Wednesday, August 7, 2013
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“There was a time at McDonald’s when the franchisee morale was extremely low and everyone was extremely upset.We’re getting there again.”
Dick Adams, restaurant consultant
Tyson renews label program for schools
Tyson Foods Inc. said Tuesday that, with the approach of a new school year, it is reintroducing its Tyson Project A+ program aimed at helping students and parents raise funds for their schools.
Students and parents raise the funds by clipping and saving labels from Tyson products. Schools can redeem the labels for 24 cents each through Tyson to be used at the schools’ discretion.
Tyson said in a news release that funds raised through the programs can be used for art supplies, classroom materials, gym equipment and other school-related items.
“We want to make it easier for parents to get back into the school routine by providing them with meal and snack solutions to keep kids full from the morning bus stop to bedtime,” said Darci Severson, of Tyson Foods.
Tribe plans first Indian-owned Sonic
The Wyandotte Nation plans to open a Sonic, America’s Drive-In franchise in the fall, making it the first Sonic operation owned by an American Indian tribe.
The Sonic drive-in will be in Seneca, Mo., west of Neosho, Mo., and will be a small-building prototype, according to a release Tuesday. It will have 21 stalls and a drive-through and is expected to provide 30 to 35 full- and part-time jobs.
Wyandottes operate casinos and have a portfolio of small-business operations.
“It creates another direction, another diversified enterprise for the Wyandotte Nation,” Kelly Carpino, chief executive officer for the Wyandotte Tribe of Oklahoma, the nation’s federally chartered corporation, said in a release.
“It gives us a lot of growth opportunity to potentially develop additional restaurants in the future.”
Based in Wyandotte, Okla., the Wyandotte Nation has 5,000 tribal members nationwide. Oklahoma City-based Sonic has more than 3,500 drive-ins and is the largest chain of drive-ins in the U.S.
U.S. attorney: SAC, Cohen probe ongoing
The U.S. investigation of SAC Capital Advisors LP and its founder, Steven A. Cohen, is “ongoing,” and the indictment of the fund addresses “pervasive” criminal conduct there, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said Tuesday.
SAC Capital was indicted July 25 in what Bharara called an unprecedented, decade-long insider-trading scheme that helped the Stamford, Conn.-based fund earn hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits. Prosecutors cited separate purported insider-trading schemes by at least eight current and former fund managers and analysts.
In an interview Tuesday on CBS This Morning, host Charlie Rose asked Bharara if his office didn’t have enough evidence to charge Cohen.
“As I said when we announced the charges, the investigation is ongoing, it is not closed,” Bharara said. “And at this point, we indicted the hedge fund as I said, at the time that we announced the case, because of the degree and nature and scope of the misconduct that had gone on there for a number of years as laid out in great detail.”
Prosecutors described Cohen as “the fund owner” and said he “encouraged” SAC employees to obtain trading information from company insiders while ignoring indications that it was illegal.
Wind-turbine sales to consumers surge
U.S. consumers and businesses installed 175 megawatts of wind turbines last year to generate their own electricity and reduce their dependence on utilities, according to the U.S. Energy Department.
That was a 62 percent increase over 2011, led by farmers and schools from California to Wisconsin, the Energy Department said Tuesday in a report on the distributed wind industry. Total investment was more than $410 million.
The surge in turbine installation by power consumers mirrored the growth in utility-scale wind farms, which almost doubled last year to 13,000 megawatts, making wind the largest new source of U.S. electricity. The agency defines distributed wind generation as turbines that are connected either directly to customers or to local power grids, compared with wholesale power, which utilities deliver through transmission lines.
Most of the turbines installed at customer sites were 100 kilowatts or less and mounted on towers about 98 feet tall, according to the report.
Sale boosts Washington Post Co. stock
NEW YORK - Shares of the longtime owner of The Washington Post hit five-year highs Tuesday after the Monday announcement the paper had sold to Amazon.
com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million.
The paper, which unveiled the scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon, has been owned by the Graham family since it was acquired in a 1933 bankruptcy sale.
The Washington Post Co. will change its name and maintain ownership of Kaplan schools and test-preparation services, its largest source of revenue. It also owns the Cable One cable television business, six television stations, Foreign Policy magazine, and the website Slate.com, among others.
IBM to furlough U.S. hardware workers
International Business Machines said it’s requiring the majority of U.S. employees in its hardware unit to take a week off with reduced pay, cutting costs as demand slows for products such as servers.
U.S. hardware workers, including those involved in development and procurement, will take a furlough week with one- third pay starting either Aug. 24 or 31, said Jay Cadmus, a spokesman for the Systems and Technology Group. Executives in the division will take no pay during the week.
The world’s biggest computer-services company is trimming expenses to preserve profit margins as hardware revenue continues to decline. Sales in the unit, which also includes storage devices and microelectronics, slid 12 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier to $3.76 billion.
“We looked at a variety of things that we could do, and in lieu of other options considered this the best approach in the balance of the organization,” Cadmus said.
Business, Pages 26 on 08/07/2013