Having very specific stores in very specific areas in Manhattan has been essential to the current comics industry, the publishing of which is still concentrated within a few blocks, and the industry has done its best to maintain these, despite rising rents, and 9/11 on one hand and late orders and financial problems on the other.2.Santa/Krampus by M. S. Corley.
Last season, the Patriots had no offensive coordinator, with Belichick covering that post; this season, they also will have no defensive coordinator. It's Belichick, Belichick and more Belichick -- no coordinators. Is this an ego-trip thing -- he wants to prove he can do something no major football coach has even attempted since, say, Leo Meyer? TMQ has been complaining for years that NFL clubs are overstaffed at coach, since it's hard to believe a head coach needs 19 more coaches, which is how many Mike Shanahan has at Washington, including a safeties coach, a tight ends coach and an assistant coach for the special-teams coach. Belichick is veering to the other extreme.3. A new store owner talks about the costs of running a hobby shop.
To reach the secret place they call the Cave, its denizens must climb a ladder toward a small, hard-to-notice opening in the tall concrete slab that helps hold up the 10 Freeway. They must squeeze beneath a rusty metal grating, balance on a ledge and descend a second ladder into thick, dead air and darkness. This is home, a vast, vault-like netherworld, strewn with garbage and syringes.Photo link.
Executives at eBay have gotten the message. Since taking the helm in March, eBay Chief Executive John Donahoe has made it clear that fixed-priced items are key to future growth. EBay's "Buy It Now" business, where shoppers can purchase items at a set price even when the merchandise is also listed in an auction, makes up 42% of all goods sold on eBay. It's growing at an annual 22% pace, the fastest among eBay's shopping businesses. "As [Web] search has developed, you can get a great deal in a fixed-price format," Donahoe said in an Apr. 16 interview after his first earnings call as eBay's top executive. "We are going to let our buyers choose."
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Perhaps the biggest example of eBay's new fixed-price focus is the new fee structure, announced in January. The changes gave breaks to many large vendors who sell fixed-priced goods on the site, while hiking fees for many eBay users who sell using a traditional auction structure.
As new readers and fortune-hunters entered the marketplace, they gravitated heavily to the emerging art talent coming from Marvel. "Oh, absolutely," commented Chuck Rozanski, the owner of Mile High Comics and a prominent figure amongst comics retailers. "They had a huge fan base, and that's why they were able to step so successfully away from Marvel and to strike out on their own. See, part of that came from Marvel's philosophy, and Terry Stewart's philosophy, of making stars. And so Marvel in effect created the notoriety of these guys by really, really pushing their star power and using that to sell books, but then in the end it came back and really did bite them in the tail. I think to this day it's the philosophy of Marvel to downplay individual creators and to really emphasize the team effort and the editors and so on. Marvel to this day doesn't send people out that much on a promotional tour. You almost never see them set up at conventions in any real substantive way. They are trying to keep their creators very much under their thumb."
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In the midst of Heroes World, Steve Milo and various other retailers were approached by Marvel to buy excess inventory. He would win the lot and create Marvel Mart ads to sell these goods. He was able to see the extent of Marvel's disorganization. Steve related, "The unfortunate component was the fact that it really destroyed the distribution market. But we weren't a distributor, so it wasn't as big an issue. I mean, Marvel Mart was kind of silly. They just were never set up to do consumer retail sales, and they knew that. Marvel literally lost control of their inventory. They literally didn't know what they had or didn't have, and we bought, for pennies on the dollars, 300 trailer-loads sight unseen of Marvel inventory. We literally bought 300 tractor-trailer-loads of Marvel product.
A jury awarded developer Rick Caruso $74 million in compensatory damages Thursday on his claim that the owner of the Glendale Galleria made illegal business threats to try to prevent a restaurant chain from moving into his competing complex.
The Los Angeles County Superior Court jury found that the Galleria's owner, General Growth Properties, engaged in "fraud, malice and oppression" to undermine Caruso Affiliated's Americana at Brand retail-and-residential center in Glendale. The $264-million development is scheduled to open next to the Galleria early in 2008.
In its suit, Caruso's company alleged that the Galleria's owner tried to stop the Cheesecake Factory from signing a lease with Americana by threatening to slow down or scuttle deals between the restaurant chain and other malls owned by the real estate company.
