(Reuters) – U.S. cable T.V. operator Cablevision Systems Corp (CVC.N) is planning to make an offer for the New York Daily News as early as this week, valuing the troubled tabloid at just $1, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The offer would come one month after New York media and real estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman said he was considering selling the newspaper and had hired Lazard Ltd (LAZ.N) to assist with the process. It underscores the declining readership and plunging advertising revenue that have plagued the tabloid for years.
Cablevision’s $1 bid takes into account the New York Daily News’ reported $30 million annual loss and $150 million investment in a printing press, and declining circulation that relies heavily on newsstand sales rather than on subscriptions, the source said.
The source asked not to be identified because the offer has not been formally presented yet. Cablevision declined to comment while a representative for the New York Daily News could not immediately be reached for a comment.
To be sure, newspapers are not the only part of the media industry which is struggling. Cable distributors such as Cablevision and its larger rivals have also been under pressure to stop consumers from dumping their cable subscriptions, or “cutting the cord”, as subscribers shift to internet services such as Netflix and Hulu.
Cablevision also owns the suburban newspaper Newsday. The company, which is controlled by New York’s Dolan family, said last month its number of video customers fell 4.7 percent to 2.68 million in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31.
Northern Bergen office vacancies skyrocket as companies flee New Jersey’s Anti Business Climate
MARCH 29, 2015 LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, MARCH 29, 2015, 1:21 AM
BY LINDA MOSS
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
* Shifting preferences are likely to alter the look of many now-empty large corporate campuses
Northern Bergen County, once a magnet for corporations, has lost some of its luster as a number of companies leave the area, sending its office vacancy rate soaring to nearly 40 percent, according to one real estate firm.
In the first quarter so far, the northern corridor of the county, including towns like Montvale and Park Ridge, had 2.25 million square feet of its total 5.8 million square feet of office space unoccupied, according to JLL, a real estate firm with offices in East Rutherford.
That translates to a 39 percent vacancy rate in the quarter, up 70 percent from the year-ago period’s 23 percent, JLL reported.
The Hertz Corp.’s former headquarters in Park Ridge, a 226,000-square-foot property, is on the block after the auto-rental giant’s relocation to Estero, Fla. And Pearson Education’s exit a few months ago from its leafy campus in Upper Saddle River added 475,000 square feet of vacant office space.
“You’ve got almost a million square feet just in Montvale,” said JLL Managing Director Tom Reilly.
Vacancy rates could rise even higher when Mercedes-Benz USA moves its U.S. headquarters from Montvale, where it has three buildings, to Atlanta over the next couple of years. That relocation, announced in January, would add as much as 310,300 square feet of vacant space in the region.
(Bloomberg) — Everyone runs into death and taxes. New Jerseyans trundle on toward an afterlife in tax hell.
“I can afford to retire here,” said Susan Barbey, a 60-year-old resident of Ridgewood, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from Manhattan. “I can’t afford to die here.” (Young/Bloomberg)
What the Domino’s CEO Would Change on Taxes, Obamacare
Stephen Moore / @StephenMoore / March 22, 2015
Here’s a question that has been puzzling Patrick Doyle, the CEO of Domino’s, for months, as he puts it: “How do we list the calorie content of our pizzas on a menu when we have 34 million different variations of pizza?” The new menu labeling law, a creation of the Affordable Care Act, could require his company to do just that.
It’s a textbook case of a mindless and arcane regulation, of Washington bureaucrats imposing on businesses costs that will have no effect on public health. “We’ve been voluntarily doing menu labeling for over a decade,” Doyle says. “We even have an online calorie calculator we call the ‘Calo-Meter’ for every possible pizza order, and it tells customers what happens if they substitute, say, sausage for mushrooms, because we strive to be very nutrition-conscious.”
That isn’t good enough for the feds. The Food and Drug Administration is now insisting that every one of the chain’s 5,000 stores post menu boards on the wall with calorie counts. “It’s crazy and it doesn’t help consumers,” Doyle says, because “90 percent of Domino’s orders arrive by phone or Internet and are for delivery, so fewer than one of 10 customers will ever see these signs.” The signs will cost about $2,000 at every store, and each change of menu will require new ones. That is about $10 million of extraneous costs nationwide for Domino’s. Thank you, Washington.
Other than that, Doyle is having a good day when I visit him at the Domino’s world-wide headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich. And a very good year, with sales up 12 percent in the past quarter alone.
The headquarters are a few miles up the road from where the original Domino’s Pizza opened in 1960. Doyle, who is 51, is tall, stocky, affable and appropriately a Michigan man through and through, having grown up in Midland and earned a degree at the University of Michigan. In his five years as CEO, annual sales have climbed to $9 billion from about $2 billion. Some 250,000 workers wear a Domino’s uniform and sell roughly one billion pizzas each year. During the Super Bowl, Domino’s was taking a dizzying 1,400 orders a minute.
Making pizzas may not be the sexiest business—though it’s a $125 billion world-wide market. But while investors obsess over finding the next Facebook, the share price of Domino’s has soared from $13 in 2010 to just over $100 today. It has been among the top performing stocks in the Fortune 100.
Doyle has helped take the company global, with stores operating in 80 nations and expansion plans throughout Asia. In sales, Domino’s is now the No. 1 restaurant chain in India. Sub-Saharan Africa is also among the company’s fastest-growing markets, with a billion people and a growing middle class. “We’ve discovered Africans love pizza,” he says. “They order them on their mobile phones.”
Things weren’t always flying so high in Ann Arbor. Doyle became CEO after two of the company’s worst years, and sales were still sliding. One of his first decisions was to take an unorthodox approach: “We held a series of focus groups with consumers and we discovered that people hated the pizza. So we ran these TV ads featuring Americans complaining about how bad Domino’s pizza tasted.” Then Doyle appeared on screen with an apology and promise: “We hear you America. Sometimes you know you’ve got to make a change. Please give us another try.”
He adds with a laugh that the one thing in his career that impressed his children was when they were in a New York restaurant and comedian Amy Poehler spotted him and shouted, “Hey, you’re the pizza guy.”
In the three months following those ads, Domino’s had its fastest rise in sales in company history. “I think consumers really appreciated that we were direct and honest with them,” he explains. That ad campaign is now considered a textbook crisis-management story, with its lesson in honesty as a best commercial policy.
Domino’s is also riding the digital revolution. “In a lot of ways we’re really a technology company,” Doyle says. “We’ve adapted the art of pizza-making to the digital age. Globally, we’re already at a run rate of about $4 billion of digital sales.” He adds that digital drives sales by making ordering easier and more efficient, and saves money on bad orders because customers “take their own orders so they make fewer mistakes.”
His goal is to have every iPhone in the world equipped with a Domino’s app, and the company is working with Ford Motor Co. on a voice-activated technology that will let motorists order a large thin-crust pepperoni with onions while driving home from work.
The atmosphere at company headquarters feels more like Silicon Valley than a fast-food company. Most employees here are computer programmers and technicians monitoring in real time what people are ordering, how long it is taking to fill an order, and the online complaints and comments that stream in. Their mission is to streamline the pizza-making process from the time the order arrives to when the pie is handed off at the customer’s front door. If the goal is delivery in 30 minutes or less, every innovation that shaves 10 or 15 seconds is a major money saver when you’re selling a billion pies a year. Although the Domino’s menu also includes such things as sandwiches, pasta and chicken wings, 80 percent of its sales are pizzas.
Doyle is unconditionally bullish on the U.S. economy. “The big story since the recession is that American households and businesses have become lean and efficient and have paid down debts. Consumers finally have money and they are starting to spend it,” he says.
Meanwhile, as the head of one of the nation’s biggest employers, Doyle sees the effects of what he calls a “tightening of the labor market” firsthand. “Frankly, right now, it’s getting harder and harder to hire. We have shortages of truck drivers and delivery people.”
Such real-world experience makes Domino’s a barometer of sorts. “My take is that the official statistics are underestimating the strength of the labor market. Look, it has been a long, slow recovery. We’re now six years into it and we’ve finally reached the point where there seems to be more demand for labor than there is trained supply.” For job seekers “that is great news, right?”
As for those who fret that only the rich are getting richer and upward mobility isn’t possible, Doyle says they should pay more attention to what happens at Domino’s. “Over 90 percent of our 900 franchisees started as an hourly worker in the store,” he says. “Most of them started as delivery drivers at minimum wage. They work their way up. They become a manager. Then they come in, they apply to buy a store.” So from earning $7 or $8 an hour, they now earn $80,000 to $100,000 by operating a franchise. Many have become millionaires. “This is absolutely a story of upward mobility in America.
If he were economic adviser to the president, what reforms would he recommend to accelerate growth and hiring? Without hesitation he says: “Simplify the corporate tax. It’s a killer. We pay 38 percent at Domino’s.” He’s including state and local taxes, but that’s a huge burden, especially given that many large corporations pay below 10 percent. “Just get rid of all the loopholes—and make it fair with a broad base and lower rates.” Then he adds, only half-kidding: “No one in Washington ever woke up and said ‘let’s have a loophole for pizza makers.’” Sounds like he needs a lobbyi
One of Doyle’s biggest worries is that the Domino’s franchise-owner model—which is also used by thousands of other retail and restaurant stores—has come under assault from trial lawyers, unions and the National Labor Relations Board. These groups want to treat a Domino’s or Popeyes franchise store and the parent company as “joint employers.” This would mean a locally owned store with a few dozen staff would still have to comply with, for instance, the ObamaCare rules that only apply to firms with more than 50 workers. Seattle passed a minimum-wage law last year that treats franchise restaurants as big businesses that must pay a super-minimum-wage that phases up to $15 an hour.
“You’ve got 20 million people today employed in the franchise industry in the U.S. Part of why small business owners want to be in a franchise is because they’re getting support from each other, and they’re getting support and ideas from a company. Franchise stores have dramatically higher success rates than people who are just doing it all on their own,” Doyle says. “Why destroy a model that is almost uniquely American and has been a tremendous success for 50 or 60 years? This would be horribly detrimental.”
Doyle is optimistic about the world economy and how the digital revolution will continue to lift living standards for billions in the coming decade. Even in sub-Saharan Africa per capita incomes are growing at 5 percent annually. “I’m a free trader. I just believe in my core that free markets, technology, innovation, cheap energy and globalization will be triumphant and will make people better off.” They will also, not coincidentally, make people order more pizzas on their smartphones.
New Jersey Last again tops nation in auto insurance rates and only lower gas prices are keeping state from most expensive place to own a car.
March 23,2015
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, The National Association of Insurance Commissioners says New Jersey motorists paid an average of $1,220 in 2012. That’s about 49 percent more than the national average of $815.https://newjersey.news12.com/news/report-new-jersey-tops-nation-in-auto-insurance-rates-1.10103446
A lesser known fact is that New Jersey is now the 5th most expensive state to own a car , with only lower gas prices ie gas taxes keeping us from last place . ( https://www.bankrate.com/finance/auto/car-ownership-costs-by-state.aspx )
Bankrate analyzed the cost of gasoline, repairs and insurance in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Labor and parts data were provided by CarMD.com, while gas spending was calculated with statistics from GasBuddy.com and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Insurance costs were compiled from National Association of Insurance Commissioners statistics.( https://www.bankrate.com/finance/auto/car-ownership-costs-by-state.aspx#ixzz3VDEPJ73V )
Fed whistleblower quits Wall Street, weighs book
By Kevin Dugan
March 20, 2015 | 11:53am
Carmen Segarra, the Wall Street whistleblower who secretly recorded 46 hours of private conversations with her fellow regulators — casting a light on the sometimes too cozy relationship between the New York Fed and the banks it oversees — is considering writing a book, The Post has learned.
Segarra, a lawyer, left her job at Barclays in New York earlier this month after Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, in a March 3 speech, appeared to refer to Segarra’s rocky relationship with her then-Fed colleagues.
“It is important that anyone serving the Fed feel safe speaking up when they have concerns,“ Yellen said in her speech in New York City before the Citizens Budget Commission.
“It’s been an ongoing drain [for Segarra],” a person familiar with Segarra told The Post, talking about the publicity following her going public with her New York Fed issues.
Segarra does not yet have a book deal or even an agent, according to one person familiar with her plans.
Segarra’s 2011-2012 tapes were made public in September when WBEZ’s “This American Life” aired a report on regulators at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shrinking before bankers at Goldman Sachs over a “legal, but shady” deal.
To say that Los Angeles merely failed would be putting it mildly.
Earlier this week, the nonpartisan RAND Corporation released a study that helps demolish the argument that governments (cities, in this case) can socially engineer away residents’ obesity by restricting food freedom.
The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute, focuses on a ridiculous, controversial, seven-year-old zoning ban on new fast food restaurants in South Los Angeles. To say that the measure merely failed would be putting it mildly.
“Since the fast-food restrictions were passed in 2008, overweight and obesity rates in South Los Angeles and other neighborhoods targeted by the law have increased faster than in other parts of the city or other parts of the county,” reads a RAND press release on the study.
Well then.
“The South Los Angeles fast food ban may have symbolic value, but it has had no measurable impact in improving diets or reducing obesity,” said lead author Roland Sturm of RAND.
The RAND study results represent some of the best evidence to date that policies that restrict food freedom do no make people healthier. The failure and repeal of Denmark’s so-called “fat tax” and damning research on mandatory menu labeling are two other convincing examples.
FTC staff report details how Google favored its own shopping, travel services over rivals
By Rolfe Winkler And
Brody Mullins
Updated March 19, 2015 7:25 p.m. ET
A previously undisclosed report by staffers at the Federal Trade Commission reveals new details about how Google Inc. manipulated search results to favor its own services over rivals’, even when they weren’t most relevant for users.
In a lengthy investigation, staffers in the FTC’s bureau of competition found evidence that Google boosted its own services for shopping, travel and local businesses by altering its ranking criteria and “scraping” content from other sites. It also deliberately demoted rivals.
For example, the FTC staff noted that Google presented results from its flight-search tool ahead of other travel sites, even though Google offered fewer flight options. Google’s shopping results were ranked above rival comparison-shopping engines, even though users didn’t click on them at the same rate, the staff found. Many of the ways Google boosted its own results have not been previously disclosed.
Starbucks executive Corey duBrowa recently deleted his twitter account, after what he said were abusive comments as a result of his push for a campaign in which his baristas were to engage with customers about race relations.
“I was personally attacked through my Twitter account around midnight last night and the tweets represented a distraction from the respectful conversation we are trying to start around Race Together,” duBrowa said. “I’ll be back on Twitter soon.”
But the whole point of the conversations he promoted, was to get people talking about what is uncomfortable, and controversial. It seems childish to delete his own twitter account over it.
A story from fastcocreate.com showed just what happens when you walk into a Starbucks wanting to engage in a discussion on race. Pretty much nothing. The baristas are young kids, just trying to do their job and get through the day, and are kind of embarrassed to even bring it up. I kind of feel sorry for them.
Assembly Transportation Committee passes ride-share regulatory bill opposed by Uber
TRENTON – After all-day pushing and shoving between union taxi cab drivers and non-union drivers, the Assembly Transportation Committee this afternoon passed a thorny labor-backed bill aimed at protecting the safety of passengers who use Uber Technologies and similar ride-sharing services. (Pizarro/PolitickerNJ)
TRENTON -Cabs cluttered West State Street again this morning in a cabbie war with an Assembly Transportation hearing on the legislative horizon.
Screaming “No justice, no peace, no justice, no peace,” Communications Workers of America (CWA) members tramped around the statuary outside the Statehouse Annex in advance of a hearing for a bill that would impose restrictions on the smartphone-based ridesharing service company Uber. (Pizarro/PolitickerNJ)
Starbucks hit by ‘cascade of negativity’ after ordering staff to talk racism with customers: Vice President forced off Twitter as angry public turns on ‘patronizing’ project
Howard Schultz, boss of Starbucks, told baristas to write ‘RaceTogether’ on cups in an effort to stimulate debate about racism Twitter users quickly branded the campaign ‘patronizing’ and ‘cringe-inducing’, and subjected executives to a wave of mockery One user pointed out that no black people featured in publicity photographs for the campaign Corey duBrowa, a Starbucks PR executive, was forced to delete his Twitter account as he felt ‘overwhelmed by the volume and tenor of the discussion’
By JAKE WALLIS SIMONS FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 03:51 EST, 18 March 2015 | UPDATED: 11:07 EST, 18 March 2015
Twitter has ruthlessly mocked Starbucks campaign for the company’s new anti-racism campaign in which baristas talk to customers about race issues while serving their coffee.
One user tweeted, ‘I don’t have time to explain 400 years of oppression to you & still make my train’, while another pointed out, ‘y’all realize there are no coloured hands in the press photos right’.
A third speculated, ‘maybe Starbucks actually wanted to get people of all races & ethnicities to join hands and make fun’.
Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3000260/Starbucks-PR-fail-Twitter-mockery-causes-coffee-executive-delete-account-customers-say-NOT-want-talk-racism-ordering-coffee.html#ixzz3UouRuuSZ
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
The Least Harmful Ways to Raise Government Revenue
Guidelines for Fiscal Cliff Negotiators
Washington, D.C., December 5, 2012—With the fiscal cliff looming, lawmakers are looking for new revenues as part of a bipartisan deal to reduce the federal deficit. While raising new revenues may be politically necessary to seal a deal, lawmakers must keep in mind that not all revenue raisers are equal. With that in mind, the Tax Foundation has released an analysis of revenue options, ranking them from least to most harmful.
Research from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has established a hierarchy of which taxes are most and least harmful for long-term economic growth. They determined that the corporate income tax is the most harmful for long-term economic growth, followed by high personal income taxes. Consumption taxes and property taxes were found to be less harmful to economic growth relative to taxes on capital and income.
“If lawmakers decide that new revenues must be part of any long-term effort to solve the budget crisis, they must choose the least harmful way of raising new revenues or else they risk compounding the crisis by slowing economic growth,” said Tax Foundation president Scott Hodge. “Our list of revenue measures is not comprehensive, but it should give lawmakers some guidelines on how to avoid the most economically harmful options.”
The number one recommendation for raising revenue is the simplest: economic growth. This may seem obvious, but whether or not we have sufficient new economic growth to generate more revenue is directly dependent upon the rest of the economic policy decisions made by Congress. A pro-growth agenda will generate more tax revenue organically as conditions improve across the board, while tax increases that slow growth will create stagnation that will actually lose money for the Treasury.
Also at the top of the list for bringing new money in the door are asset sales, requiring government-sponsored businesses to start paying income taxes, and raising user fees and leases on government goods and services. The value of mineral rights owned by the federal government, for example, has been estimated at over $1 trillion. Privatizing certain government-run enterprises would also turn tax-subsidized operations into tax-generating ones. To learn more about unlocking the potential of mineral ownership, visit doggettland.com. Their expertise can help mineral owners maximize returns and navigate complex ownership processes.
Options in the middle of the pack include taxing currently untaxed businesses (like credit unions, electrical coops, and some hospitals and insurance companies), increasing Medicare premiums, and raising the amount federal employees must contribute to their own health care and retirement costs.
The least attractive options include raising individual income tax rates, increasing the estate tax, and raising rates on capital gains and dividends. Worst of all for economic growth, however, would be increasing corporate income tax rates, which are already the highest in the industrialized world.
Tax Foundation Fiscal Fact No. 344, “Raising Revenue: The Least Worst Options,” by Scott Hodge is available here.
The Tax Foundation is a nonpartisan research organization that has monitored fiscal policy at the federal, state and local levels since 1937. To schedule an interview, please contact Richard Morrison, the Tax Foundation’s Manager of Communications, at 202-464-5102 or [email protected].
