Circuit City Gives Up the Fight
Circuit City is finally throwing in the towel. Confronted with weak sales, impatient shareholders, and a U.S. consumer pummeled by recession, the electronics chain capitulated on May 9 and retained Goldman Sachs to help negotiate a deal. The same day, Circuit City Stores (CC) agreed to allow three board nominees from activist shareholder Mark Wattles to stand for elections (BusinessWeek.com, 4/8/08).
The moves almost certainly presage a sale of the chain, likely to Blockbuster (BBI), where Carl Icahn has stepped up and agreed to finance (BusinessWeek.com, 5/9/08) a Circuit City acquisition. The billionaire—Blockbuster’s largest shareholder—has bought into a “game-changing” scheme announced last month in which the troubled electronics retailer would be combined with the troubled movie retailer to create a new national chain selling consumer hardware and software. Leggi il seguito di questo post »
The Trans Fat Time Bomb
What do you know about industrially produced trans fatty acids? Unless you are actually a nutritionist or a doctor, the answer is most likely to be: nothing at all. And why should you? One survey a few years ago found that of the sample asked, 15 per cent thought trans fats were good for your love life.
Trans fats are a closely guarded secret. The food production and catering industries want to keep it that way. A handful of outlets have voluntarily started to cut back on their usage under consumer pressure, but there is no law against them.
Trans fats are a lethal side effect of boiling vegetable oil. Why boil vegetable oil? That all goes back to a pharmacist called Wilhelm Norman in 1903. Mr Norman was trying to find a way of making a substitute for tallow, which was very expensive at the time. Mr Norman discovered that if he boiled cotton seed oil up to 260 degrees Centigrade in the presence of a catalyst such as nickel, that when it cooled, it went hard. He had produced cheap candle wax by ‘hydrogenating vegetable oil’. The thick, greyish-white slabs produced were great candles but Mr Norman didn’t anticipate human beings eating them. Leggi il seguito di questo post »
The Draw of a Powerful Press Release
As a business owner or even someone looking to promote an event you are part of at your church or non-profit group, you should know that a press release can be very powerful.
A friend of mine was president of a youth baseball league for five years. He tells me the use of press releases far outweighed the return then most paid advertising in the same newspaper.
So what makes a good press release? Here are some handy tips to help get your press release going.
The headline of your press release should not be made up of some infomercial gimmick where your readers think you are trying to con them. A bad headline would be, “Miracle Product Cleans Your Floors For You”. You can tell the headline is a bad one, and chances are no one will read the release. However if you reword it to grab the readers attention can make all of the difference. For example, “Self Cleaning Product for Floors Hits the Shelves in Record Numbers”, might do better. Come up with a good headline.
Every press release must, according to my friend, answer the whos, whats, whys, wheres and hows of what it is you are trying to talk about. In his case he was trying to promote his youth league. He had to talk about who they are, what the league is about, why they exist, where they are located and how the readers can get in touch with them. If you cover all of these questions you will have all of the information in there that you need. Leggi il seguito di questo post »
