Latest Headlines

Haier in home fix-up show deal; and Taco Bell franchise owner gives Fla. ‘coma’ guy $2.5K
Tebow Home Free
Tebow (left) and Holmes host show where Haier is now a sponsor.

A news summary, focused on big employers; updated 10:32 a.m.

GE: Haier has signed on as a sponsor for the second season of the reality TV-game show Home Free, where contestants compete to win a home outfitted with Haier appliances. Co-hosts are Tim Tebow, the Heisman Trophy winner, and Mike Holmes, the series’s creator and professional contractor. On the Fox Network show, nine couples compete to renovate a dilapidated home each week, facing elimination until the winners are awarded their dream home. The series starts June 16 (press release). China-based Haier’s pending $5.4 billion purchase of the 6,000-employee Appliance Park in Louisville is expected to close this summer.

Michael Booth Taco Bell coma man
Booth in hospital with tacos.

TACO BELL: The Florida man who became an Internet sensation after waking from a 42-day coma in April and immediately asking for Taco Bell as his first meal is now closer to paying his medical bills, too: The franchise owner whose restaurant supplied the 8½ crunchy tacos last month presented Jake Booth with an oversized check for $2,500 at his Bonita Springs home, plus $250 in gift certificates for more tacos; Booth’s request led to untold millions of dollars in free publicity for Taco Bell. “We wanted to meet one of our greatest fans,” said Carlos Silva, chief operating officer of Prometheus Franchise Restaurant Holding; the Clearwater, Fla.-based company owns Taco Bell franchises throughout Southwest Florida. The money will go toward a Wake the Jake Go Fund Me campaign to raise $50,000 to help Booth pay medical bills (Naples Daily News). Watch the video. Booth’s story caught fire when someone posted a photo of him on Reddit. “Taco Bell’s marketing team have a slam dunk with this one,” said one poster.

AMAZON‘s latest round of distribution center openings is set for Edwardsville, Ill., where it plans two centers with more than 1,000 full-time jobs total. The company said today that one center will specialize in handling big-screen TVs, sports equipment or kayaks and the other will handle smaller items, including books, toys and electronics; no opening date was given for the centers (press release). Rumors had circulated last month that Amazon was headed for the area (Belleville News-Democrat). Edwardsville has 25,000 residents and is 27 miles northeast of St. Louis (Census facts). Today’s news follows Amazon’s announcement just a week ago that it would open a second distribution center in Joliet, Ill., with 2,000 jobs on top of the 1,500 already at the existing center; Joliet is an hour south of Chicago (press release).

In other news, University of Louisville has given baseball coach Dan McDonnell a $325,000 raise, to a base salary of $1 million a year, to discourage other schools from trying to poach him (Courier-Journal). U.S. stocks were modestly lower an hour into trading as Wall Street digested fresh ADP payroll data, watched an OPEC meeting, and waited for tomorrow’s May employment report from the Labor Department (Google Finance). The Boulevard Stock Portfolio of 11 big employers was mixed.

Just Tweets

Amazon and Domino’s were on the same promotional page for National Best Friend’s day.

Not so much at Pizza Hut . . .

. . . or Papa John’s:

Cops and Courts

Schneider feud erupts again: heiresses attack heiresses over ‘desperate grab at power’
Galt House
The Galt House is the jewel in the Schneider real estate crown.

Well, that ceasefire didn’t last long.

Reigniting a family fight, Schneider Co. CEO Mary Moseley and her sister Dawn Hitron have accused their other two sisters of a “desperate grab at power and control power play” to prevent the sale of their late father’s $280 million real estate empire, The Courier-Journal is now reporting. In a blistering claim filed in a long-running lawsuit, they’re demanding their siblings pay them damages for “derailing” the sale of the Galt House hotel downtown and other properties.

The battle had appeared over just two weeks ago, when Moseley, 66, and Hitron, 62, a homemaker, agreed in Jefferson Circuit Court to drop a plan to sell the real estate before the end of May, when a trust expired and control flowed to all 24 of Schneider’s beneficiaries, according to the newspaper.

Al Schneider
Schneider

But in the new 49-page claim filed Tuesday, the two sisters want to recover damages for the thwarted sale of the assets to Columbia Sussex for $135 million, which they said was far in excess of appraised value, the CJ says. The hotel is the marquee property their father, Al Schneider, bequeathed to his children when he died in 2001 at 86.

The fight has already dragged on through four courts and required 10 lawyers. It’s divided the four sisters — three of whom live in adjacent houses on the same block off Newburg Road; a fourth is just a mile away — in a business drama rivaling the 1980s Bingham family meltdown over their media business. The two sisters on the other side of Moseley and Hitron are Christy Coe, 64, a nurse practitioner, and Nancy O’Hearn, 70, who owns an event planning company.

Diversions

Once the nation’s glittering disco ball star, Omega’s now barely stayin’ alive
Disco ball
$25 at Amazon.

During the late 1970s, when the Bee Gees made Saturday Night Fever a box-office hit, Louisville’s Omega National Products factory on Baxter Avenue nearly cornered the market, churning out 90% of the spinning dance floor ornaments in the U.S.

“That was the heyday, I’m telling you,” said Yolanda Baker, now 69, and the last of dozens of women still making the mirrored globes by hand at Omega, according to The Wall Street Journal. These days, production is down to about 15 or 20 a month, nearly all Baker’s work. The culprit: overseas competition has cut prices; a 12-inch Omega ball retails for about $135 vs. one made in China that’s $25 on Amazon. (Of course, Boulevard notes, it doesn’t help that mirror balls are nowhere on Omega’s product list.)

As for the Bee Gees, the city’s still breakin’ and everybody’s shakin‘ — on video.

Latest Headlines

B-F closes $405M BenRiach deal; Bezos says Amazon isn’t gunning for UPS — but he wants ‘better prices’; and Taco’s new Chalupa is one of ‘grossest fast food items ever offered’
BenRiach Distillery
The distillery is in the Highlands of northern Scotland.

A news summary, focused on big employers; updated 3:47 p.m.

BROWN-FORMAN said today it had completed its previously announced acquisition of Scotland’s BenRiach Distillery Co. for £281 million ($405 million). The deal includes three BenRiach labels and brings Brown-Forman back into the single-malt scotch whisky business. “The GlenDronach, BenRiach, and Glenglassaugh single-malt brands are among the finest single malts in the world,” CEO Paul Varga said in a statement. The purchase includes three distilleries, a bottling plant, and the headquarters in Edinburgh. BenRiach was founded in 1826 — 44 years before Brown-Forman was launched (press release). Today’s announcement follows a published report two weeks ago that the Louisville spirits and wine company is considering selling its Finlandia vodka business amid a broader effort to focus on whiskey. Brown-Forman’s Louisville operations.

Jeff Bezos
Bezos

AMAZON CEO Jeff Bezos told a high-profile technology conference last night that the retail giant isn’t aiming to compete head-on with UPS and other shippers it now partners with. Instead, Amazon wants to pick up the slack when delivery services can’t handle the final stretch. He cited India and the U.K. as examples. “We have had to take over a lot of the last-mile delivery in the U.K. over the last several years,” he told the Code Conference, in wide-ranging remarks. “The Royal Mail ran out of capacity at peak” (Bloomberg). Bezos did, however, hint at another motivation: wrangling better terms on delivery contracts. “Better prices on transportation would be acceptable to us,” he deadpanned (Recode). The Amazon founder was “equally comic, candid, and clever as he offered his views on artificial intelligence, data privacy, free speech, leadership, streaming video, and aerospace” (Fortune).

Elsewhere, Amazon is hiring more than 1,000 workers for its new 855,000 square-foot distribution center opening this summer outside San Antonio; the company already has six other Texas centers, including another one in the San Antonio area (Houston Chronicle). Amazon has five centers in Kentucky, including two in the Louisville area employing 6,000. And with more than 20,000 workers, UPS is Louisville’s biggest private employer.

TACO BELL‘s newest menu offering — a Chalupa with a fried chicken shell — is one of the “grossest fast food items ever offered” (New York Daily News). How it’s made (BuzzFeed). Also, the company has started construction on a restaurant in Nitro, West Virginia (WSAZ).

Ford logoFORD recalled 1.9 million vehicles with certain Takata passenger-side frontal airbag inflators after Takata said the inflators were defective. The vehicles affected are 2007-2010 Ford Edge; 2006-2011 Ford Fusion; 2005-2011 Ford Mustang; 2007-2011 Ford Ranger; 2007-2010 Lincoln MKX, and 2006-2011 Lincoln MKZ, Zephyr and Mercury Milan (Reuters and press release); all about Takata’s airbag scandal. Separately, Ford said total U.S. vehicle sales in May declined 6% from a year ago, to 235,997. That was despite F-Series pickup sales posting a 9% gain, and van sales hitting their best May since 1978 (press release). Ford shares closed down 2.9% at $13.10.

KINDRED said it completed a deal where it’s buying four leased hospitals in Indianapolis, Houston, Denver and Colorado Springs, Colo., and selling two in Cleveland, one owned and another leased. The Louisville hospital and nursing home giant said it paid about $800,000 cash and additional cash consideration to Select Medical Holdings Corp. as part of the deal (press release). Separately, Kindred said it’s closing its Bashford Manor area nursing and rehabilitation center, where 153 employees care for 110 residents (Courier-Journal).

PAPA JOHN’S will be one of the first U.S. restaurant brands to enter Tunisia; it’s the second African country after Egypt to have one of the pizza chain’s franchises. The country in North Africa only recently opened its borders to franchising (Meat & Poultry). More about Tunisia.

GE is scaling back plans for a factory that will build big gas-powered engines in Welland, Ontario; the factory is now in Waukesha, Wisc. The company will create just 150 jobs at the new site, down from 350 at Waukesha, when it first announced the move in September. GE is taking advantage of tax incentives (CBC).

TEXAS ROADHOUSE got only a so-so review in Augusta, Ga., partly because of the restaurant’s signature item: steak. “My first bite of the filet seemed pleasantly salty, but as I went on, the meat was overwhelmed with salt — I couldn’t even finish it,” the reviewer said. “It was tender, but not the most tender filet I’ve ever had. And while I ordered it medium, it was more of a medium rare” (August Chronicle). The restaurant chain tweeted a recommended topping on Sunday:

In other news, the embattled Cahoots bar on Baxter Avenue in the Highlands is closing (Business First). Brawls had been a problem, leading a customer to post a truly gross review, complete with photo! “Blood on the men’s room sink,” wrote John R. “From one of the (many) fights I’ve witnessed at this place. Disgusting” (Yelp).

Bottom Line

Tantalum?! Amazon document is an inside peek at newest compliance woes for top brass

Amazon has just filed its annual “conflict” minerals report with the Securities and Exchange Commission on a detailed — and we mean detailed — survey of suppliers who might unwittingly work with armed groups committing war crimes in the Congo region.

Gold
Yes, it’s gold.

The scores of companies supply commodities for making Amazon’s Kindle e-readers and Fire tablets. Last year’s survey literally ran from A (Aida Chemical Industries Co. in Japan) to Z (Zijin Mining Group Co. Ltd. Gold Refinery in China) in nearly 60 countries on all seven continents. The minerals are gold, tin, tungsten, and tantalum. The bottom line:

“While, for 2015, we identified no suppliers that were sourcing minerals through a supply chain that benefitted armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo region, some of the suppliers for our Kindle/Fire products are still working to determine country of origin and facility information, and other suppliers are still investigating whether the facilities they identified were used to process the gold, tin, tungsten, or tantalum in our Kindle/Fire products.”

Related: SEC conflict reports explainer.