it's cross-hairs.

Both companies have been suffering mightily in the face of the housing slump and the crushing financial markets. Eventually, recession or not, both companies will see their revenues improve as the economy works through it's nightmarish problems.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

Way back when, the movie-rental wars were fought between the neighborhood video stores (which had limited availability) and the superchain Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI) (which had limited availability except for the Die Hard series). Then, Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) came along with an amazing business model. Set up an account online, build a mammoth list of movies (from tens of thousands available), receive a few in the mail and send them back when you're done -- no late fees, but you only got new movies when you sent old ones back.

At the time, Blockbuster -- and many consumers -- didn't think it would work. First of all, you had to wait a day or two to get new movies; and second of all, who was going to want to deal with sending movies back in the mail? I mean, gosh. Well, eventually, Blockbuster caved and started the same kind of service. When you compare the two, however, which one takes the cake?

What Netlix Offers: For $16.99, you receive three DVDs in the mail. These movies come from the top of the personliazed list you create on the Netflix site. Delivery times vary, but local distribution centers can usually get them to you in two days. You can keep these DVDs as long as you want; but, if you never return them you never get anything new. Which is a real bummer when I Am Legend is gathering dust on your TV set. After you've watched one, or more, send it back in the provided postage-paid envelope. Within a few days, your next movie arrives in the mail. As of now, Netflix offers a total of nine (9) membership plans, from one-at-a-time to eignt-at-a-time. You can also purchase DVDs through the site, in addition to watching certain movies for free.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

In the world of diapers, try as other brands might to gain a foothold, it is really a Pampers vs. Huggies world.

Pampers, made by Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) has been the market share winner for decades and is P&G's top global brand. But Huggies, made by Kimberly-Clark (NYSE: KMB) has made significant inroads thanks to frequent discounts.

Consumer Reports estimates parents will spend between $1,500 and $2,000 on disposable diapers before their child is potty trained. With that kind of investment, many parents have strong views about which brand is best. Leakage control and rash prevention are the main criteria. Consumer reports rates Pampers (both its Cruisers and Baby Dry brands) higher than Huggies, mainly due to Pampers' superior leakage prevention.

Baby blogs also seem to favor Pampers over Huggies. And in my experience, I do think of Pampers as the "premium" and was surprised that when I actually checked price tags in my local drug store this week, found that they were priced exactly the same.

For my diaper dollar, I don't see much of a difference between the two. I'm all for changing the baby more often and buying a cheaper diaper. If you really put the diapers to the test with, say an eight-hour day at the playground without a change, you might find a difference. But my priority is to spend as little time and money diaper shopping as possible. Costco stocks Huggies in bulk, so that's what we have now.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

Going by ad campaigns alone, you would think that every person -- or, at least every cool person -- had abandoned their Windows PCs and hoisted themselves onto the Macintosh bandwagon. Not so. The truth is that PCs far outnumber Macs in the market. The big-business worlds of finance, law, medicine use predominantly PC, while the areas of video production, web design and art use Mac. These computers do most of the same things (play games and DVDs, word-process, create web pages, store and play music) but they are completely different operating systems. Even though Apple computers now include the Intel processor that makes it possible to use Windows-only applications, it can still be hard to compare products.

But what about the companies themselves? What does the Apple brand signify that the Dell brand does not? And vice versa.

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL): Providing innovative products and a user-friendly interface, Apple has turned the whole computer thing into a fashion accessory. For someone who used Dell products for years and then switched to Mac, the difference is like night and day. A Mac is so easy to use. With a clean interface, a near-universal compatibility with external products and tools, these computers are a beautiful breeze. And now that Macs include Intel processors, one can switch back and forth between a Windows interface and a Mac interface, making previous incompatibilities (software, games, etc.) now perfectly compatible. And when it comes to customer service (see below) Apple really socks the house.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

Tylenol is probably the most recognizable brand name for the pain reliever acetaminophen. In addition to being a pain reliever, Tylenol also reduces fevers. It was created in 1955 as Tylenol Elixir for children, and was the first aspirin-free pain reliever. It was initially available only by prescription, but became available without a prescription in 1960.

The product is made and marketed by McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a brand owned by Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ). Tylenol falls within the Consumer segment of J&J, which had sales of $14.5 billion in 2007. Over-the-counter pharmaceuticals represented $5.1 billion in sales, or 35% of the segment's sales.

Excedrin is a pain reliever that combines acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine. (Caffeine is known to enhance the effectiveness of aspirin and acetaminophen.) It's a product of Novartis (NYSE: NVS), a Switzerland-based company that bought the Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) consumer medicine business in 2005. Novartis produces a variety of consumer health care products, with 2007 revenue of $39.8 billion.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

How to compare the two dominant pizza brands, Yum! Brands Inc.'s (NYSE: YUM) Pizza Hut vs. Domino's Pizza Inc. (NYSE: DPZ)?

Most annoying ads? The wing man series by Pizza Hut is a recent annoyance, but Domino's still, in my mind, has not lived down the ignominy of its Noid commercials in the 1980s.

Most obscene side-dishes? What in the hell are dipping strips? Like we don't realize they're just pizza dough with goo indistinguishable from the plaque clogging our arteries. Bad Pizza Hut! Bad!

Size? Pizza Hut -- 12,800 outlets in 90 countries. Domino's -- 8,624 outlets in 55 countries.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

Something new and something old, eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) the large Internet trading platform competes more each day with Craigslist, who's platform continues to unfold. They are very much the same, and oh so different, too. Craigslist has been resisting becoming eBay in too many ways, yet eBay has gone through the back door to acquiring partial ownership and tracking a competitive threat from the inside.

Being public, eBay must disclose its financial information, which is not true for the private Craigslist. Craigslist is not happy about eBay's ownership position, and for its part eBay has sued Craigslist. It says the board diluted its interest in the popular site by more than 10%, and the two have been trading accusations since.

For most of Craigslist's history there has been pressure to become public or sell itself outright or make the pursuit of profit a higher motive. That has been shunned in favor of slowly building a user friendly and practical Internet information trading platform.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

When it comes to multi-bladed disposable razors, how many blades is enough? In the long-standing rivalry between the two biggest brands of disposable razors, the current answer seems to be five. For now.

The Gillette company, which in 2005 became part of Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG), invented the safety razor in 1895, as well as the first razor marketed to women in 1916. They started the current arms race in multi-bladed disposable razors by introducing a twin-blade razor in 1971, and then the triple-bladed Mach 3 in 1998. Schick responded with the four-blade Quattro in 2003, then in 2005, Gillette introduced the five-blade Fusion. Of course, each of these models includes a version for women, and versions with various bells and whistles.

St. Louis-based Energizer Holdings (NYSE: ENR), a U.S. manufacturer of batteries, purchased the Schick brand of razors from Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) in 2003. Outside the North America and Australia, the same products are sold under the Wilkinson Sword brand. Either way, Schick remains a distant second to Gillette in global sales, though some analysts saw patent infringement lawsuits filed against Schick by Gillette as evidence that Gillette recognized a potential threat. Combined, these two brands account for nearly all razor sales in America.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

Behold the humble potato chip, snack food of the ages. Claimed to have been invented in 1853 in the road house kitchen of Native American George Crum, the potato chip traveled through American snack history in a class of it's own. That is, until in the early 1960s, when it was discovered that you could grind potatoes into a slurry and then press them back into a consumable form.

I sat down one day with a bag of potato chips from Lay's and with a can of Pringles. Lay's are made by Frito-Lay, a property of PepsiCo Inc. ( NYSE: PEP). Pringles are made by Procter & Gamble Co. (NYSE: PG). I wanted to compare the two in order to assess their similarities and differences. What I found were two very different snacking sensations although both are derived from the same source. The Lay's ingredient list is simple. They're made with potatoes, oil, and salt, with no preservatives added. The Pringles ingredient list begins with the same potatoes, oil, and salt, but the product also contains at least traces of wheat starch and rice flour in addition to a couple common food chemicals.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

Crocs, those ubiquitous colorful rubber clogs you either love or hate, are perhaps on the road out as a fad. But don't blame the fashion police: blame company shenanigans and a spate of bad PR.

Recent news reports about their safety (Japanese children have reportedly been hurt riding on escalators in their rubber shoes) have only added to the company's woes.

Crocs Inc. (NASDAQ: CROX) has seen its share price plummet in recent months, reaching an all-time 52-week low after announcing it would adjust its first quarter guidance sharply downward. The company recently shut down its rubber plant in Quebec City due to the slowdown in U.S. retail orders. The guidance adjustment shocked analysts, and the stock began to melt like, well, like rubber. Indeed, this once darling of Wall Street has been brought low from all sides. My colleague Zac Bissonnette follows the company closely, (although I doubt he owns a pair himself) and recently wondered why the company wasn't addressing its safety concerns in its 10K.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

While I won't claim the title of Most Hip Person on the planet, I do have a fair bit of "new media" credibility. And I think it should be instructive that I've finally embraced (or at least given a friendly pat on the back to) Facebook, whereas News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace continues to horrify. Where Facebook pokes, MySpace cackles wickedly; where Facebook exposes me to unwelcome questions from first grade classmates, MySpace exposes your children to unwelcome advances from questionable adults. Facebook is silly; MySpace is spooky.

The two social networking sites sprung up at about the same time, but focused on vastly different niches. Facebook was originally meant to monopolize electronically on the popularity of the "Freshman Facebook," a publication put together by most colleges displaying the faces of the new students and immediately hoarded by upperclassman hoping to find their one true love (at least for tonight). Why not bring the desirability of fresh faces to a much wider audience? At first the network was limited to college students, but soon the barely legal founder was pitching his product at a bigger market. And then my boss asked me to join and the rest is writing on my wall.

MySpace, on the other hand, was initially marketed to indie bands (although it wasn't meant to be a niche, its developers were active in the LA music scene and thought that would be a great way to attract other users) as a way to spread the musical love and relieve struggling artists of the need to sink money into building a website. The concept was a virtuous circle -- musicians attract fans, fans attract musicians, and so on forever.

Now musicians are still on MySpace, and college students are still on Facebook, but while Facebook seems to have (if not transcended at least) risen above its origins to attract "networks" and "groups" whose affinity ranges from a common employer to a favorite politician or social cause; MySpace has sputtered, devolving ever more into awful allegations and truths. Pedophiles are reported to find victims through their MySpace pages, and the site is notorious for cyberbullying (scary!). On the other hand, there is a big kerfuffle over Scrabble on Facebook (silly!).

I reluctantly set up an account on FaceBook several months ago, and now it's moderately interesting as a way to reconnect with friends from 1st grade, and occasionally peek in on the lives of my college and business school classmates. It occasionally bugs me with its "pokes" and "candy corn" (what the heck?) but it's not riddled with often obscene and sometimes frightening content, as is MySpace; the space that's not mine, at all.

Vote in our poll for MySpace or Facebook as your preferred brand, and let us know in the comments why you love it.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

When you need to ship a package, which company first comes to mind? According to last year's Battle of the Brands non-scientific poll, an overwhelming majority said they favored United Parcel Service Inc. (NYSE: UPS) over FedEx Corp. (NYSE: FDX). Higher fuel surcharges, a weak economy, reduced domestic package volume, and a recent push from the U.S. Postal Service have impacted both of these international shipping companies in the past year, but Americans still want the same quality service at a discount price.

Let's take a look at a few changes since last year:

The US Postal Service Tries To Gain Ground

The largest player in the U.S. overnight package delivery business is attempting to increase its market share in the fast-delivery business next month. USPS is barely holding on to its 32% market share in the business, as FedEx and UPS continue to push the envelope at 31% and 25% market share, respectively. For the first time, shippers using Express Mail, Priority Mail, and several other parcel services will be able to get lower rates for large- and medium-volume contracts, according to the agency. Will UPS and FedEx need to cut their prices further to compete with the USPS?

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

Ahhhh... Kentucky Fried Chicken from the Colonel. Then it became KFC. Now it's Kentucky Fried Chicken again. Any way you slice it, they have some awfully good chicken and the most delicious gravy ever. Please don't tell me how many calories I'm eating or whether I'm next on the heart attack list thanks to all the fat.

Kentucky Fried Chicken is one of multiple restaurants under the Yum! Brands (NYSE: YUM) umbrella, which also includes Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and Long John Silver's. The menu has changed a bit over the years, but the mainstay of KFC will always be the chicken dinners. You can currently get your chicken in original or extra crispy. Or you can choose the more modern chicken strips or popcorn chicken.

Popeye's Chicken, owned by AFC Enterprises (NASDAQ: AFCE), refers to itself as "New Orleans Chicken." With over 1,900 stores open at the end of 2007, Popeye's provides a little more variety in addition to the standard chicken meals. Of particular interest are the "Louisiana Legends," which include Creole, Jambalaya, Etoufee, and Smothered Chicken.

For a true chicken experience, I think KFC is the way to go. But if you prefer to spice it up and get a little New Orleans style food with your chicken, Popeye's is your brand of choice!

Vote in our poll for KFC or Popeye's as your preferred brand, and let us know in the comments why you love it.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

When it comes to nonalcoholic beverages, there are two that stand out from all the rest. I'm sure you know the names of the companies behind them -- Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) and PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP). That's right, it's Coke-versus-Pepsi time! This battle has been waging for a long, long time, and it is as legendary, as ultimate, as the conflict between good and evil. Of course, which one is "good" and which one is "evil" will depend on your taste buds (or, perhaps, the stock you own).

Oddly enough, I'm sort of on both sides. Consider: I own shares in Coke, but when it comes to choosing between Coke and Pepsi, believe it or not, I actually choose the latter! Nothing wrong with that, certainly; after all, you don't invest based solely on what you personally like or don't like. But I will give Pepsi this much -- its soda, simply put, seems a little smoother, a lot sweeter, and it doesn't have an aftertaste. There's something about Coke's flagship beverage that causes a strange taste to linger after its been downed. Maybe it's just me. But, yes, I have to come clean and confess that I do prefer Pepsi over Coke (although, I tell all my friends that Coke is the better-tasting drink, as you can imagine, and promote it whenever the opportunity arises). I should note, though, that all of this is a bit of a moot point, since I mostly eschew sugary soda these days in favor of the dietary counterpart -- on that count, I am most firmly in Coke's camp, as I happily consume Diet Coke exclusively, and cannot stand Diet Pepsi!

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

As far as toothpaste goes, I was raised on Crest. My entire childhood, it was always Crest. Except when I spent the night at Grandma's and Grandpa's. They had Colgate. What a treat! Here are some facts about both...

Colgate toothpaste is the flagship product of Colgate-Palmolive Co. (NYSE: CL), an international operation in more than 200 countries. Total sales were almost $13.8 billion in 2007, the highest ever for the company, and it's notable that 75% of the sales were made outside the United States. Net income was up 28% to $1.7 billion for the year. Toothpaste is one of many personal care products that the company makes, including toothbrushes, soaps, and deodorants. The oral care products accounted for 40% of Colgate's sales in 2007.