White Castle, a 90-year-old hamburger chain known for its square “slider” burgers, is sipping on the idea of offering alcoholic beverages as it tests beer and wine sales at a restaurant in Indiana.
The food famously craved by stoners in the 2004 movie “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” can be had with a glass of wine or a domestic or seasonal beer at a Lafayette, Ind., restaurant that fuses a conventional White Castle with a new concept for the company called Blaze Modern BBQ. Wine costs $4.50 and beers start at $3.
“This was something that customers had been suggesting,” said Jamie Richardson, a spokesman for Columbus-based White Castle System Inc. “They thought that beer and wine might go nicely with the barbecue that was available at Blaze. We’re certain that we might have some customers who might enjoy some sliders and a beer or wine as well.”
White Castle’s test with those beverages was first reported in Wednesday’s editions of The Columbus Dispatch.
Other fast-food restaurants also are dabbling with alcohol. Earlier this year, Burger King opened the Whopper Bar South Beach, a restaurant in Miami Beach offering beer, and Starbucks Corp. has been testing beer and wine at a few sites.
The companies see alcoholic beverages as a growth opportunity after years of flat sales, said David Henkes, a vice president with the Chicago-based food research firm Technomic. “Alcohol is one of those things that is extremely profitable to the operator,” he said.
White Castle’s beer and wine tryout is part of a broader experiment with three new concepts that the company has been studying for a little over a year, Richardson said Wednesday. Besides Blaze Modern BBQ, there’s also an Asian food brand, Laughing Noodle, at a White Castle in Springfield, Ohio, and a triple-decker sandwich concept, Deckers, in Lebanon, Tenn.
Customers have had a “very positive” reaction to the alcoholic beverages offered in Indiana, but for now, White Castle is considering only whether to expand them to the two other co-branded restaurants, Richardson said.
White Castle would face challenges trying to roll out beer and wine on a wider scale, Henkes said.
“What we find with fast-food places is, there’s very strict regulations around training. Typically, a lot of the employees in fast food are under 21, so you get into some service issues,” he said. “You get into some inventory issues. You get into whether distributors are willing to deliver to you because you’re generally not doing a whole lot of volume in these categories.”
Adding beer and wine to the menu sounds fine to lifelong White Castle fan Jim Kreml of Elk River, Minn. _ even though he’s a teetotaler. “I know my wife would love that because she is a wine drinker,” said Kreml, 47, the operator of a chimney-cleaning business who acknowledged he eats at the restaurants “a couple of times a week.”
Kreml, named in 2009 to White Castle’s Cravers Hall of Fame, said Wednesday that he would expect alcoholic beverage options to be popular with many slider aficionados. “If they’re of age and they drink that already, I think they’d be happy with that. As long as they’re responsible and don’t sit in there, and that’s not party time,” he said.
Record drought ravaged parts of Texas and Oklahoma this year, but Missouri was hard hit, too — and now the state’s dairy and cattle industries are scrambling to cope with the aftereffects of the parched summer as they prepare for winter.
“We’ve heard an awful lot about the extreme drought in Texas and Oklahoma, and areas farther west,” said Mike Collins, a professor of plant science at the University of Missouri. “But if you look at the drought map, it projects into Missouri.”
Last month, in fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture designated 101 Missouri counties natural disaster areas because of the drought, and one estimate puts the loss to the state’s grain farmers at nearly $350 million. University of Missouri researchers say the state would need to get an unlikely 13 feet of snow this winter to compensate for the scorching heat and lack of rain that shrank crop yields last summer.
“In mid-Missouri and particularly as you go southwest, (the soil) was pretty well depleted four to six feet down. There’s not much left there for plant growth,” said Randy Miles, a soil scientist with the university. “We need to recharge the piggy bank, so to speak.”
The drought’s impact is reaching into all areas of agriculture, and could eventually hit consumers. Corn farmers in Missouri lost roughly 24 million bushels of yield because of the drought, and the state’s soybean farmers about 20 million. The drought also scorched pasture and forage lands, and now, hay — a newly precious commodity — has been heading out of state by the truckload.
“We see a lot of hay moving east to west,” Collins said. “A lot of hay heading west on the interstate.”
Missouri is the country’s third-largest producer of hay, but this year hay is in such great demand from cattle and dairy farmers in neighboring states that producers, here and elsewhere, are scrambling to secure enough of it to make it through the winter.
“I had to drive 100 miles north, to get it from a guy in Green Ridge,” said Darrel Franson, a cattle farmer who heads the Missouri Forage and Grassland Council. “In the half an hour I’m talking to him, his phone rings three times, with producers from Texas willing to buy anything he’s got, at any price.”
Cattle ranchers and dairy farmers typically grow much of the hay they feed their animals. But this year, burned-up pasture land forced them to feed hay months before they typically would. At the same time, the weather shrank hay yields by as much as 15 to 30 percent in some places.
Some worry that, by mid-winter, producers will be caught without enough to feed their animals.
“In January or February, the farmer is going to take a walk out into his pasture and see his cows are thin. He’s going to run in and say, ‘Ma, the cows are awful thin.’ Then they’re going to look at the ground and see there’s no grass there,” Franson said. “They’re going to get on the phone to get some hay, and they won’t find any.”
DAIRY FARMER FEARS
The situation is not just a question of scarcity, but of quality. Hay that survives the weather isn’t the most nutritious, which means cows need more of it. Dairy cows, particularly, need better-quality hay to produce better milk, and for the higher-quality hay, producers are paying as much as $300 a ton.
“That’s well above what we normally see,” Collins said.
The state’s dairymen are especially concerned.
“This is going to be one of the toughest challenges I’ve seen in my lifetime, seeing these cows through the winter,” said Larry Purdom, head of the Missouri Dairy Association. “A lot of times in the past when hay prices were up, we could use corn, but that’s been at record highs, and that’s expensive now, too.”
The state’s dairy herd has shrunk to about 90,000 from 100,000 in recent years, Purdom said, and could get even smaller as aging dairy farmers decide to sell their cows and get out of the business rather than face higher feed costs.
“This is serious,” Purdom said. “We have eight or nine processing plants in the state, and if we don’t have milk for them, we’re worried they’ll take their operations somewhere else, and that means jobs.”
Cattle ranchers, too, are being forced to pay higher feed prices, and some are selling off their animals.
“I sold 20 percent of my herd,” Franson said. “I have to match up my cattle with my forage supply.”
Cattle ranchers, however, are still in the black, with high beef prices buoyed by demand overseas and a shrunken American cattle population.
“Given where prices are today, producers are trying to take advantage of that,” said Jeff Windett, of the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association.
So are the state’s hay producers. “Anytime you have a situation like this, it makes it difficult for some,” Collins said. “But for farmers in the business of producing hay, this is an excellent year.”
Researchers at the University of Missouri and the states’ farmers, however, are worried about next year. If soil moisture isn’t adequately replenished over the winter months, farmers could face depleted soils for a second year. That puts farmers in an odd situation: Hoping for a bad winter.
“If we don’t get enough input over the next few months, we could go into the next season without enough moisture,” Miles said. “Even though it might not be that amenable to some, and it may create some slushy driving hazards and so on, from a soil moisture viewpoint, more snow and rain may be more valuable long term.”
The European Union’s antitrust watchdog says it is probing whether U.S. companies Honeywell and DuPont are restricting competition in the market for new refrigerants for car air-conditioning systems.
The European Commission said Friday it has received complaints that the two companies entered into “development, licensing and production arrangements” that prevent rivals from also developing new refrigerants that fulfill updated environmental standards.
Commission says it is also investigating whether Honeywell International Inc. is abusing its dominant position in the production of the new refrigerant, known as 1234yf, and deceived authorities during the evaluation of 1234yf.
The opening of a probe does not mean that Honeywell and E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. actually broke EU law.
Bank holding company Washington Mutual Inc. has agreed to a settlement with some creditors involved in its Chapter 11 bankruptcy case and has filed a new reorganization plan.
Washington Mutual said in a statement late Monday that the settlement will allow it to distribute more than $7 billion to its creditors. The settlement must still be approved by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.
“The comprehensive settlement announced today represents a fair and reasonable recovery for the thousands of equity holders of the company who have been following this case closely for three years,” Michael Willingham, chairman of the committee of equity security holders appointed in the company’s Chapter 11 proceedings.
Washington Mutual’s bankruptcy case is three years old and its reorganization plans have twice been rejected by Bankruptcy Court Judge Mary Walrath. The company is hoping to exit bankruptcy protection by the end of February. It has a hearing scheduled for Jan. 11, 2012 in which the bankruptcy court will consider approval of the reorganization plan’s disclosure statement. The company also plans to ask the bankruptcy court for a mid-February hearing to confirm its reorganization plan fast cash online.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized WaMu’s Seattle-based flagship bank in 2008 and sold its assets to JPMorgan for $1.9 billion in the largest bank failure in U.S. history.
Under terms of the settlement, the reorganized assets of Washington Mutual will include equity interests in WMI Investment Corp. and WM Mortgage Reinsurance Co.
A reorganized Washington Mutual will receive $75 million in funding from certain creditors. Exit financing provided by settlement noteholders will include a $125 million senior secured credit facility that will be used to fund working capital as well as for general corporate purposes and eligible originations and acquisitions.
The majority of the reorganized company’s common equity will be distributed to its current preferred and common equity holders. Its board will initially be made up of four members chosen by the equity committee and one member selected by lenders under the credit agreement.
China’s chronically high inflation rate fell to a lower than expected 4.2 percent in November, paving the way for authorities to further ease credit to support growth.
The National Bureau of Statistics said Friday that falling food prices and a high base from a year earlier helped to bring inflation down from 5.5 percent in October.
The decline gives China’s leaders the leeway to ease policies that were imposed to cool an overheated economy but recently have fanned fears growth might be stifled at a time when hopes are pinned on a robust China to help offset the malaise in Europe and the U.S.
“Inflation is marching south at an aggressive pace,” Alistair Thornton, an economist with IHS Global Insight, said in a research note.
Data for November “highlighted strong downward pressure amid an increasingly gloomy global outlook,” it said.
China has already begun relaxing reserve requirements on banks to help ease a cash crunch and reopen a flow of liquidity needed to keep growth on track.
Beijing is treading a thin line as it strives to support job-creating growth while avoiding re-igniting inflation that can undermine public support for the ruling communist party because it erodes the economic gains that underpin their claim to power saving account payday loan.
“The challenge for policymakers is to enact measures that boost domestic demand and to loosen credit controls somewhat without stoking inflation and property price bubbles,” said Jing Ulrich, JP Morgan’s chairwoman for global markets.
Incomes are rising but gains are increasingly unevenly distributed.
Food costs, a major component of the consumer price index and especially sensitive in a society where poor families spend up to half their incomes on food, rose 8.8 percent, the National Bureau of Statistics said.
China’s latest bout of perilously high inflation, fueled by a binge in bank lending unleashed by stimulus meant to fend off the global crisis, peaked at 6.5 percent in July.
In late July, Roberts Mayfair Hotel co-owner Mike Roberts owned up when we reported that his company had not paid hourly workers in a timely fashion.
The downtown St. Louis hotel, he acknowledged, had been late on some payrolls, but only because of a temporary glitch in transferring data to a payroll contractor.
“I don’t recognize this as a long-standing problem,” Roberts said at the time.
It may not have been a long-standing problem then.
But it is now.
Mayfair employees have continued to complain periodically about the hotel failing to deliver checks on paydays, which come every two weeks. Lately, they have been joined by employees of the the Comfort Inn the Roberts Brothers operate in the Central West End.
And the problems appear to have spread beyond St. Louis. Complaints about tardy payrolls have also filtered in from the staff of a Houston hotel co-owned by Mike Roberts and his brother and business partner, Steven.
Delayed compensation has become so routine at the Central West End location that new hires say they were advised of the problem prior to being offered a job.
One employee said he accepted the offer anyway.
“There’s nothing else out there,” he lamented.
Fearing termination if they are identified publicly, seven Mayfair and Comfort Inn employees spoke this week on the condition of anonymity.
“It’s an employer’s market,” said one worker. “If they let us go, they’ll just hire someone else the next day.”
The employees say delinquent checks have caused them to miss rent, utility bills and cellphone payments.
“I’m constantly borrowing money to pay my bills,” said another employee. “I feel like a teenager again.”
Each of the seven employees interviewed said they know cash-strapped co-workers who have been forced to leave mandatory prescriptions at a pharmacy.
“They are messing with people’s lives,” said one employee.
Another worker and her two children now face eviction unless she can come up with the money to cover the penalties, equal to the monthly rent of $775, imposed when tardy paychecks resulted in late payments to her landlord in two consecutive months.
“I kept telling (the landlord), ‘I’ll pay you today if they pay us,’” the employee said. “But they never paid us. It took me two years to find a job. If I’d known it was going to be like this, I’d have kept on looking.”
The employees are especially vexed by what they say is the Roberts’ habit of stretching the rules. By law, an employer has 16 days to compensate its employees for work performed during the most recent pay period. The Roberts, the employees say, regularly push the envelope to the 16th day.
On Wednesday Nov. 30 for example, the Mayfair employees received paychecks they were due Nov. 15.
The checks, they said, did not include overtime earned when the hotel filled to capacity during the baseball playoffs, a recent business conference and a religious convention.
“We’ll never get caught up,” said the employee who fears she’ll soon be evicted.
Despite their own hardships, the employees are for the most part not devoid of empathy. They acknowledge the brothers, who once rode high on the profits from their telecommunications and real estate holdings, have also hit a tough patch.
Roberts Broadcasting in October filed for bankruptcy protection, a step toward reorganizing a company beset with liens connected to licensing fees for television stations in St. Louis, Mississippi, Indiana and South Carolina.
“I sympathize with them, because of the economy,” said one worker. “But I wish they’d come clean with us, bring us all into the ballroom or something and tell us directly what’s going on.”
Instead, Mayfair and Comfort Inn employees say all they know is to dread paydays - anxiety exacerbated by the impending holiday season.
Contacted Wednesday afternoon, Mike Roberts said he was not inclined to comment but suggested a reporter call back Thursday morning.
Even if the Roberts come through in December, the employee wondering how she’ll cover back rent and penalties already anticipates further problems come the new year.
“If they can’t pay us on time what’s going to happen with our taxes in January when they’re supposed to give us our W-2?” she asked.
Will my flight still operate?
India’s commerce minister said Friday that the decision to open the country’s $400 billion retail sector to global chains such as Wal-Mart has a built-in safety net for small shops and farmers.
Anand Sharma told reporters that the Indian cabinet’s decision late Thursday allowing 51 percent foreign ownership of supermarkets would vastly improve decrepit infrastructure that causes massive food waste in a country plagued by malnutrition and high inflation.
Sharma said the new rule would only apply in cities with more than one million people. The minimum investment would be $100 million and half of this would have to be invested in rural infrastructure and refrigerated transport and storage. Thirty percent of the produce sourced by the retailer would also have to come from small and medium enterprises.
Top retailers such as Wal-Mart and Tesco have lobbied for years for a chance to build stores in the nation of 1.2 billion people and political deadlock on long-promised reforms in retail and other areas has helped cool foreign investor interest in India. Foreign retailers have Indian partners in wholesale operations, but no retail stores.
The Cabinet also allowed 100 percent foreign ownership of single-brand retail operations, up from 51 percent.
Advocates see the move as a way to strengthen India’s creaking food distribution system.
The country suffers chronically high malnutrition and soaring inflation, but it’s not for lack of food. It is the world’s second largest grower of fresh produce, yet loses an estimated 40 percent of fruit and vegetables to rot because of a lack of refrigerated trucking and warehouses, poor roads, inclement weather and corruption. That translates into lower incomes for farmers and higher prices for consumers.
If companies like Wal-Mart and Tesco can open shops of their own, the investments they make in improving farming techniques and getting produce into stores more efficiently, could bring down food inflation and possibly improving rural incomes.
Sharma said the policy would have a “multiplier effect” and tens of millions of people would gain jobs.
Analysts say India’s darkening economic prospects gave fresh urgency to the decade-long talks on opening up India’s retail sector. Many see Thursday’s move as an attempt by the ruling Congress Party to reassert its leadership, which has been weakened by corruption scandals, soaring inflation and slowing growth.
“When the government’s credibility seems to be under significant question, this is one way to give a message that the government is still in business and it means business,” said Arvind Singhal, chairman of retail consultancy Technopak Advisors.
The cabinet this month also indicated that it is open to allowing 26 percent foreign investment in pension fund management _ another headline item in the Congress Party’s promised second wave of economic reforms, which follow a round of liberalization forced by a balance of payments crisis in the early 1990s.
The central bank has raised interest rates by 5.25 percentage points over the last 18 months but that hasn’t been enough to control runaway inflation or the rupee’s freefall. Food inflation, which quickly becomes a political issue in India, has been bouncing into the double digits since 2008 and now stands at 9.1 percent.
“Monetary policy interventions have not been able to control inflation,” Singhal said. “Now they have to look into supply side policy, which could have an impact.”
International investors, who have grown increasingly wary of corruption, surprise tax bills and shifting regulations in India, have also put pressure on the government to make good on old promises to grant them greater access.
Rajan Bharti Mittal, vice chairman and managing director of Bharti Enterprises, said Friday that the retail move was a “major landmark in India’s economic reforms process.”
Bharti’s joint venture with Wal-Mart has 13 wholesale outlets in India and sources produce from thousands of farmers.
“We have always stated that development of organized retail in India will bring immense benefits across the value chain _ from farmers to small manufacturers and above all to consumers, while creating enormous employment opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid,” Mittal said in a statement.
Wal-Mart, British-based Tesco PLC and French-based retailer Carrefour welcomed the decision.
“This legal evolution should contribute to modernize the Indian food supply chain and to fight against food inflation for the benefit of Indian customers,” Carrefour said in a statement.
The change, which does not require approval by India’s fractious Parliament, was opposed by the Trinamool Congress Party, a key partner in the ruling coalition, and the main opposition BJP party. The country has struggled to find consensus because of concerns that competition from the foreign retail giants could hurt millions of small shopkeepers, as well as the poor.
Sharma said the new policy had been reached through a “transparent and democratic process of consultation with all the stake holders.”
India’s $400 billion retail sector is the nation’s second-largest employer, after agriculture, according to consulting firm Deloitte.
Ashish Sanyal, managing director of retailing consultancy AMP Retail Services, said small businesses had nothing to fear from the big chains.
“At the end of the day this is like the high tide. All boats will rise. We will learn from the big retailers,” he said.
Forecasters say Hurricane Kenneth is weakening rapidly and has been downgraded to a Category 1 storm in the eastern Pacific.
There is no threat to land from what had been the strongest late-season hurricane in that area on record when it earlier reached Category 4 status.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said Wednesday that Kenneth has maximum sustained winds near 90 mph (150 kph). The storm was centered about 860 miles (1,385 kilometers) southwest of the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico.
It is moving west at 9 mph (15 kph)
Kenneth is expected to weaken further and could be downgraded to a tropical storm by Thursday. There are no coastal watches or warnings in effect.
The eastern Pacific hurricane season ends Nov. 30.
Whether people celebrate or criticize Occupy Wall Street, the movement has reinvigorated calls for local buying just in time for the manic holiday shopping season.
Buying local and American-made became a battle cry for some in the movement that blames big business greed for shuttering American operations and shipping those jobs overseas.
“Some people talk about buying local and not supporting large chain stores, but really I think we want to encourage people to think consciously about where they shop,” said Zach Chasnoff, 33, of south St. Louis.
Chasnoff has wielded a bullhorn at a few Occupy St. Louis rallies, though he said he couldn’t speak as a representative of a movement. He said he’d been waiting for an opportunity to ignite this particular discussion.
Chasnoff owns a house painting business that fluctuates from two to seven employees during his busy season. When the bottom fell out of the economy in 2008, he was virtually unemployed for about seven months and didn’t know if he’d keep his house, he said. Meanwhile, bank bailouts and news of continued executive bonuses infuriated him. He blames greed for companies’ transferring jobs overseas and cheap foreign goods for undercutting American-made items.
Many economists challenge that logic, saying that free trade ultimately benefits the U.S.
“It feels almost anti-patriotic to buy goods made elsewhere right now. You are perpetuating the loss of manufacturing jobs,” Chasnoff said, echoing long-standing protests by some against, for instance, buying foreign cars.
Buying local, on the other hand, puts consumers, not corporations, in control, he said.
Would it work?
Steve Farazzi, a professor of economics at Washington University, said that the wage disparity concerns at the root of the Occupy Wall Street movement wouldn’t be solved by shopping at boutiques and farmers markets.
“I’d have a hard time telling people that their holiday shopping patterns will have an important impact on income distribution,” Farazzi said.
If globalization has killed American jobs and driven down wages, then the tool to combat the trend would be higher wages in emerging markets such as China, not necessarily closing operations there. China’s extremely cheap labor is the problem for American workers, not the fact that Chinese workers have jobs formerly held by Americans, Farazzi explained.
Rising global wages would level the playing field for American workers, he said, and it would increase the demand for all goods if we have more people who can afford to buy. But Farazzi acknowledged that a push to boost wages for Chinese workers
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