Starbucks hopes customers will be willing to pay at least $5 more when they stop in for their morning cup of Joe.
Starting Nov. 1, Starbucks will begin collecting donations of $5 or more from customers to stimulate U.S. job growth through its “Jobs for USA” program. The Seattle-based coffee chain is collaborating with the Opportunity Finance Network, a nonprofit that works with nearly 200 community development financial institutions to provide loans to small businesses and community groups. Starbucks says 100 percent of the donations will go toward loans for firms and organizations that can add jobs or stem job losses.
Starbucks, which pioneered how Americans drink coffee, declined to estimate how much money it plans to raise, but millions of people visit its nearly 7,000 company-owned U.S. stores each day. Customers who give will get a red, white and blue wristband that says “Indivisible.”
“This is about using Starbuck’s scale for good,” said Howard Schultz, Starbucks Corp.’s CEO.
The program is the latest effort by Schultz to address the nation’s economic woes. In August, he sent more than 200,000 Starbucks employees a memo urging them to do what they can to help business thrive. Then, he asked fellow CEOs to stop contributing to political campaigns until the nation’s leaders reached a long-term economic solution. After that, he hosted a national telephone forum, bought full-page ads in two major newspapers and started a website, Upwardspiral2011.org.
Schultz said he feels personal responsibility to do something to stimulate the U.S. economy. Starbucks is hiring about 200 people a day in the U.S. as part of its efforts to remodel thousands of stores and add about 200 more locations in the next year. But Schultz said he wanted to do more.
Starbucks is covering the operational costs to get loans out through the program, which will run indefinitely. Its charitable arm, The Starbucks Foundation, is giving $5 million to get the program started, with the hope that funds will be invested in communities within a month of a donation being made business card design.
Opportunity Finance Network works with 180 financial institutions _ banks, credit, unions, loan funds and venture capital funds _ that give loans in low-income communities that don’t have easy access to credit. The organization, created 27 years ago, has invested $23.2 billion and generated nearly 300,000 jobs through 2009.
Loans through the network have supported everything from charter schools to grocery stores nationwide. The organization found that, even during the recession, more than 98 percent of the money loaned out has been repaid, which is in line with traditional lenders.
Through the program, businesses will apply to financial institutions, which along with the Opportunity Finance Network will assess their potential for adding jobs. Preference will be given to applicants who can add jobs within six months. An outside organization will audit the program within a year.
“We want to match up every person who has $5 to share with every person who can’t spare $5,” said Mark Pinsky, CEO of Opportunity Finance Network.
The effort has the potential to be successful, say some experts. Community institutions succeed, they say, because they understand the needs in the areas they serve.
“I think it’s a really worthy effort,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “In theory, this is a great idea and should have impact.”
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Online: For more information, visit createjobsforusa.org or for information on Opportunity Finance Network and how to find a community development funding institution, visit opportunityfinance.net
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Two children and their parents were killed by machine-gun fire Saturday while trying to flee Moammar Gadhafi’s hometown along with hundreds of other residents, as forces loyal to the ousted regime engaged in heavy clashes with revolutionary fighters surrounding the city.
Their bodies were brought to a makeshift hospital outside Sirte, said a doctor there, Nuri Naari. They were hit by machine-gun fire as they drove toward the positions of revolutionary forces on the edges of the city, he said. It was unclear who killed them.
Sirte is one of the last cities to remain in loyalist hands. After months of stalemate in Libya’s civil war, anti-Gadhafi forces swept into the capital in August and their leaders set up a transitional government. But the continued fighting in holdout cities and the failure to find and capture Gadhafi has kept Libya’s new leaders from being able to declare victory.
Revolutionary forces had given families inside Sirte two days to leave the city starting Friday, said Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, head of the National Transitional Council that now runs the country. They tried to keep a safe corridor open for civilians fleeing the coastal city.
“This period will give a chance for families to leave the areas of fighting,” he said at a press conference Saturday.
Hundreds of cars carrying Sirte residents formed long lines at revolutionary forces’ checkpoints leading out of the city, calmly waiting to be checked by the fighters as explosions echoed in the distance.
After weeks of fighting Gadhafi’s loyalists inside Sirte, the fighters now hold positions about three miles (five kilometers) from the city center, said commander Mustafa al-Rubaie.
Last week, the Libyan Defense Ministry announced that Sirte’s port, airport and military base were all under their control.
Al-Rubaie told The Associated Press that fighters from the east seized control of Sirte’s first residential district and a hotel where Gadhafi’s snipers were based.
“There is heavy fighting going on in the streets of Sirte right now,” he said. “The enemy is besieged from the south, east and west but it’s still in possession of highly sophisticated weapons and a large amount of ammunition.”
Al-Rubaie said Gadhafi forces were also in control of strategic positions inside the city, including high-rise buildings where snipers are positioned, making the revolutionary forces’ advance slow and hard.
“The plan is that the eastern and western forces will meet in the middle of Sirte,” al-Rubaie said. “When we reach this point, we will celebrate the liberation of Sirte.”
Fighters on the western approaches to the city fired rockets and tank fire at loyalists’ positions, while NATO aircraft were heard circling overhead.
Gadhafi’s spokesman Moussa Ibrahim, meanwhile, denied reports that he had been captured, telling the Syrian-based TV station Al-Rai that he was traveling with 23 fighters in Sirte. There was no way to verify the identity of the man speaking in the audio recording, but it sounded like his voice and the TV station has become the mouthpiece for Gadhafi’s resistance.
Many of those fleeing Sirte said conditions in the city continue to deteriorate, with food in short supply and no water or electricity.
“We couldn’t leave our homes because of the shelling; we had to leave the city,” said Ahmed Hussein as his wife, mother-in-law and two children watched the fighters search their car.
Cars, buses and trucks loaded with families and heaped with household goods lined up at the first checkpoint about half a mile (kilometer) from the front lines. Volunteers gave the families food and water while fighters checked documents and cars.
A small contingent from the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders attempted to enter Sirte on Saturday to deliver medical supplies but turned back because of heavy shelling and no guarantees that the Gadhafi loyalist would hold their fire.
In between the bouts of shooting, Libyan fighters prayed.
German officials on Monday downplayed prospects of any quick and dramatic change of course in the eurozone debt crisis, days before a parliamentary vote on beefing up the continent’s rescue fund.
Weekend meetings of global financial leaders in Washington raised hopes of a change in strategy, with officials indicating that would focus on further boosting the firepower of the euro440 billion ($595 billion) rescue fund _ perhaps by allowing it to tap loans from the European Central Bank or otherwise leveraging its lending capacity.
Hopes for such a move boosted European stock markets on Monday, with German and French bank shares rising strongly.
However, ahead of a parliamentary vote Thursday on changes to the fund that eurozone leaders already agreed to in July, Berlin was keen to underline its attachment to its often-criticized step-by-step approach.
Thursday’s vote on expanding the powers of the rescue fund, the so-called European Financial Stability Facility, will be followed over the coming months by final decisions on a second bailout package for Greece and on a permanent rescue mechanism meant to succeed the EFSF from 2013, Finance Ministry spokesman Martin Kotthaus noted.
“That is quite simply the procedure that lies in front of us _ we will work through it step by step,” Kotthaus said.
When asked in Washington whether he supported the idea of leveraging the rescue fund, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said: “Of course we will use the EFSF in the most efficient way possible.”
His spokesman, Kotthaus, said that the EFSF “is how it is” and noted that only a small part of the funding has already been committed.
Asked about the possibility of leveraging the fund, he said “the discussion is not so far along that I could contribute any examples, ideas or subideas.”
Some in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right coalition already find beefing up the EFSF by giving it new powers hard to swallow, and anything beyond that could be a hard sell among its lawmakers.
Christian Lindner, the general secretary of the Free Democrats _ Merkel’s junior coalition partner _ called on the chancellor to provide clarity and stressed that his party opposes allowing the fund to tap ECB loans quick guaranteed personal loans.
A prominent opposition lawmaker, center-left Social Democrat Carsten Schneider, said the government should come clean on its “real intentions.”
“In Washington and Brussels they are already planning new programs in the billions, and in Germany the parliament and public are having the wool pulled over their eyes,” Schneider was quoted as telling Der Spiegel magazine.
Merkel’s spokesman rejected that accusation sharply.
“The true intentions of the government and the chancellor are on the table,” Steffen Seibert said. “They will be decided on in parliament Thursday.”
Merkel has been caught between criticism from abroad for doing too little and from supporters at home who fear she is spending too much taxpayer money on the crisis. She went on German television Sunday night to defend her step-by-step tackling of the crisis.
She warned of the dangers a radical restructuring of Greek debt might bring at this stage.
“Lehman Brothers was allowed to go bust, and then the world was surprised that it fell into a deep crisis,” Merkel said on ARD television.
“What we have to learn is that we can only take steps we can really control,” she added. “The word ‘haircut’ is easy to say on its own … (but) we must go step by step.”
In financial terms, a haircut is a loss investors take on an asset. Many experts believe Greece’s bondholders will have to take a sharp haircut _ that is, not get paid back fully for the money they lent to the country _ if Greece is to have any chance of reducing its debt load.
“What we cannot do is, along the way, destroy the confidence of all investors, and (have) them say, OK, they did this with Greece now; tomorrow they’ll do it with Spain, the day after with Belgium or some other country,” Merkel said.
“Then no one anywhere would invest their money in Europe any more, and we have to prevent that.”
After eight months of contract-wrangling and negotiations that dragged past a strike deadline, supermarket workers in Southern California will stay on the job and shoppers won’t have to rely on Whole Foods or their corner liquor store for groceries.
Members of the region’s United Food and Commercial Workers voted to ratify a new contract with three major grocery chains, union local spokeswoman Ellen Anreder said, averting a strike of more than 60,000 workers that could have crippled the industry and left shoppers scrambling.
United Food and Commercial Workers local spokeswoman Ellen Anreder said Saturday that after two days of voting, members agreed to a deal struck Monday with Vons, Ralphs and Albertsons. Exact vote totals were not released.
“We’re all very grateful to our customers for their support over this eight-month process, and are very grateful that we can continue to serve them,” a tired-but-relieved Anreder said after the vote.
Union officials had urged their rank-and-file to ratify the contract, which they said addressed concerns about funding for the employees’ health plan, the main sticking point during months of negotiations.
“This package protects our members’ access to affordable comprehensive health care for themselves and their families,” the union said in a statement. “That was our top priority throughout the negotiating process.”
The supermarkets, meanwhile, said after agreeing to the deal that it would allow them to remain competitive. Messages left for grocery representatives after the vote were not immediately returned.
Details of the agreement were made available to members for the first time as they filed into their union locals’ headquarters or other voting locations to cast their ballots on Friday and Saturday.
“There was a sense of relief when people had an opportunity to really look over the new contract and see what was in it,” Ralphs clerk and union member Mario Frias said.
The deal ended months of sometimes testy discussions between union officials and representatives of The Vons Cos.; Ralphs Grocery Co., a subsidiary of The Kroger Co.; and Albertsons, which is owned by Supervalu Inc.
Ralphs had indicated it would initially close all 250 of its stores if there had been a strike; Albertsons had said it could shutter up to 100 locations, while Vons had said its stores would remain open.
The prospect of shuttered stores and tense picket lines brought fears of a repeat of the four-month strike in 2004 that cost the industry $2 billion and created a mess for shoppers. This time around, with unemployment at 12.1 percent in California, workers evidently feared that they would find little public sympathy if they voluntarily walked off the job.
The market chains, meanwhile, were likely reluctant to invite shutdowns and picket lines that might alienate shoppers already spending less due to the economic downturn.
Union leaders and the markets announced in July that they had reached a tentative agreement on the employers’ contributions to pension benefits, but remained far apart on payments to the union health care trust fund.
Union members voted overwhelmingly last month to authorize their leaders to call a strike. Those leaders said they were responding to what they characterized as the chains’ delaying tactics when they issued the required 72-hour notice Thursday evening to cancel the contract extension under which they had been working since March.
But after the Sunday evening deadline passed with neither a strike nor a deal, store employees returned to work. Union officials announced Monday that the tentative deal had been reached.
A legal fight over a company’s claim that its designs for numerous SeaWorld attractions were stolen by the theme park operator and its former owner, Anheuser-Busch, has now landed in a St. Louis courtroom.
Revere Entertainment Studios, an Oviedo, Fla.-based design firm, has filed a federal lawsuit alleging SeaWorld used several concepts Revere developed for attractions at SeaWorld theme parks in Orlando, San Diego and San Antonio but did not pay for the development or use. Revere originally filed the suit in federal court in Florida in May, but the case was transferred to federal court in St. Louis on Sept. 16.
Revere names SeaWorld and A-B in the lawsuit in addition to several current and former SeaWorld and A-B executives.
The brewery’s parent company, Belgium-based Anheuser-Busch InBev, owned SeaWorld until late 2009, when it sold its theme park division, Busch Entertainment, to private equity firm Blackstone Group for more than $2.3 billion. Busch Entertainment was headquartered in Clayton until it moved to Orlando in 2008.
Revere claims in the lawsuit that it created an Australian Extremes concept for rides and attractions and pitched the idea to several Busch Entertainment and SeaWorld executives beginning in 2005. Revere also claims it created multiple concepts for rides and attractions, such as a merry-go-round with dolphins and seahorses, that SeaWorld ultimately added to its parks low rates payday advance.
Revere claims SeaWorld and the other defendants named in the suit breached an implied contract by using Revere’s ideas but not paying for the work. Revere claims that many of the ideas it presented to SeaWorld, were slightly changed, for example, Revere alleges it presented an idea for a Dynamite Pass roller coaster and SeaWorld ultimately added a similar attraction called the Dynamite Drop.
Tucker Byrd, an attorney representing Revere, said the damages he’s seeking for his client exceed $100 million. Revere ’spent a couple of years putting it together and thousands of hours creating this thing,” Byrd said. “Then the defendants misappropriated the property of my clients.”
In a motion filed to dismiss the case, SeaWorld and the other defendants argued that Revere signed a non-confidentiality agreement and that Busch Entertainment “made no commitment to keep products, ideas or materials secret or in confidence.”
In an emailed statement, Fred Jacobs, a spokesman for SeaWorld, called the allegations “baseless and meritless.”
KINCARDINE
The economic news is gloomy, and the stock market is down 4 percent this year.
So where are mutual fund managers finding real values, aside from bargain-hunting among stocks with depressed prices? Top fund manager Chuck Akre sees lasting value in the stocks of three discount retailers, each with a gain more than 20 percent this year.
They’re among the top holdings in the Akre Focus Fund. One of Akre’s largest stakes is in Dollar Tree Stores Inc. The other two are off-price apparel rivals: Ross Stores Inc., owner of Ross Dress for Less stores, and TJX Cos., which runs the T.J.Maxx and Marshalls chains.
The impressive rise of these stocks in a down market
The Bank of Italy has warned that the government’s revamped austerity plan must not cut back on the proposed euro45.5 billion ($65.9 billion) in new taxes and spending cuts needed to meet European Central Bank demands for a balanced budget.
Premier Silvio Berlusconi and his allies late Monday revised the planned austerity measures after widespread public anger, deciding to scrap a special tax on high earners and spare small town governments from consolidation and cuts.
The new measures tinker with retirement age and call for a reduction in the number of lawmakers, among other things fast cash loans.
The Bank of Italy’s vice chief Ignazio Visco told parliament committees Tuesday that he hoped the market’s response to the fiscal retreat “isn’t too penalizing.” He said the overall austerity plan “cannot be reduced.”
Corporate culture doesn’t change overnight, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says in reflecting on the company’s post-Jobs future. But the signature Jobsian quirks might.
Google vice-president for engineering Vic Gundotra reflected Thursday on an urgent cellphone call from Jobs one Sunday to insist that the hue of yellow on one of the O’s in Google wasn’t just right.
“So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away,” Gundotra said Jobs told him.
“I’ve already assigned someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow. I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”
It was, Gundotra wrote on the Google+ site, “a lesson I’ll never forget. CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday.”
Jobs’ legendary obsession with detail and secrecy were two ingrained Apple traits that some industry observers saw receding just a little the day after the 56-year-old founder stepped down as CEO.
The website AllAboutSteveJobs.com documented the cult of secrecy.
“Software engineers work on big boxes and hardware engineers never see the software that will run on their machines — less than a dozen people had actually seen an actual iPhone before Steve unveiled it at Macworld 2007.”
A Time magazine article described One Infinite Loop, the Apple Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, after Jobs returned as CEO in 1997:
“Executives feed deliberate misinformation into one part of the company so that any leak can be traced back to its source.” Employees “are monitored by cameras, and they must cover up devices with black cloaks and turn on red warning lights when they are uncovered.”
The other Steve – Wozniak, who with Jobs’ created Apple in Jobs’ parents garage in 1976 – said Being Steve Jobs took its toll.
“He really has had to sacrifice a lot to run Apple,” Wozniak told Byte.com shortly after Jobs announced that his role at Apple would be confined to Chairman of the Board.
“Steve needs now to just have some ‘Steve time,’ Wozniak said.
“He was surrounded by great, great people at Apple . . . and those people are still there,” Wozniak said. “I don’t think the core Apple culture will change because of (Jobs’) leaving, not for a long time.”
New CEO Tim Cook has been running Apple’s daily operations since January when Job went on his third medical leave. He’d first stepped up to the job in 2004, when Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Cook, 51, was in charge when the iPad 2 was unveiled, when iCloud was announced, and when Apple, two weeks ago, briefly became the world’s most valuable company.
Before that, Cook restructured Apple’s manufacturing methods and its supply chain. He is, by all accounts, a logistics maestro.
“You kind of want to manage it like you’re in the dairy business,” he was quoted as saying in a CNN 2008 profile payday loans. “If it gets past its freshness date, you have a problem.”
And he has his own nascent cult of personality.
“In meetings he’s known for long, uncomfortable pauses, when all you hear is the sound of his tearing the wrapper of the energy bars he constantly eats,” CNN wrote. One executive was quoted as saying, “I’ve seen him shred people. He asks questions he knows you can’t answer and he keeps going and going.”
A tidy, often-repeated Cook story has him remarking at a meeting on Asia’s terrible distribution network, “Somebody should be in China driving this” and then, 30 minutes later, asking operations executive Sabihh Khan, “Why are you still here?” As the story goes, Khan left the meeting immediately to grab a plane to China, without even a change of clothes.
As low-key as Jobs is a showman, Cook has made clear he’s steeped in the philosophy of Apple, which he joined in 1998, when “the company was commonly thought to be on the verge of extinction,” he said in a 2010 commencement speech at his alma mater, Auburn University.
“The word ‘complete’ is not in our dictionary,” he said at the Goldman Sachs tech conference in San Francisco in 2010. “We’re innovators. Which means many times we end up ‘obsoleting’ ourselves.
“We say no to great ideas every day. And we do that in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small so that we can put all our energy behind the ones we do choose.”
Steve Jobs’ Apple “has never been afraid to cannibalize its own business,” said MSNBC tech writer Wilson Rothman. “The iPhone eats more and more into iPod sales every quarter. The iPad is a low-prices alternative to a Mac. One of the things Jobs’s rivals will never be able to stomach is his ability to make his own products obsolete.”
Jobs helped change computers from a geeky hobbyist’s obsession to a necessity of modern life at work and home, and in the process he upended not just personal technology but the cellphone and music industries, the Associated Press reported.
The Apple II hit the market in 1977, making Jobs a multi-millionaire by age 25. The Macintosh exploded onto the scene in 1984 and then, in 1998, came the candy-coloured iMacs, which sold about 2 million its first year.
In this century, iTunes changed the way people bought music, and the iPhone changed the way they communicated. Jobs’ career, said The Mac Observer, has been “a revolution every other year.”
Indeed, the day before Jobs stepped down, a Japanese website reported Apple was working on a new Mac line that would be “completely different” from anything on the market now.
“No one can replace Steve Jobs, but (Cook) is good at what he does, which is make sure the right people have the right jobs,” said Jeff Gamet, managing editor at The Mac Observer.
“It’s not like as of today everything for Apple changes. It’s going to feel a little different, though, because Steve won’t have the CEO title.”
An Exxon Mobil Pipeline Co. executive says the cleanup of a major oil spill in the Yellowstone River has proven to be more difficult than expected and could go on for several more months.
Company vice president Geoff Craft said Thursday that areas hit hardest by the July spill should be cleaned up by the first half of October. That includes a 20-mile stretch of the Yellowstone from Laurel to Billings.
But scattered sites would need to be dealt with, including contaminated river sections downstream of Billings. Craft says work in those areas could continue until Thanksgiving.
Exxon Mobil had been ordered to complete work on the 1,000-barrel spill by Sept 9. Removing crude from hundreds of debris piles created by spring flooding has slowed the company’s efforts.
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