Month: July 2016

Latest Headlines

Facing heightened competition, UPS will try limited Saturday delivery in three U.S. cities

A news summary focused on 10 big employers; updated 7:02 a.m.

UPS will test Saturday delivery this summer in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Los Angeles for standard ground packages as it defends its turf against FedEx, which already offers the service, and the U.S. Postal Service, which delivers on Saturdays and Sundays in some markets for Amazon. UPS is remaking its network to accommodate online shopping while watching potential rivals enter the market, including courier services now pitching same-day delivery. The proportion of UPS’s packages going to U.S. homes is expected to rise to 51% in 2019 from today’s 46%, challenging its efficiency. While it earns a bit more per parcel for home deliveries, it averages only 1.2 packages on each residential stop, compared with 3.6 at each business (Bloomberg).

Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Erdogan

PAPA JOHN’S has 22 restaurants in Turkey, only 1% of all its more than 1,500 locations outside the U.S., according to regulatory filings that show it has limited exposure to the tumult in that country, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been facing a military-led coup attempt since yesterday. List of all overseas restaurants. Louisville’s other major fast-food chain, YUM, doesn’t show any locations broken down by country.

Philanthropy

Fund for the Arts raises $9 million, but campaign illustrates risk of shifting Louisville economy

The Fund for the Arts said it received $8.7 million in contributions during its fundraising campaign ended last month, up slightly from last year’s $8.6 million. The money will be distributed to more than 100 charities, schools and other nonprofits to support arts programs, according to The Courier-Journal.

Fund for the Arts logoBut in announcing the figures, the 67-year-old organization warned Louisville’s economy has made it harder to raise more money, especially when big contributions from companies such as GE Appliances and Humana may be threatened by ownership changes.

The Humana Foundation is one of the fund’s biggest supporters. Of the $8.3 million it gave to charity in 2014, $366,000 went to the arts fund, according to the foundation’s most recent IRS tax return. Only six other charities got more:

With $179 million, the Humana Foundation is the fourth-largest foundation in Louisville, according to Boulevard’s database of richest nonprofits. While it’s legally separate from the company, their leadership overlaps. The foundation’s five directors are Humana CEO Bruce Broussard; General Counsel Christopher Todoroff; board member David A. Jones Jr.; his father, company co-founder David A. Jones Sr., and Chairman Michael McCallister, a retired Humana CEO and former chairman.

Michael McCallister
McCallister

It’s unclear whether Aetna would change any of those officers — and the foundation’s giving, too — assuming the Hartford insurer completes its $37 billion purchase of Humana. That deal is subject to final regulatory approval, a hurdle that’s recently grown higher within the Department of Justice’s antitrust division.

Related: As GE Foundation gets new chief, its Louisville ties are less certain after Haier deal.

Cops and Courts

After men used knife and gun, a bad day for Taco Bell in California, Texas and Missouri

The latest crime news across the world of 48,000 restaurants*. Updated 5:16 p.m.

Crime scene tapeA 21-year-old worker at a Taco Bell in Redding, Calif., was repeatedly stabbed about 6 p.m. yesterday by a customer armed with a pocket knife, who jumped over the counter after claiming employees stole his credit card.

Police arrested the suspect, Marco Osby, 46, outside the restaurant after customers and others tried to detain him, according to the Record Searchlight. Osby had been released from the Shasta County Jail only three hours earlier after being arrested in a separate incident Tuesday on suspicion of assault.

Marco Osby
Osby

The victim was taken to Mercy Medical Center where he was listed in good condition last night. Police said Osby claimed he is a paranoid schizophrenic in need of medication.

In Abilene, Texas, a grand jury indicted a 22-year-old man yesterday on charges of aggravated robbery, robbery, and possession of cocaine in an April 23 robbery of a Taco Bell.

Jacob Gongora
Gongora

The man, Jacob Lee Gongora, forced an employee to enter the manager’s office at gunpoint and demanded money, according to court documents cited by the Abilene Reporter-News. The manager told police Gongora pointed the gun at her, too.

Gongora took the money and fled the restaurant; police located and arrested him later, the newspaper said. He was found carrying a long rifle; a bag of money in his pants, and a small amount of white powder, believed to be cocaine, in his sock, according to court documents.

In Hazelwood, Mo., police were searching for someone who shot a 36-year-old woman in a Taco Bell parking lot yesterday around 2:30 p.m. Officers found the victim with a gunshot wound to her leg, according to KTVI. She was taken to a local hospital to be treated for a non-life threatening injury.

KFC

A shooting last night outside a Seattle-area KFC left two men injured, with one in critical condition. The shooting started in the restaurant’s parking lot in Tukwila, 11 miles south of Seattle, during an argument between two groups of young men. At some point, the groups began firing at each other in what witnesses described as a “gunfight,” according to the Seattle Times.

* Yum has 43,000 KFCs, Pizza Huts and Taco Bells in nearly 140 countries; Papa John’s has 4,900 in 37 countries, and Texas Roadhouse has 485 restaurants in five countries. With that many locations, crimes inevitably will occur — with potentially serious legal consequences for the companies.

Latest Headlines

Top U.S. health official: competition key to insurance markets in Humana-Aetna deal; British Pizza Huts are 😋 about their 🆕 menus; and Amazon adds 10th Calif. center

A news summary focused on 10 big employers; updated 5:23 p.m.

Pizza Hut emoji menu
An emoji expert wrote the new menus.

HUMANA: The Obama administration’s top health official highlighted the importance of competition to insurance markets, as the Justice Department is poised to decide on two massive deals among four of the health-plan industry’s biggest players: Humana-Aetna’s $37 billion tie-up, and Anthem-Cigna’s $48 billion. But Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell declined to comment on her department’s view of the two massive deals. “When there is competition, that creates downward price pressure, and it also creates upward quality pressure,” Burwell said in a brief interview in Fort Dodge, Iowa (Bloomberg).

PIZZA HUT: Six British Pizza Huts have unveiled menus written entirely in emojis, all in time for Sunday’s World Emoji Day. “Many of the items look easy enough to translate, with one pizza option including pictures of a tomato, basil plant, a green heart and a mushroom with the vegetarian ‘v’ sign next to it,” says the Daily Mail. “A crown, chicken and drumstick is slightly more obscure.” But if it all gets too difficult for some customers, there’s a traditional menu on hand (Daily Mail). Here’s an English-to-emoji translator.

YUM: Financial news site Seeking Alpha has published a transcript of Yum’s second-quarter conference call with analysts on Wednesday (Seeking Alpha).

AMAZON today disclosed plans to open its 10th California distribution center, in Sacramento. It’s the fourth center the retailer has announced for California alone over the past four months, and is expected to create more than 1,000 full-time jobs (press release). Amazon has more than 120 centers worldwide, including two in the Louisville area with a combined 6,000 employees, in Jeffersonville and Shephardsville.

FORD posted its best first-half for total European vehicle and passenger car sales since 2010, and best commercial vehicle sales since 1993 in its 20 traditional European markets (press release). The company’s philanthropic arm, the Ford Motor Company Fund, said it would award $400,000 in scholarships and grants to support programs encouraging Latino students to graduate from high school (press release).

And the U.S. Postal Service started selling first-class “forever” stamps today that commemorate four pickup trucks, including the 1948 Ford F-1 — the first F-Series truck — and the 1965 Ford F-100:

pr16_056

Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant employs 5,100 workers, producing F-250 and F-550 Super Duty pickups, plus Expeditions, and Lincoln Navigators.

KFC: In the U.K.’s Plymouth, a 46-year-old man branded “too fat to work” on national television has vowed to chain himself to land set aside for a new KFC, in protest of the plans. Stephen Beer, who once gorged on three takeaways a day and weighed more than 420 lbs, is on a mission to raise awareness of childhood obesity, and says he’s “disgusted” by the thought of more fast-food chains in the city (Plymouth Herald).

In other news, presumptive GOP White House nominee Donald Trump Continue reading “Top U.S. health official: competition key to insurance markets in Humana-Aetna deal; British Pizza Huts are 😋 about their 🆕 menus; and Amazon adds 10th Calif. center” →