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WARRENTON • A billboard along Interstate 70 encourages drivers to stop in Warrenton and stay awhile.
But with just a handful of shops left at the Warrenton Outlet Center, there are fewer reasons for St. Louisans to make the trek to this city, about 60 miles west of downtown.
The Gap Factory Outlet and Dress Barn have jumped ship, finding apparently sunnier pastures last year at a strip center in Wentzville. The Levi’s Outlet Store, G.H. Bass & Company, and the Famous Footwear Outlet shuttered their locations last month.
And the Nike Factory Store, one of the last major retailers left, is closing in April and moving to the Meadows at Lake Saint Louis.
Elsewhere around the country, many outlet malls continue to thrive, and developers are rushing to build more of them. But Warrenton’s outlet center, operating under an increasingly outdated model, never managed to reach its full potential.
Now the beleaguered center will suffer an ignoble fate shared by other retail properties on the decline: the auction block.
The 200,000-square-foot outlet center will be put up for sale in a three-day online auction starting Monday morning. The minimum starting bid is $375,000.
The listing at auction.com notes that the center was 35 percent occupied in November. But that was before some of the recent departures.
The center opened in 1993 during a national boom in outlet mall construction. It once boasted many notable stores such as Mikasa, Nine West and Jones New York — some names of which are still barely visible above vacant storefronts. At one time, it had upward of 45 stores. Now, only about 10 stores remain.
“Even a few years ago, it was still a vibrant center,” said Michelle Schlenther, Warrenton’s director of economic development. “People would come out and make a day trip out of it. The dad would go play a round of golf while the wife shopped.”
So what happened?
“It’s an older center,” said Linda Humphers, who tracks the outlet mall industry for the International Council of Shopping Centers as editor of Value Retail News. “It’s only 200,000 square feet, and it’s probably a little too far out of town.”
Older outlet malls like Warrenton were built about 40 to 50 miles outside cities because retailers objected to having discounted merchandise so close to their regular-price stores.
But that model has begun to change with newer outlet malls creeping closer and closer in. For example, two proposed outlet mall developments are duking it out to come to Chesterfield within a stone’s throw of Chesterfield Mall.
NOT A DESTINATION
Steve Etcher, executive director of the Boonslick Regional Planning Commission, said the Warrenton outlets never grew to be large enough to be a true shopping destination. A third phase for the center, which would have taken it to more than 100 stores, never materialized.
“You had drive-by shopping but not enough to sustain it,” he said. “It’s not a bad location — you’re right on 70, but it’s not necessarily destination. To me, Lake of the Ozarks is destination. But this ended up being more of an along-the-way thing.”
It didn’t help, he said, that ownership of the center changed hands several times. And then when St. Louis Mills opened in 2003, offering a mix of outlet and regular price stores, that took some wind out of Warrenton, too.
Schlenther also traced some of the decline to several years ago when a number of stores went bankrupt or underwent massive restructuring such as KB Toys, Liz Claiborne and Big Dog Sportswear.
“So a lot of what closed there closed not only in Missouri, but across the nation,” she said quick payday loan. “And it just happened that we had a lot of those in one facility.”
Things got worse when the property fell into receivership a couple years ago, Schlenther said. At that time, the owner was Ariel Preferred Retail Group, which had a portfolio of about seven outlet malls.
“Stores just don’t want to come in and put an investment in because they don’t know when it’s bought what the new owners are going to do,” she said.
Texas-based Woodmont Co. is the receiver that’s managing the property. An on-site outlet manager referred questions to Fred Meno, a Woodmont executive. Meno did not return requests for comment.
Despite the troubles at Warrenton, Humphers said the prospects for an outlet mall in Chesterfield are rosier because the developers behind both projects are large, reputable mall developers.
In November, Simon Property Group, the owner of St. Louis Mills, announced it was joining forces with Woodmont and EWB Development on that proposed outlet project to be called St. Louis Premium Outlets. The project previously went by the name Spirit of St. Louis Outlets.
The other proposed outlet center — Chesterfield Outlets — is being spearheaded by Taubman Centers. The city of Chesterfield has approved its zoning request. And its plans for a 472,000-square-foot upscale outlet center will go before the city’s architectural review board next week.
Aimee Nassif, the city’s planning and development director, said she’s expecting to receive the section plans from the other project any day.
“They are literally kind of racing to the finish line,” she said. “It will be very interesting.”
OTHER USES
But Donna Boehringer hasn’t given up on the Warrenton outlets yet. She has operated her Corner Quilt Fabrics store in the center for about seven years after moving there from another location in town.
The move was good for business. A billboard she has along the interstate also has helped. She estimated about 60 percent of her customers are from out of town.
“Quilters seem to have this sixth sense of quilt shops,” she said. “If there’s one around, they will stop by.”
Boehringer did have her worst year in sales last year, but she attributed that more to the economy than to less traffic at the center. She’s in the process of renegotiating her lease.
“My plans are to stay right here,” she said. “I’m trying to be optimistic because I’d like to see something else come in. But we’ll see.”
Jan Olearnick, executive director of the Warrenton Area Chamber of Commerce, thinks the property holds promise for a mixed-use project. An education center, a health facility and a technology incubator are some of the ideas that have been thrown around.
“It would take a forward-thinking person to try and revive it, but we’re ready,” she said. “Warrenton is definitely a good location for any industry because of our proximity to I-70 and to the railroad — and even to the river.”
On top of that, the city recently got federal approval to build an interchange just west of the outlet center, making for easier access to the site. But the project’s funding source has not yet been determined.
In the meantime, other enterprises have been popping up in the region — though they are not necessarily retail.
A billboard next to the entrance to the outlet center advertises one of them a bit farther west: zip line tours.
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Total U.S. money market mutual fund assets fell $14.68 billion to $2.679 trillion for the week ended Wednesday, Investment Company Institute said.
Assets of the nation’s retail money market mutual funds fell $5.73 billion to $929.14 billion, the Washington-based mutual fund trade group said. Assets of taxable money market funds in the retail category fell $3.89 billion to $733.47 billion. Tax-exempt retail fund assets fell $1.84 billion to $195.67 billion.
Meanwhile, assets of institutional money market funds fell $8.95 billion to $1.750 trillion. Among institutional funds, taxable money market fund assets fell $8.13 billion to $1.653 trillion; assets of tax-exempt funds fell $820 million to $96.20 billion.
The seven-day average yield on money market mutual funds was 0.02 percent in the week ended Tuesday, unchanged from the previous week, said Money Fund Report. The 30-day average yield was also unchanged at 0 guaranteed online personal loans.02 percent.
The seven-day compounded yield was flat at 0.02 percent, as was the 30-day compounded yield at 0.02 percent, Money Fund Report said.
The average maturity of the portfolios held by money market mutual funds was unchanged from the previous week at 44 days.
Bankrate.com said its survey of 100 leading commercial banks, savings and loan associations and savings banks in the nation’s 10 largest markets showed the annual percentage yield available on money market accounts was unchanged at 0.13 percent from the previous week.
Bankrate.com said the annual percentage yield on six-month certificates of deposit was unchanged from the previous week at 0.22 percent.
How much is it worth to suffer through a terrifying cruise ship grounding?
Italian ship operator Costa Crociere SpA on Friday put the figure at euro11,000 ($14,460) plus reimbursement for the cost of cruise tickets and extra travel expenses, seeking to cut a deal with as many passengers as possible to take the wind out of class-action lawsuits stemming from the Jan. 13 grounding of its Costa Concordia cruise liner off Tuscany.
But many passengers are refusing to accept the deal, saying they can’t yet put a figure on the costs of the trauma they endured. And lawyers are backing them up, telling passengers it’s far too soon to know how people’s lives and livelihoods might be affected by the experience.
“We’re very worried about the children,” said Claudia Urru of Cagliari, Sardinia, who was on the Concordia with her husband and two sons, aged three and 12, when it capsized.
Her elder son is seeing a psychiatrist: He won’t speak about the incident or even look at television footage of the grounding.
“He’s terrorized at night,” she told The Associated Press. “He can’t go to the bathroom alone. We’re all sleeping together, except my husband, who has gone into another room because we don’t all fit.”
As a result, she said, her family retained a lawyer because they don’t know what the real impact _ financial or otherwise _ of the trauma will be. She said her family simply isn’t able to make such decisions now.
“We are having a very, very hard time,” she said.
Costa’s offer, which covers compensation for lost baggage and psychological trauma, was the result of negotiations with several consumer groups who say they are representing 3,206 passengers from 61 countries who suffered no physical harm when the massive cruise ship hit a reef off the island of Giglio.
It’s not clear, though, how many of those passengers will take the deal, even though they’re guaranteed payment within a week of signing on.
In addition to the lump-sum indemnity, Costa, a unit of the world’s biggest cruise operator, Miami-based Carnival Corp., said it would reimburse uninjured passengers the full costs of their cruise, their return travel expenses and any medical expenses they sustained after the grounding.
Costa said the euro11,000 figure is higher than current indemnification limits provided for by law, and added that it wouldn’t deduct anything that insurance companies might kick in.
The deal does not apply to the hundreds of crew on the ship, many of whom have lost their jobs, the roughly 100 people who were injured in the chaotic evacuation, or the families who lost loved ones.
Sixteen bodies have already been recovered from the disaster and another 16 people who were on board are missing and presumed dead.
On Friday, the first known lawsuit was filed against Costa and Carnival by one of the Concordia’s crew members, Gary Lobaton of Peru. The suit, filed in Chicago federal court, accuses Carnival and Costa of negligence because of an unsafe evacuation and is seeking class-action status.
In Italy, some consumer groups have already signed on as injured parties in the criminal case against the Concordia’s captain, Francesco Schettino, who is accused of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship before all those aboard were evacuated.
Schettino, who is under house arrest, deviated from the ship’s charted course to bring the Concordia closer to Giglio, gashing the hull on a reef a few hundred meters offshore. He has said the reef wasn’t on his nautical charts.
In addition, Codacons, one of Italy’s best-known consumer groups, has teamed up with two U.S. law firms to launch a class-action lawsuit against Costa and Carnival in Miami, claiming that it expects to get anywhere from euro125,000 ($164,000) to euro1 million ($1.3 million) per passenger.
German attorney Hans Reinhardt, who currently represents 15 Germans who survived the accident and is in talks to represent families who lost loved ones, said he is advising his clients not to take the settlement.
Instead, he along with Codacons is working with one of the U.S. law firms to pursue the class-action suit in Miami.
“What they have lost is much more than euro11,000,” he said of his clients.
But Roberto Corbella, who represented Costa in the negotiations with consumer groups that led to the offer, said the deal provides passengers with quick and “generous” restitution that with all the reimbursements could amount to some euro14,000 ($18,500) per passenger, even non-paying children.
“The big advantage that they have is an immediate response, no legal expenses, and they can put this whole thing behind them,” he told AP.
Melissa Goduti, of Wallingford, Connecticut, is trying to do just that but hasn’t quite been able to. The 28-year-old, who was traveling with her mother aboard the Concordia, says she can’t sleep at night _ “nothing works, even meds” _ and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
She said Costa had offered to pay for three to five counseling sessions for the PTSD, but that she’ll need more.
“That will not fix my problem,” she said in an email. “No one is going to get over this tragic event in 3-5 counseling sessions.”
Passenger Ophelie Gondelle of Marseille, France, said euro11,000 was paltry “especially considering the psychological” trauma she endured. She said she and her boyfriend are taking part in a French class-action effort underway instead.
Urru, the Sardinian mother of two, said her family was so traumatized by the grounding that when it came time to go home the day after, they flew to Sardinia from Rome rather than take the ferry because everyone was too terrified to go near a ship.
“It was impossible,” to go by boat, she said.
For the past several days, she has kept busy by preparing a box of goods to send to a resident on the island of Giglio who let her family and their friends _ a total of 10 people _ stay in a holiday apartment the night of the grounding.
Urru said she was sending seven sweaters and two blankets to make up for the things that her family took from the apartment, since they had nothing to guard against the freezing Tuscan chill. She said she was also sending the homeowner some cheese and salami and typical Sardinian sweets.
“Inside this apartment, it was so warm, so welcoming. They gave us everything that was inside the house,” Urru said. “They were truly, truly wonderful.”
The number of Americans filing for new jobless benefits dropped to a near four-year low last week, pointing to some building up of momentum in the labor market and the economy.
But the upbeat economic outlook was dampened by other data on Thursday showing a drop in new residential construction in December after hefty gains the prior month.
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits plunged 50,000 to a seasonally adjusted 352,000, the lowest level since April 2008, the Labor Department said.
That was the largest drop since September 2005 and took claims within spitting distance of the 350,000 mark that economists say would signal strong job growth.
The four-week moving average of claims, considered to be a better measure of labor market trends, dropped 3,500 to 379,000 last week. Analysts had expected initial claims to fall only to 385,000.
“We have to see if there are some seasonality issues involved here, but on the surface this number looks to be very positive and is pretty much consistent with other data we’ve seen recently that suggest improvement in underlying fundamentals in the U.S.,” said Omer Esiner, chief market analyst at Commonwealth Foreign Exchange.
U.S. stock futures added to gains after the data, while Treasury debt prices widened losses.
Last week’s claims data covered the survey period for January nonfarm payrolls and claims dropped by 14,000 between the December and January survey periods.
Payrolls increased 200,000 in December, with the unemployment rate dropping to a near three-year low of 8.5 percent.
The claims data builds on a rash of stronger-than-expected economic signals and could further temper expectations among some economists that the Federal Reserve could launch a fresh round of bond buying to spur the recovery.
The Fed meets next week and no policy action is expected, outside from the possibility the central bank may signal it will keep overnight rates pressed to zero for longer than had previously been expected.
But with continued signs of stress in the housing market, the U.S. central bank will stay very much in the picture.
Housing starts fell 4.1 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 657,000 units in December, the Commerce Department said in a separate report guaranteed payday loans. Economists had expected housing starts to fall to a 680,000-unit rate.
Permits for future home construction slipped 0.1 percent to an annual rate of 679,000 units last month.
“Housing continues to bounce along at the bottom, suggesting that housing is not going to recover for several years to come. If we are relying on housing to drive this recovery it seems we will continue on this tepid path for a very long time,” said Lindsey Piegza, an economist at FTN Financial in New York.
INFLATION STILL MUTED
In another report, the Labor Department said its Consumer Price Index was unchanged in December for a second straight month.
Core CPI - excluding food and energy - inched up 0.1 percent after rising up 0.2 percent in November. That was in line with economists’ expectations.
Last month, overall inflation was held back by gasoline prices, which fell 2.0 percent - declining for a third straight month. Food prices rose a modest 0.2 percent after nudging up 0.1 percent in November.
Overall consumer prices rose 3.0 percent year-on-year after increasing 3.4 percent in November. That was in line with economists’ expectations.
Core consumer prices were last month dampened by new motor vehicle costs, which fell 0.2 percent - the third straight month of declines. Prices for used cars and trucks dropped 0.9 percent, falling a fourth month in a row.
Apparel prices slipped 0.1 percent, indicating discounting by retailers to attract holiday shoppers. Apparel prices rose 0.6 percent in November.
But housing costs held up, with owners’ equivalent rent rising 0.2 percent last month, reflecting the rising demand for rental apartments as the weak housing market pushes Americans away from home ownership. This category rose 0.1 percent in November.
In the 12 months to December, core CPI increased 2.2 percent after rising by the same margin in November. This measure has rebounded from a record low of 0.6 percent in October.
The Fed would like to see core inflation at 2 percent or a little under, although the price measure its follows most closely tends to run below the core CPI.
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Charles Evans said the drop in the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent may be partially reversed in coming months.
After four leaderless months, Yahoo named Scott Thompson as its new CEO on Wednesday — choosing an outsider to take over the helm despite shareholders’ calls to sell the company.
Thompson was previously the president of PayPal, an eBay (, Fortune 500) subsidiary. His appointment, which becomes official January 9, follows the ouster of former CEO Carol Bartz — who was unceremoniously fired by the company’s board via phone in September.
Shares of Yahoo (, Fortune 500) closed 3.1% lower Wednesday.
In a prepared statement, Thompson called Yahoo "an industry icon" with a "rich history." Although that’s true, Yahoo has struggled mightily in recent years. The company gave up on search two years ago, a market that it once led. It is also losing ground with its other cash cow, display advertising, to new entrants to the market such as Google (, Fortune 500) and Facebook.
On a conference call following the announcement, journalists and analysts hammered Thompson on those points. He said he needs time on the job to develop strong answers.
"It’s too early for me to have any informed opinion as to the display space, what’s going on there and what’s happening next," Thompson said on the call. "I have a lot to learn, and it’s still very early days … but down in that data we’re going to find ways to innovate and compete."
Roy Bostock, chairman of Yahoo’s board of directors, was also on the call and jumped in to answer many of the hardball questions.
"What we’re doing at Yahoo, you can call it a turnaround, but it’s really building on strong assets," Bostock said.
Will Yahoo sell itself? Despite Bostock’s insistence Yahoo can stand alone, the company’s weakness has attracted buyout interest from a long list of both private equity firms and tech titans. Reports in late October said Google was preparing a bid, in addition to Microsoft (, Fortune 500), which offered to buy Yahoo for more than $47 billion in 2008 and was turned down no checking account payday advance. Reports last month said Chinese Internet company Alibaba, of which Yahoo owns a stake, is preparing a takeover bid.
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and other board members have privately told four major private equity firms that the board would not support a takeover offer for the entire company, Fortune reported on Wednesday.
Several groups of activist shareholders had pushed Yahoo’s board to sell the company, but bringing in an outside CEO makes that possibility more remote.
An analyst on the conference call asked Thompson whether he "see[s] Yahoo as public or private" in the future.
Thompson got out half a word before Bostock jumped in: "We are a public company, with roughly a $20 billion market cap. We don’t see that changing right now."
But earlier in the call, Bostock said Yahoo is "considering a wide range of business investments" and other options. He stressed several times during the call that "the primary focus will be on core business."
That leaves Yahoo room to shed more of its vast product portfolio. It began winnowing in late 2010, killing off struggling services like its Buzz community news site and aging AltaVista search engine. Yahoo also thinned its blogs and sold off bookmarking service Delicious.
Thompson said his aim is "to return this business to one of the great iconic brands. I have a core belief that what happens in the next five years, and the next ten, is almost impossible to imagine."
He closed the call by saying, "I’m genuinely excited to be here. I would not be here if I didn’t think the future of this brand could be spectacular."
Yahoo chief financial officer Tim Morse had been serving as interim CEO, and he will return to his former position once Thompson takes the helm. Morse will also join the company’s board.
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon will name the state’s new top job creation official on Friday, his office said Thursday.
The new director of the Department of Economic Development will replace David Kerr, who’s stepping down this month after a little more than two years in the post.
The former AT&T executive and Kansas Commerce Secretary worked to significantly boost Missouri’s exports and led an overhaul of the state’s strategic economic development plan. He also played a key role in negotiations with both Ford and General Motors about plant expansions in the state.
But his tenure was also marked by sluggish job growth and, in recent months, controversy over a sugar plant deal gone awry in Moberly. Meanwhile, efforts by the Nixon administration to re-tool Missouri’s menu of economic incentives largely stalled in the General Assembly. Kerr replaced Nixon’s first economic development chief, St. Louis attorney Linda Martinez, who lasted less than a year in the job.
Whoever takes the seat next will do so ahead of a re-election campaign in which the economy is expected to be a major issue. They will also take the seat on the eve of a Legislative session where tax credits will, again, likely see much debate.
Nixon will visit Kansas City and Springfield (though not St. Louis) to make the announcement.
Verizon Wireless was working to get its 4G network back up and running on Wednesday, following a nationwide outage that began in the early morning hours.
Customers across the country, from California to Ohio to Virginia, took to Verizon’s forums to complain that service was knocked out, though gripes were mostly limited to the new 4G LTE data network, which Verizon began to roll out a year ago. Voice calls, texts and 3G data were unaffected, according to the company.
Verizon (, Fortune 500) spokesman Tom Pica confirmed that service returned to normal at around 2 p.m. ET after engineers worked all morning to fix the issue. He did not comment on the cause of the problem.
It was the second nationwide outage in as many weeks for Verizon’s 4G network, and the third since April. That’s a tough pill to swallow for Verizon, which has built its brand on network reliability.
The bad news for Verizon and its customers is that wireless infrastructure experts expect this isn’t the last time the 4G network will go down. Since Verizon was the first company in the world to deploy a 4G LTE network at any great scale, it is dealing with the usual early adopter growing pains.
"Verizon is a pioneer, and it’s suffering the fate that all pioneers face," said Ken Rehbehn, analyst at Yankee Group.
Indeed, each new wave of network technology involves some degree of pain. When the last next-generation network (3G) first deployed, it was brought down by widespread capacity constraints that the carriers had not anticipated. Most notably, AT&T’s (, Fortune 500) 3G network became close to unusable in New York and San Francisco following Apple’s (, Fortune 500) launch of the iPhone 3G in 2008.
4G is a myth (and a confusing mess)
So what’s the trouble with Verizon’s 4G network? Verizon isn’t saying, and it would be very unusual for a network operator to reveal specifics about why it’s having a problem. But experts believe it has to do with the complexities of LTE, which is a much more intricate technology than its predecessors cash advance.
Unlike previous systems that use switches to control traffic, 4G uses "cores," that act like large, centralized command-and-control centers. Switches covered city blocks, but 4G cores are now serving multiple states. If one goes out, entire regions could lose service.
Since it’s a nationwide event, experts believe all the cores may have been affected by a software or hardware issue.
"This is truly indicative of a larger problem," said Robert Laracuente, vice president of business development at Telenetworks in Puerto Rico. "Best case scenario, some routing isn’t programmed as it should be. The worst case scenario is an undetected hardware fault that systemically disrupts the network under certain conditions."
Because this has happened three times now, Laracuente said it would be surprising if Verizon faced a software problem, since the company prides itself on its scrutiny of its engineering. If it is a hardware malfunction, that can be very hard to detect and prevent in the future.
"This is a whole new paradigm of network technology, so I expect that issues will continue to occur," said Akshay Sharma, analyst at Gartner.
Next-generation networks are based end-to-end on Internet Protocol, which routes packets of information over the Internet rather through circuits. That makes 4G about 10 times faster and gives it significantly more capacity for data traffic than 3G, but it also brings a new host of issues to the table.
"IP by its nature is not resilient from day one," Sharma said. "You don’t get resiliency and quality of service for free — you have to engineer that in. That’s a new wrinkle that adds to the challenge."
Verizon’s 4G customers may have to get used to a few bumps as their first-of-its-kind technology gets all the glitches smoothed out. It’s the price pioneers always pay.