Indonesia
Get free instant insurance rates for universal, whole, variable and term life insurance from the nation's leading Insurance companies.
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 But Warrenton’s outlet center, operating under an increasingly outdated model, never managed to reach its full potential.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.
Free online car insurance quotes. Get insurance rate comparisons, and buy your auto insurance policy instantly.
Germany’s controversial suggestion of a European debt regulator with direct control over Greece’s spending turned out to be such a touchy subject that Chancellor Angela didn’t even mention the idea to the leaders at Monday’s European Union summit in Brussels.
In what was seen as a blow for Germany’s push for tighter European integration, national sovereignty appeared to have won the argument Monday.
Over the weekend, Germany had made a pre-summit call to give a powerful European debt watchdog direct control over Greece’s budget decisions. Despite often stinging criticism over how Greece runs it financial affairs, having a foreigner directly run a nation’s budget found no takers among the other leaders.
Even Merkel’s staunch ally, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is so close that they have morphed into the diplomatic couple “Merkozy”, could not back her.
“We cannot put a country under trusteeship and run it from abroad. It would not be reasonable, not democratic, and, in short, not efficient,” Sarkozy said after the summit.
Going into the summit, German Economics Minister Philipp Roesler had suggested the EU should take over the “leadership and supervision” of Greece’s budget.
Athens is teetering on the brink of a disorderly default and is seeking a key agreement to get a second euro130 billion ($170.43 billion) bailout. The country has been surviving since May 2010 on an initial euro110 billion package of rescue loans from other eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund.
Greece must also cut its deficit further and push through painful public sector layoffs and sell off several state companies, and its partners are unhappy with the pace of action.
Still, a “Sparkommissar” in German_ or “savings Czar” _ was beyond the pale for Greece.
“Our partners do know that European integration is based on … the respect of their national identity and dignity,” Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos wrote in an angry retort.
“I am certain that the political leaderships of all European nations _ particularly bigger nations that bear increased responsibility for the course of Europe _ are aware of how friends and partners, who have joined their historical destinies, raise questions,” he wrote on Sunday.
Merkel got the message.
“I believe that we are having a discussion that we shouldn’t be having,” she said entering the summit.
Other European leaders have said that the Commission, the EU’s executive, needed the power to block bad spending decisions, but not only in Greece but also other highly indebted countries.
But taking over the leadership of budget went too far.
“It can only be put in place by the Greeks, in a democratic way,” said Sarkozy.
Ever since Greece threw the eurozone into financial turmoil in 2009 when it admitted previous governments had played down the amount of debt, it has been criticized as a profligate nation living off the wealthy northern nations.
It has since committed itself, under often intense pressure, to slowly move back toward a degree of fiscal discipline.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s energy business agreed to buy an 81-megawatt wind power project from Invenergy Wind LLC to expand production in Illinois.
The Bishop Hill II project, which is under construction, will use 50 General Electric Co. 1.62-megawatt turbines, according to a statement Friday from Berkshire’s MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co. in Omaha, Neb.
Berkshire, led by Warren Buffett, has been expanding renewable production at the energy unit, which also produces power with coal and natural gas. Mid-American has invested about $6 billion in wind generation and built or acquired more than 3,300 megawatts of the renewable energy source in states including Iowa, Wyoming, Washington and Oregon since 2004. Last month, the unit agreed to buy the $2 billion Topaz solar project in California from First Solar Inc payday loans.
Wind “meets current and future energy needs in an environmentally efficient and cost-effective manner,” said MidAmerican Chairman and Chief Executive Greg Abel.
The Bishop Hill II wind project is near the town of Galva, Ill., about 40 miles northwest of Peoria. The project is expected to be in commercial operation in the fourth quarter. A unit of Ameren Corp. in Illinois has agreed to buy electricity from the project under a 20-year power-purchase agreement. Terms of the Invenergy deal weren’t disclosed.
An email landed in my inbox the other day from a startup called Timehop. In that email, there were pieces of my online life posted a year ago that day.
"Feeling inspired," I had tweeted January 6 , 2010. And then there was a picture I had posted of my best friend sitting at our favorite local restaurant in the East Village, the one that months later closed its doors after 20 years.
The next day, I received an email documenting a tweet I’d sent to another good friend leaving CNN. "We’re losing a good one," I tweeted him in farewell. Later that day, I posted a picture of my favorite building lit by afternoon sunlight in what has now become my old neighborhood.
Nostalgic? Just a bit.
That’s why Timehop is betting our social media history will become more important in a world where much of our lives are documented online.
Sign up and connect your Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, and Instagram account and every morning a piece of your social media history will land in your inbox showing what you tweeted a year ago on that date, the pictures you posted, and the places you were.
"We’re producing enough content in digital form that we have a digital past," Timehop co-founder Jonathan Wegener said. "You’re following your own life story, which is pretty interesting." Wegener added that Timehop has tens of thousands of subscribers.
The interest in eventually looking back online is part of the reason Facebook overhauled its interface to create Timeline, a new version of the site that would also serve as a digital scrapbook and essentially, a story of our lives.
Until Facebook launched Timeline, it was tough to view your past actions on the service.
"We knew people wanted to dig back in," Meredith Chin, manager of product communications at Facebook said. "We wanted people to be able to see a return on investment they put in over the years and also look back and reflect things that were important to them."
Companies like Foursquare and Twitter don’t allow users an easy way of looking back at old tweets and check-ins, and Timehop hopes to position itself as the place to do that.
"Everyone’s focused on real time and there’s an incredibly powerful product to be built on the past," Wegener said. "That’s the product we’re building."
Code Year draws 200,000 aspiring programmers
Timehop was a spin off of 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, which was originally built out of a Foursquare hackathon in February of last year. That service simply sent you reminders of your Foursquare check-ins in the past credit reports free.
Wegener was a part of the latest Techstars class, an influential incubator program in New York that matches entrepreneurs with mentors. He was working on another startup called FriendsList, which was meant to take on Craigslist.
Wegener said Timehop was always a side startup but people just latched on to it. So he stopped working on FriendsList and is now working on Timehop full time with two other coworkers. He wouldn’t comment on VC funding.
The service uses the public APIs from social networks like Twitter and Foursquare to collect that data and send it to users in a daily email.
"What’s the point?" you might ask. I thought the same, but in a world where our musings are tweeted and our favorite moments shared on our smartphones, it doesn’t hurt to have a little reminder of where we were a year ago.
Wegener says the gentle digital reminders from the past in a daily email are "emotionally powerful," citing users who are reliving their child’s birth and viewing pictures they posted a year earlier.
But what happens when we don’t want to be reminded of the past? What if the daily reminder mentions an ex-boyfriend or someone who has since died?
Wegener admitted that’s been a problem for Timehop. "We’ve had a surprising number of people unsubscribing due to people not wanting to relive a tough patch of history," he said.
The crew is currently working on a filter that would allow users more control over their reminders and a snooze feature that would turn off the service temporarily.
Wegener, who has spent nearly a year on the project, says the tweets we send, the pictures we post, and the other bits of media we’ve started creating on a daily basis will ultimately gain value.
"The content you create gains value with time. So whether it’s a photograph or tweet, it becomes more emotional with time — it ages like wine," he said.
Of course, the philosophy must be backed by a business plan and it’s not clear whether Timehop will be able to pull that off. Timehop eventually hopes to make money from advertising. Wegener said there is also potential for virtual gifts connected with a service that celebrates the past.
Only time will tell if our digital past will be a success in the future. We’ll sign up for Timehop and check back in a year.
Workers at Top Form International Ltd.
NEW YORK, N.Y.
Canada
U.S. employment likely grew solidly last month, but the jobless rate probably rose from a 2-1/2 year low as improving conditions lured some Americans who had given up looking for work back into the labor market.
The government’s closely watched employment report due on Friday should cement views that economic growth accelerated in the fourth quarter after a tepid performance in the first nine months of 2011.
However, the pace of job creation remains too slow to signal a robust recovery is finally under way. Nonfarm payrolls rose 150,000 last month, according to a Reuters survey, after rising 120,000 in November.
Unusually mild weather during the month may have given employment a boost.
While the unemployment rate is expected to edge up to 8.7 percent from 8.6 percent, the tone of the report will likely be strengthened by upward revisions to the payrolls count for October and November, in keeping with a recent trend.
“Businesses are beginning to feel a little bit better about the future and are hiring, but we cannot get too excited because 150,000 is the minimum we need to keep the job market stable,”
said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at California State University Channel Islands in Camarillo, California.
The economy would need even faster job growth over a sustained period to make a noticeable dent in the pool of 24.4 million Americans who remain either out of work or underemployed 2-1/2 years after the end of the 2007-09 recession.
Job growth has averaged 131,000 over the past 11 months and even if payrolls rise as expected in December, employment will still be 6.1 million below its December 2007 level.
With the labor market still far from healthy, the debt crisis in Europe unresolved and tensions over Iran threatening to drive up oil prices, the U.S. economy faces stiff headwinds.
Economists predict the recovery will lose a step early this year after expanding in the fourth quarter at what is expected to be the fastest pace in 1-1/2 years.
This should keep alive the possibility of the Federal Reserve embarking on a third round of asset purchases, or quantitative easing, to spur stronger growth.
“We could see QE3 by the middle of the year,” said Harm Bandholz, chief U.S. economist at UniCredit Research in New York.
The employment report will offer little comfort to the Obama administration and could provide Republicans with more ammunition to attack the government’s handling of the economy.
President Barack Obama’s chances of a second term in office could depend on the health of the labor market.
LABOR MARKET TONE IMPROVING
Although the pace of job creation remains mediocre, there is no denying that the market is healing.
Small business hiring is improving and layoffs have subsided, with first-time applications for state unemployment benefits hovering near 3-1/2 year lows.
Over the past several months, the government has consistently revised up earlier payroll counts based on its survey of employers high risk personal loans. In addition, the household survey, from which the unemployment rate is derived, has shown an even more vigorous pace of hiring for each of the last four months.
Economists say the Bureau of Labor Statistics may not be picking up jobs created by small companies and new businesses.
“The payrolls survey has a hard time picking up smaller employers and births of new start-ups, and that’s where we expect to see a lot of job creation,” said Stephen Bronars, senior economist at Welch Consulting in Washington.
“It’s always going to be harder for the BLS to pick up those because they are measuring employment at companies that are included in their survey and those tend to be the bigger, well established companies.”
In Friday’s report, the government will revise the household series going back five years. Analysts will watch this survey closely to see if the recent improvements will hold.
A broad measure of unemployment that includes people who want to work but have stopped looking and those working only part time but who want more work hit a 2-1/2-year low in November.
GOVERNMENT A DRAG
All the anticipated job gains in December will come from the private sector, where payrolls are seen rising 165,000. Government employment is expect to shrink 15,000, weighed down by budget cuts at state and local governments.
However, the worst of the belt tightening is over and some states have reporting increases in revenue.
In November, a measure of the share of industries that showed job gains during the month fell sharply and economists will be watching to see if it recovers.
Job gains in December are expected to come from construction, where unseasonably mild weather has boosted groundbreaking for new homes. Transportation and warehousing payrolls could also benefit from the mild temperatures.
Manufacturing could post a third consecutive month of job gains, but a moderation in retail employment is expected after recording the biggest increase in seven months in November as retailers geared up for a busy holiday shopping season.
Healthcare and social assistance hiring is expected to pick up after adding the smallest number of jobs in five months in November. Temporary hiring — seen as a harbinger of future hiring — is expected to show more gains.
Even though employment probably picked up last month, a modest gain in hourly earnings is likely, indicating that most of the jobs being created are low paying. The high unemployment rate also means wages cannot grow much.
This is a potentially troubling sign for consumer spending, which has been largely supported by a reduction in savings.
The average work week is seen steady at 34.3 hours.