Among the 15 companies that U.S. News & World Report projects might not survive 2009: Six Flags, Loehmann’s and — gasp! — Krispy Kreme.
According to the story:
Krispy Kreme. (KKD; about 4,000 employees; stock down 50%). The donuts might be good, but Krispy Kreme overestimated Americans’ appetite – and that’s saying something. This chain overexpanded during the donut heyday of the 1990s – taking on a lot of debt – and now requires high volumes to meet expenses and interest payments. The company has cut costs and closed underperforming stores, but still hasn’t earned an operating profit in three years. And now that consumers are cutting back on everything, such improvements may fail to offset top-line declines, leading Krispy Kreme to seek some kind of relief from lenders over the next year.
Just one question. WTF is “the donut heyday of the 1990s”?
One of the quirkiest traditions of this time of year is watching “The Simpsons” annual new “Treehouse of Horror” episode — after Halloween. Because Fox currently owns the broadcast rights to the World Series, and November is a ratings “sweeps” month, “The Simpsons” Halloween episode almost always airs after All Hallow’s Eve, when it’s horror-themed slapstick proves a little out of date. The show doesn’t even make self-deprecating jokes about it any more, it’s been this way for so long. This year the 19th installment airs on Sun., Nov. 2 at 8 p.m. and, as usual, features three segments: “How to Get Ahead in Dead-vertising,” “Untitled Robot Parody” and “It’s the Grand Pumpkin, Milhouse,” which satirize, respectively, AMC’s “Mad Men,” Transformers and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” and other Peanuts specials. The amusing titles for the “Mad Men” spoof are already on-line:
“Treehouse of Horror XIX” seems unusually, uh, leaky this year. The episode’s election-themed prologue, involving a faulty voting machine, has been on-line for several weeks already. (In a sign of just how long “The Simpsons” has aired Halloween specials, one of its most amusing political-themed chapters dates to 1996. “Citizen Kang” featured slobbery aliens Kang and Kodus impersonating Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.) Anyway, here’s the new prologue, which at least airs ahead of Tuesday’s Election Day.
In last Thursday’s Letters section of the Marietta Daily Journal, a fellow by the name of William Owen of the Georgia Monorail Consortium wrote in and espoused the virtues of his organization’s technology — cost-efficient! creates jobs! snazzy! I couldn’t help but wonder why all this talk of newfangled super-slick rail systems sounded so familiar. And then I remembered…
(Full disclosure: I was raised in Marietta and once worked for one of the MDJ’s weeklies. My folks still live there. I harbor no ill will toward monorails or Mr. Owens and don’t believe him to be the huckster excellently portrayed by the late Phil Hartman in the above video.)
Former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney has filed a libel suit against the AJC.
Atlanta Progressive News reports the suit lists five “false and defamatory” statements about McKinney penned by Pulitzer Prize-winning AJC op-ed columnist Cynthia Tucker in a July 2006 column.
Fifth on the list:
McKinney takes issue with a statement by Tucker that McKinney “doesn’t have the power or prestige to pass a resolution in support of sweetened iced tea.”
I hope this gets to trial, if only to hear McKinney’s attorney attempt to prove she was indeed powerful and prestigious enough to legislate on behalf of sweet tea.
It’s too bad legendary attorney Lionel Hutz is no longer with us. It’s the case he was born to argue.
