Yesterday Starbucks said it is going to close 600 stores around the country. There are at least 10 in Richmond. Click here for a map. The company said it will close relatively new stores that have only been open since the beginning of fiscal 2006. Starbucks identified stores that were either not profitable or not… Read more »
Aaron Kremer
Aaron Kremer is the founder of Richmond BizSense. Email him at [email protected].
How to use MySpace
Someone asked for info on how to use a Myspace page, so here you go: Myspace is free, so anyone with an email address can create a page. After a local business registers with an email and some contact info, they can reach thousands of potential customers in their area. But it takes time to… Read more »
Local scrap-booking company to appear in Martha Stewart Living
Do a Google search for Tabitha Geary and 37,900 hits come back. After clicking through eight pages worth of links and being confronted time and time again by the same face, it seems that there is no other Tabitha Geary than the Richmonder who owns a scrap-booking company that bears her name. And now Geary’s… Read more »
The brief history of our Wikipedia page
BizSense had a Wikipedia page, then lost a Wikipedia page within two minutes. I’ve always been a fan of the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It’s free and always up to date. To edit on Wikipedia, you need a free account. So I signed up. I tried to keep our Wiki page objective and… Read more »
Ukrop’s latest promotion: buy grocieries, save $ at the pump
Spend $50 on groceries at Ukrop’s Grocery and take 10 cents off the price of a gallon of gas at Uppy’s Convenient Stores, a savings of $2. Spend $500 and save $1 off each gallon (up to a 20-gallon fill-up) for a savings of $20. The new consumer-focused promotion is called Fuelperks!. Consumers need only… Read more »
Roll the cameras: Fox 35 killing cats
Talk about a cat fight. When local TV station WRLH Fox 35 hired an exterminator to kill feral cats in a back lot of its building, the local SPCA got wind and unleashed a save-the-kittens firestorm. Now the station is dealing with a far larger problem than a few alley cats: a PR snafu that… Read more »
More crime against businesses
On Tuesday posted a story about the rising crime against businesses. Now the T-D is reporting that two downtown businesses were robbed at gun-point yesterday. “Two men robbed the Limited Edition store at 302 Goshen St., near Virginia Commonwealth University, at about 12:25 p.m.,” writes Michael Martz. At about 4 p.m. yesterday, a man and… Read more »
Media General CEO predicts mergers
Media General CEO Marshall Morton says major American newspapers will have to join forces in order to stay alive. “There’s got to be some assimilation, I would guess that rather than bankruptcies, you’d see some combinations,” he says in a story that appeared in Monday’s NY Times. Ad revenue at newspapers across the country is… Read more »
CarMax and Circuit City: Sniffles and Pneumonia:
It was a rough week for CarMax and Circuit City. CarMax stock shed $2 a share, or about 11%, on news that profits at the company dropped 55%. Meanwhile, Circuit City – the company from which CarMax was spawned – is on life support and looking for a transfusion. Or is it an organ transplant?
Networking online … helpful or just a passing fad?
The professional networking site LinkedIn just raised $53 million in capital, which pegs the company’s valuation at around $1 billion. Technology analysts are wondering if that’s a tad high. How much social networking sites can extract from advertisers and subscribers, after all?