Month: June 2016

Latest Headlines

Louisville companies slammed again in Brexit fallout; Kindred falls 7% more, as Dow Jones plunges another 261 points

A news summary, focused on 10 big employers; updated 4:42 p.m.

Kindred headquarters
Kindred’s headquarters at 4th and Broadway; its shares got hit today.

The 10 big louisville employers tracked by Boulevard took it on the chin again, tumbling for a second consecutive day in the aftermath of Britain’s surprise vote to leave the European Union. Only one — Qingdao Haier, new owner of GE Appliances — gained ground, as major stock market indices fell hard. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 17,140, down 1.5%; the broader S&P 500 index ended the day at 2001, off 1.8%, and the Nasdaq slipped below 4,600, or 2.4%.

Some of the losses didn’t make sense. Hospital and nursing home giant Kindred, with no discernible exposure to overseas turmoil, dove another 7%, to $10.49 a share — even steeper than its 3.9% drop on Friday. Volume was light: 767,818 shares vs. the average 837,761, suggesting little conviction among pessimistic investors; 1.1 million shares traded Friday. Still, Kindred was easily the worst performer of the 10 today:

June 27 stocks

Papa John’s, on the other hand, fell just 1%, to $65.82, after also declining 1% Friday. That’s despite the fact its biggest foreign market is the U.K., where it has 384 company-owned and franchised stores — 26% of all 1,505 outside the U.S., according to its annual report. In total, Papa John’s had 4,893 stores at the end of last year. The company’s top 10 foreign markets . . .

Top 10 Papa John's market outside U.S

. . . and the full list of all 37 overseas.

Today’s action came after Friday, the first day Wall Street could react to Brexit. The Dow plunged 3.4% to close at 17,400; the S&P fell 3.6% to 2,037, and the Nasdaq fell the most, 4.1% to 4,708. Here’s the latest news about Brexit, finance, and business.

In non-Brexit news, Papa John’s will donate 250 pizzas a day through Thursday to victims of recent devastating floods in the Elkview and Clendenin areas of West Virginia (WSAZ). At least 25 people are dead and several more missing after the disaster caused by heavy rains Thursday. Latest flood news.

Meanwhile, visits to fast-food restaurants — which had been growing at a quarterly clip of 2% since September 2015 — stalled in March, April and May, according to as-yet-unpublished data from market research firm NPD Group (The Wall Street Journal).

Media and Marketing

150th-birthday campaign: How to play the Jack Daniel’s whiskey barrel scavenger hunt

Starting Friday in its Lynchburg, Tenn., hometown, the Brown-Forman unit is hiding 150 prize-filled whiskey barrels across the globe at historic and cultural sites, with clues on Jack Daniel’s Facebook pages to help fans find them.

The clues, tied to the history of each region, will be revealed on the day of each local Barrel Hunt, and barrels will be opened when the first person to arrive gives the correct password. The hunt is a social-media marketing centerpiece of the distiller’s 150th anniversary. It runs through Sept. 30.

Photo, top: A barrel gets the Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 brand.

How important is Jack to the company?

It’s the only one of Brown-Forman’s product lines to be Continue reading “150th-birthday campaign: How to play the Jack Daniel’s whiskey barrel scavenger hunt” →

Latest Headlines

Saturday night dive: a bad one for Pizza Hut, after a good one for Roadhouse; and Jack Daniel’s reveals a hard truth

A news summary, focused on 10 big employers; updated 6:36 p.m

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In an undated photo, Jack Daniel — center, in white hat — and to the left, a man who could be a son of Nearis Green, a slave who taught Daniel how to make whiskey.

PIZZA HUT: In Memphis, police are investigating why an officer shot and critically wounded a suspect around 11:10 last night in front of a Pizza Hut, after a caller reported two men were robbing a driver there. One suspect was shot and taken to the Regional Medical Center in critical condition. The second suspect fled; it’s unknown if he was also hit (Commercial Appeal).

In Ohio, Harrison Township deputies were investigating a break-in at a Pizza Hut early this morning; reports indicate a cash register from the business was located by deputies, but it wasn’t immediately clear whether burglars were able to get away with anything (WHIO).

And in northern Delaware yesterday, two armed men confronted a male clerk closing a Pizza Hut in Bear at 1 a.m., demanding cash from the register. The clerk complied and turned over an undisclosed amount. The suspects then fled the store; no injuries were reported (Delaware Online). BTW: Yelp reviewers don’t like the Bear restaurant one bit.

BROWN-FORMAN‘s Jack Daniel’s unit is using its 150 anniversary celebrations this year to talk candidly about its history: the founder learned his craft from a slave named Nearis Green. “This version of the story was never a secret,” The New York Times says today, “but it is one that the distillery has only recently begun to embrace, tentatively, in some of its tours, and in a social media and marketing campaign this summer” (New York Times).

TEXAS ROADHOUSE‘s new restaurant in Roanoke, Va., drew 350 diners when it opened last week for the first time. But managing partner Eric Grow wasn’t surprised in the least, “even though there was very little spectacle at the opening — no formal ribbon cutting or announcement,” says the Roanoke Times. “A few weeks ago he began switching on the building’s LED lights. The first night he did this, he estimates the restaurant got more than a hundred calls asking if it was open yet” (Roanoke Times).

Books

A UPS aircraft mechanic, her ‘Dark Brown Lies’ book, and a very expensive advertisement on the CJ’s front page today

Many Courier-Journal readers were no doubt left totally confused this morning when they saw an advertisement on the front page — one of the most expensive you can buy — for a three-year-old book written by a former UPS aircraft mechanic.

CJ June 26 detail

Debbie Simpson’s “Dark Brown Lies” doesn’t show up in the CJ’s database, which means a lot of readers were learning about it for the first time. The book, which she self-published through a company she apparently incorporated in Arkansas in 2013, is about her 19-year-career at Louisville’s biggest private employer — one that ended very badly.

Debbie Simpson
Simpson

“This true story,” she writes on her website, “is about a female aircraft maintenance technician that worked for one of the most powerful companies in America and the consequences she faced for standing up and speaking out against harassment within the workplace. The consequences were: employee entries, warning letter(s), retaliation, intimidation, suspension, the constant real threat of termination and termination.”

What exactly happened isn’t detailed. But her beef with UPS, which employs 22,000 people at its hub here, may stem at least partly from a whistleblower case she lost in 2008 before the U.S. Labor Department.

Simpson’s advertisement this morning is only indirectly about her book. Instead, she’s drawing attention to another legal case where a pilot, Douglas Greene, has sued the Frost Brown Todd law firm in federal court in Louisville and two of its attorneys. Simpson says she’s dealt with one of the attorneys, Tony Coleman, in her own legal fight against UPS.

Travel

Das ist schön! Louisville to Berlin for a $32,000 gay tango festival weekend

An occasional look at premium travel from Louisville.

Tango has always been an art form friendly to same-sex couples — hardly surprising, when you consider one possible origin of the traditional Argentine dance is in Buenos Aires brothels, where men danced awaiting their turns for sexual assignations.

Now, with June’s gay pride month kicking off a busy summer of events for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender folks, The New York Times suggests the International Queer Tango Festival, July 28-31.

Let’s dance!

When: July 28-31. Airline: American. Route: Louisville to Washington to Berlin; total travel time: 16 hours and 30 minutes. How much: $7,720 per business-class ticket. Reservations.

For accommodations, the Waldorf Astoria Berlin ist schön, especially the King Presidential Suite — a large, luxurious apartment on the 31st floor. It sleeps four adults in two bedrooms with en suite bathrooms; a living room with a piano, fireplace; panoramic views from two balconies; a kitchen; separate office and service access. Here’s the view from a bedroom . . .

Corner bedroom
A corner room with Berlin at your feet.

. . . and the living room. Continue reading “Das ist schön! Louisville to Berlin for a $32,000 gay tango festival weekend” →

Jobs

$30,410 a year: How much you’d earn as a Louisville dog catcher — if you have a license to kill

time-clockBoulevard reports extensively on executive pay at big local employers. But we also look at what folks make down in the trenches — or in the animal kingdom. Here’s an opening listed on the City of Louisville’s help-wanted website.

The job: animal control officer.

The duties for this Louisville Metro government job appear fairly straightforward: explain to the public procedures, laws, codes and ordinances; patrol an assigned geographic area year-round; investigate complaints and issue citations, violations and warnings; and capture and impound animals with a net, rope, trap, food, other equipment or other technique or method.

But then there’s this special requirement: “Must possess EBI (euthanasia by injection) certification issued by the Kentucky Board of Veterinary Examiners or obtain within six months of employment.”

What it pays: $14.62 an hour. At that rate, working 40 hours weekly for 52 weeks, you’d make $30,410 a year.

Your net income after taxes would be about $2,007 a month, according to this tax calculator.

But can you live on that?

Continue reading “$30,410 a year: How much you’d earn as a Louisville dog catcher — if you have a license to kill” →