Tuesday Evening Business Brief

• Stocks bounced off the lows of today's session, settling mixed. The Dow was down 55 points to 13,036. The S&P slipped more than a point, while the Nasdaq added 8 points.
• A taste for pickup trucks helped pace a jump in overall U.S. auto sales last month. Among the big three, GM's August U.S. sales rose 10 percent compared with a year earlier, while Ford's rose 13 percent and Chrysler's 14 percent.
• Getting ready for the holidays, Wal-Mart is lowering the fee that shoppers pay for its interest-free pay-over-time program for the winter holidays. That word comes a day after Toys R US announced it was waiving the upfront service fee for layaway orders created in store through the end of October.
• McDonald's is opening what may be its first vegetarian-only restaurants. The world's biggest hamburger chain says locations in India will serve only vegetarian food because of customer preferences in the region. The company could not immediately say when the restaurants would open or how many there would be.
• The price of oil slipped today after a weak report on U.S. manufacturing raised fear demand for oil would fall. U.S. benchmark crude fell $1.17 to close at $95.30 in New York.

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