FORD‘s auto and truck factories in Louisville will shut down for only one week this summer vs. the usual two, because of unexpectedly strong demand for SUVs, and the need to gear up for launching the new 2017 Super Duty F-series truck later this year.
The company says it will crank out an extra 22,000 SUVs at the Louisville Assembly Plant and at two other sites in Chicago and Oakville, Ontario. Through May, SUVs sales totaled 325,475, a 9% increase from a year ago, including Escape, Edge, Explorer, Flex and Expedition. The 4,700-employee Assembly Plant closing will be the week of July 4. Ford had disclosed the SUV production increase to investors in its second-quarter production guidance April 28.
This is the fourth consecutive year the automaker has trimmed its summer shutdowns (press release).
The Kentucky Truck Plant employs 5,100, but that figure is growing substantially. In December, Ford said it would add 2,000 jobs and invest $1.3 billion there to produce the new F-series; it originally opened in 1969. The factory already produces F-250 and F-550 Super Duty pickups, plus Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator trucks. More about Ford’s history and operations in Louisville.
KINDRED: A jury in Nashua, N.H., yesterday cleared Kindred Healthcare and Greenbriar Terrace nursing home in the death of a Nashua man more than five years ago. Byam “Bing” Whitney Jr. died in 2011 after developing pneumonia and then bedsores that led to sepsis and his death at the age of 84 (Union Leader).
FORD: In a radical shift, Ford is repositioning itself in Europe’s small-car market by abandoning the minicar and focusing on subcompact buyers with a larger Ka and a more upscale Fiesta. The change highlights the automaker’s strategy of picking battles to win 6% to 8% profit margins for its European business (Automotive News).
Ruimin
GE: Haier Group CEO Zhang Ruimin was awarded the Legend In Leadership Award at the Yale University Chief Executive Leadership Institute Summit in New York City. The conference is organized by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the prominent senior associate dean for Leadership Studies at Yale’s School of Management; he is a much sought-after commentator on management issues (press release). Haier bought GE Appliances and 6,000-employee Appliance Park for $5.6 billion in a deal completed last week.
Delcid
PAPA JOHN’S: A 38-year-old San Antonio man was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison yesterday for killing a Papa John’s delivery driver in 2014. William “Jimmy” O’Neill, 46, had been delivering at an apartment complex when Robert Carlos Delcid stole his car and ran over him as he tried to stop the theft. O’Neil’s 86-year-old mother Edna O’Neill told the jury: “He was a good kid” who called her nearly every day, always ending the conversation saying, “I love you” (Express News).
PIZZA HUT: In Odessa, Texas, a gunman robbed a Pizza Hut Wednesday night, demanded money and fled; no injuries were reported (American).
Ramsey
In other news, University of Louisville Foundation vice chair Joyce Hagen paid virtually all the cost of a full-page Courier-Journal ad in April that lauded embattled school President James Ramsey, and blasted his critics on the board of trustees (Insider Louisville). Enormous craft beer restaurant HopCat expects to open in five weeks, assuming construction is done at its Grinstead and Bardstown roads location; it’s now hiring some 200 employees to handle the 132 varieties of beer (WDRB). And the news drought continues about Louisville native and Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence :(.
GE sold Appliance Park to Haier Group for five times what it claimed the complex was worth in 2013, when it won a dispute with Jefferson County over the southend property’s value, a dispute that ultimately reduced the taxes the conglomerate paid. At the time, GE said the complex was worth $23 million, nearly half the $42 million value assigned by Property Valuation Administrator Tony Landauer’s office (WDRB).
HUMANA beefed up security yesterday after reports of what some employees said was a threatening graffiti message written on a bathroom wall at the insurer’s Waterside building downtown, one the company seriously enough to allow employees to go home early. The FBI is investigating the incident, said WAVE. The threat may be related to annual gay pride events planned downtown this weekend. Several employees told WLKY the graffiti referenced last weekend’s mass shooting at an Orlando gay bar, where a suspected terrorist possibly inspired by ISIS killed 50 people and injured another 50 (WAVE, WLKY and Courier-Journal).
Yesterday’s incident came after authorities arrested a Jeffersonville man arrested in California who was heavily armed and headed to a gay pride event, plus reports of possible copycat threats at a New York gay bar and in the U.K. June is gay pride month in many cities, with parades and other public festivities (Courier-Journal, Time and BBC).
BROWN-FORMAN filed its annual 10-K report with the Securities and Exchange Commission this morning; as always, a key section describes the business itself. The filing came a day after the whiskey giant disclosed how much it paid CEO Paul Varga and other top executives, plus fresh details about the value of the controlling Brown family’s $6 billion in stock holdings (SEC document).
It costs $19.99.
PIZZA HUT‘S bacon-stuffed pizza has arrived in the U.K., but only for in-the-know customers. “To savour one of the new pimped-up crusts, all you need to do is whisper the secret words ‘Bacon Crust Have’ when ordering any large pizza (Mirror). Also, the chain has brought back its Triple Treat Box in a special summer edition, “a tri-level wonder decorated to look just like your favorite picnic basket” (Delish). It includes two medium one-topping pizzas, bread sticks and the just-introduced Ultimate Hershey’s Chocolate Chip Cookie (Brand Eating).
PAPA JOHN’S: In San Diego, no injuries were reported after an SUV crashed into a Papa John’s Pizza restaurant yesterday afternoon (KGTV).
TEXAS ROADHOUSE is looking for Baltimore area cooks “who are ready for a fun and rewarding career in the restaurant business.” Applicants are considered without regard to race, religion, color, age, gender, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, citizenship, national origin, or any other legally protected status (Craigslist). Apparently, gender expression hasn’t made that list — yet.
Adopt me, please!
UPS: In northern California, a UPS driver who happened to be on the scene rescued a crazy-cute puppy dumped Tuesday evening in the street by a passing vehicle. The Modesto Bee identified the driver as 39-year-old Jason Harcrow of Hughson. Police said the puppy, believed to be a Cairn terrier less than a year old, was in great spirits and would be put up for adoption at the county shelter (KPIX). The driver who abandoned the pup is expected to spend eternity in hell with tobacco lobbyists.
In other news, U.S. stocks closed slightly higher, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and other indices up less than 1% (Google Finance). Among Boulevard’s 10 big Louisville employers, Papa John’s performed best, closing at $65.89, up 2%. And on the A-list front, there was no news of any consequence about Louisville native and Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence.
Boulevard focuses on news about some of Louisville’s biggest employers, nonprofits, and cultural institutions. This is one in an occasional series about them.
Louisville’s economy was sizzling in 1951, when General Electric’s nearly 50-year-old home appliances business started construction on what would become one of the city’s single-biggest factory complexes. Louisville’s population had soared 15% in the previous decade, to 369,000, after World War II’s end shifted the U.S. economy back to peacetime prosperity.
Edison in 1922.
GE appliances traces its history to 1905. But through its corporate parent and original driving inventor, it really extends even further back, to 1866. That’s when 18-year-old Thomas Edison moved to Louisville to work for Western Union. He spent most of his spare time tinkering, eventually losing his job. Many career moves later, he’d amassed a stack of patents for electrical inventions. The financier J.P. Morgan and a partner cobbled them into a company that formed the basis of General Electric.
That was the goliath that in the late 1940s and ’50s raced to meet post-baby boom consumer demand for toasters, mixers and “white goods” with the latest features — like the two-in-one freezer-fridges advertised in the 1952 TV commercial, top of this page.
Appliance Park would eventually cover 1,000 acres in the county’s south end, with more than a dozen manufacturing, warehousing and power-generation buildings.
With Ford, International Harvester and other big manufacturers, GE launched a solid middle class with good wages and benefits that became the foundation of Louisville’s economy. At one time, the park employed 25,000 workers. It was a self-sufficient city providing many of its own needs, right down to mail handling.
Palomar’s existing Escondido hospital; the new Kindred hospital will be built nearby.
KINDRED‘s just-announced 52-bed rehab hospital planned for southern California will be built by a private investment company, which will then lease it to the joint venture run by Kindred and local partner Palomar Health. Expected to open in 2019, the facility will be built on Palomar’s existing 56-acre campus in Escondido in San Diego County, 103 miles south of Los Angeles. Kindred didn’t detail the construction cost in its late-afternoon announcement yesterday. Escondido has just 149,000 residents, but the county ‘s total population is 3.1 million.
Palomar wants to relocate its existing inpatient rehabilitation program run by Kindred since 2000 at an older Palomar building in downtown Escondido. Palomar’s campus already includes an 11-story, 740,000-square-foot hospital opened in 2012; it has 288 private single-patient rooms, 44 emergency and trauma rooms, and 11 operating rooms (San Diego Union-Tribune). The new facility will be Kindred’s 20th rehab hospital nationwide. The Louisville company also has 95 transitional-care hospitals and 90 nursing centers. Palomar was launched in 1933 by two women — a nurse and a dietician — who used their own money to buy an egg and poultry plant downtown and converted it into a 13-bed hospital.
In Louisville, meanwhile, Kindred is planning a four-story, 114-room nursing home near the Old Brownsboro Crossing development at Chamberlain Lane. That follows the company’s disclosure two weeks ago that it’s closing its nursing and rehabilitation center near Bashford Manor, with 110 residents and 153 employees (Courier-Journal).
TACO BELL rival Chipotle’s once high-flying shares fell again, closing at $390.31 moments ago, the second consecutive day near three-year lows after a bearish Deutsche Bank report Monday. The stock’s weakness is the latest sign the Mexican food chain is still recovering from a devastating E. Coli outbreak last year; shares had reached an all-time high of $748 last August.
Analyst Brett Levy said Chipotle’s profit margin potential is now highly uncertain as sales continue to decline, and some customers “may be lost for good.” The analyst cut his price target to $340 (KDVR). The Denver-based chain was felled by two E. coli outbreaks starting in late October, forcing the company to shutter all its stores for a day to retrain employees. Chipotle shares have plunged 39% since the first outbreak emerged vs. a 17% gain by Taco Bell parent Yum. The CDC declared the outbreak over in February (CNBC). More about Yum.
AMAZON: A new report may have settled a long-standing question: How many different products does Amazon sell? Answer: 12.2 million on its own. Throw in marketplace sellers, and the number soars to nearly 354 million — enough to supply one different gift to each of the U.S.’s 319 million residents. Both figures exclude books, media, wine, and services, according to the 360pi study (Chain Store Age).
Kansas City, Kan., has emerged as a likely location for one of Amazon’s newest distribution centers, sparking speculation same-day delivery service won’t be far behind; it’s already available in Louisville and 26 other markets. The retailer is already working on a 822,104-square-foot center 37 miles southwest of Kansas City in Egerton, and plans to begin staffing there early next month for the busy third-quarter shipping season (Kansas City Business Journal). Amazon has two centers in the Louisville area with 6,000 employees, and another three elsewhere in Kentucky.
In other news, urban life blog Broken Sidewalk has new drawings of the recently announced six-story, 128-room Cambria Hotel proposed for the former Connection nightclub site on the corner of Market Street and Floyd Street in NuLu.
On Wall Street, U.S. stocks opened higher as traders eyed the end of a two-day Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting at 2 p.m. (Google Finance).
News about business and culture in Louisville, Ky.
TACO BELL rival Chipotle’s once high-flying 
Boulevard 