Month: May 2016

The Jennifer Lawrence Diary™

Jennifer LawrenceBoulevard reviews the latest media coverage of the Oscar-winning Louisville native in our exclusive Jennifer Lawrence Diary™. Today’s news, rated on a scale of 1-5 stars:

Three starsLawrence was trashing her Beverly Hills house — figuratively, at any rate — not long after she snapped it up for $8.2 million in October 2014. The 5,500-square-foot bachelorette pad’s provenance was apparently problematical. “It’s Ellen [DeGeneres]’s old house,” Lawrence said, according to Pop Sugar. “It was Jessica Simpson‘s old house. It’s like the neighborhood whore. I was outside and some girl was like, ‘I grew up in this house.’ Beat it, kid. Everybody’s lived in this house.”

Now, pushing two years later, that kid would have plenty of company on the street outside, according to this just-published MSN story:

“There are 10 [paparazzi] sleeping outside my house, and I see them every morning and it’s not lovely,” 25-year-old Lawrence says. “I’ve talked about it a lot with other actors who have the same problems, but we don’t really like to complain about it because if we do people go, ‘Shut up, millionaires,’ and say, ‘you’re so lucky.’ And yes, we are lucky, but I deserve the right to have control over my image. I would prefer that the only time somebody sees me is when I am in a film or in character or if I am promoting a movie.”

Curbed Los Angeles says Lawrence’s house in the guarded Hidden Valley enclave sold for $6.4 million only a year before she bought it from DeGeneres for nearly $2 million more. For those 10 men who’d love to come inside to snap pictures, Curbed offers this inside tour — including the entrance, with the garage gate open:

Jennifer Lawrence house

For not being all judge-y about Lawrence’s poor-me travails, Boulevard gives MSN three stars!

Jobs

$25 per hour: Here’s a job so unusual, it’ll probably leave friends scratching their heads

time-clockBoulevard reports extensively on executive pay at big local employers. But we also look at what folks are making down in the trenches — or, in this case, up in the heads. Here’s a recent ad from Craigslist’s salon/spa/fitness category of Louisville job listings.

The job: head lice removal technician.

The description: Lice Doctors is looking for people who can work part-time, on-call — and away from an office, because you’ll likely treat families in their home or another agreed-upon location. To qualify, you must have experience removing head lice, either professionally or on family and friends; be able to find small nits in hair, and have reliable transportation, a valid driver’s license, and proof of auto insurance. Ideally, you have already worked in healthcare (such as a nurse, home health aide, certified nursing assistant, or phlebotomist); as a hairdresser, and with children.

What the ad doesn’t say seems nearly as important, according to the company’s website: You must be willing to tell people what you do for a living, in a conversation that goes like this:

“You’re a what?!”

“A lice remover.”

” . . . so you pick lice out of people’s hair?”

“Yep.”

“Does it work? Can you really get rid of the lice? Do you clean their whole house or something?”

“It works 100%. I can really get rid of the lice and I don’t do anything with the home because that isn’t necessary. All the focus and energy goes towards the head and hair.”

“Do you use a pesticide or something?”

“No, I use olive oil.”

“Olive oil?!”

“Yep.”

What it pays: $25 per hour, plus travel expenses. (Lice Doctors charges customers $125 for the first hour, then $110 for each additional hour.) At that hourly rate, working 20 hours a week (plus many extra hours after school starts, we imagine), you’d earn $26,000 a year.

Related: Yes, you really can use olive oil to treat lice. Plus, Amazon sells 143 different lice removal kits.

Latest Headlines

China fund and KKR drop talks to buy into Yum China; ‘Pac Man’ takeover of CJ-owner’s tough to swallow, and another Taco Cantina on the way

A news summary focused on big employers; updated 3:09 p.m.

tacobell-restaurant
The first Taco Bell Cantina in Chicago; next up is in Berkeley, Calif.

YUM: A consortium led by sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp. and private equity firm KKR has ended talks to buy a stake in Yum’s 7,205-restaurant China unit, partly over Yum’s unwillingness to give up majority control because of the negative tax implications that would pose (Reuters).

GANNETT: Tribune Publishing’s defensive “Pac-Man” takeover of Courier-Journal owner Gannett would be a mouthful (New York Times). Meanwhile, Gannett’s unsolicited bid for Tribune got more personal yesterday, with each company calling out the other’s leaders by name and questioning management’s decision-making (Chicago Tribune).

TACO BELL is planning one of its next new Cantinas for Berkeley, Calif., across from San Francisco. The new formats, which target urban millennials and include alcohol on the menu, were announced last fall for Chicago and San Francisco (San Francisco Eater). The San Francisco Cantina is still alcohol-free — “no beer, no sangria, none of the boozy Mountain Dew slushies that they serve at the flagship Cantina in downtown Chicago,” thanks to a liquor license dispute with the neighbors (SF Eater, too). Taco Bell last week announced plans for four new upscale concept restaurants in Southern California.

KFC: That chicken-flavored nail polish the Internet fell in love with was a one-off by a Hong Kong franchisee; it won’t be sold company-wide. “As a brand strategy, it’s not something we will pursue,” Yum China CEO Micky Pant said in an interview yesterday after the fast food giant’s annual shareholder meeting in Louisville (Courier-Journal). Meanwhile, a video about the polish has gone viral, racking up nearly 231,000 views:

CHURCHILL DOWNS: Two horses have died today in separate incidents after races leading up to this afternoon’s Preakness Stakes (WDRB).

UPS will invest $177 million expanding its distribution hub in Columbus, Ohio, creating 75 jobs on top of the 748 employees already there (Columbus Business First).

PIZZA HUT: New Orleans police arrested a man for doing something very naughty on a mattress behind a Pizza Hut restaurant (Times-Picayune).

In other news, the Westport Village shopping center has been sold to Atlanta-based Hendon Properties for $23.8 million (Courier-Journal). The center at night, below:

Westport Village Shopping Center

The Jennifer Lawrence Diary™

cover-03-eg00vfx“I love the fans and I love the character. But then you realize how important your year is, like how important three months out of your year is — I don’t know. I shouldn’t be that honest.”

— Jennifer Lawrence, speaking to Entertainment Weekly about whether the Louisville native will appear in another “X-Men” film. The next installment in the franchise, “X-Men: Apocalypse,” opens domestically on Thursday. Lawrence appears on the magazine’s cover, above. Watch the trailer.

Entrepreneurs

In Yum’s history, 11 herbs and spices became a recipe for a fast-food giant

Boulevard focuses on news about some of Louisville’s biggest employers, nonprofits, and cultural institutions. This is one in an occasional series about them.

Harland Sanders
Sanders

Louisville-based Yum Brands traces its corporate roots to one of the most-recognized entrepreneurs — and cooks — in the world: Col. Harland Sanders. He launched his iconic Kentucky Fried Chicken chain in 1930 from his roadside restaurant in Corbin, Ky., during the Great Depression.

It grew into a business giant based on his secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices. In 1964, at age 73, Sanders sold the chain for $2 million ($15 million in 2016 dollars) to a partnership led by Kentucky businessman John Y. Brown Jr. (a lawyer and future governor of the state) and Jack C. Massey, a venture capitalist.

In the 1970s and 80s, KFC passed through a series of owners, ultimately getting acquired by PepsiCo.

The beverage giant added Pizza Hut in 1977, and Mexican fast-food chain Taco Bell in 1978 — and then it spun off all three into Tricon Global Restaurants in 1997. Tricon made Louisville its corporate headquarters, and then adopted the name Yum! Brands. (Boulevard doesn’t use the exclamation mark because it looks like a typo to readers who aren’t familiar with the brand!)

With nearly 43,000 restaurants in more than 130 countries and territories, Yum is now one of the biggest restaurant chains in the world. Its marquee brands — KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell — are one of the biggest private employers, with a combined 505,000 employees; a majority of them work part-time. Revenues in 2015 exceeded $13 billion. It ranked No 218 in the Fortune 500 in June 2016.

Greg Creed
Creed

In Louisville, Yum employs 1,000 at the corporate headquarters as well as KFC’s U.S. division offices. In early 2016, however, CEO Greg Creed and the four other top executives shifted to Plano north of Dallas, where the company’s biggest two divisions, KFC Global and Pizza Hut, are headquartered. Allaying concerns that Yum’s corporate headquarters might move, too, a spokesman told WDRB in February 2016 the executives would work from Louisville one or two weeks per month. Taco Bell is based in southern California’s Irvine.

Sanders’ affiliation with KFC hasn’t entirely ended. He continued as a spokesman for many years after he sold the chain to Brown and Massey. He died in 1980 at Jewish Hospital and was buried in Cave Hill Cemetery before a monument designed to look like the KFC-Yum headquarters, at 1441 Gardiner Lane. For many years, his grave has been the most-visited there.

Last year, Yum resurrected the colonel — actually, former Saturday Night Live comedian Darrell Hammond — to boost sales. But the new series of commercials that followed have gotten mixed reviews. Here’s one: