Agriculture is a business that is changing rapidly and offers a variety of rich stories. Perry Beeman, senior environmental and agriculture, reporter at The Des Moines Register, explains the beat's basics.
Hitting the roads with cheap gas. AAA’s winter holiday travel season officially starts Tuesday, and motorists are hitting the road with the gift of cheap gasoline. GasBuddy says 24 states now have stations where gasoline is selling for less than $2 a gallon, according to NPR. The average national price for a gallon of unleaded […]
Coffee, tea and adopt a cat. That’s the mantra at the latest trend in cafes that are beginning to spring up across the United States. Cat cafes are already popular in Japan, where there are also cafes featuring owls and penguins, and where many apartment owners ban residents from owning animals. Now, the New York […]
Restaurants are notoriously unsuccessful businesses. Two-thirds don’t make it to three years, and many cafes and bistros find that profit margins are notoriously thin. But on the flip side, successful chefs have become business moguls in their own rights. Think about people such as Emeril Lagasse, Nobu Matsuhisa and John Besh, all masters of restaurant […]
Chocolate covered marshmallow trees have already appeared at See’s. No doubt chocolate Stanley Cups are on the shelves of Canadian supermarkets, or soon will be. Now comes news from the Washington Post’s Wonkblog that the world may be running low on chocolate. That word comes from the world’s two biggest chocolate makers, Mars, Inc., and […]
With dry conditions or outright drought plaguing a significant section of the United States, it beats me why TV weather people still pull gloomy faces when they’re reporting impending storms; you’d think they would be leading the dance of joy. Financial writers know that water issues – from crop hydration to the marketing of bottled […]
Maybe this column should be called “quirky tips” instead of “quick tips,” because I can’t resist sharing some of the interesting and offbeat jottings from my notebook. Hopefully you can embrace the oddities and spin an idea or two into a colorful summertime business feature. First off, my ears perked up the other day when […]
Already 2014 is about half over and the Fourth of July holiday is speeding toward us like a runaway locomotive. It’s the make-it or break-it bellwether for many summer tourism businesses and particularly interesting this year because the Fourth falls on a Friday, making for an automatic three-day-weekend for many workers. According to Orbitz, many […]
Well, it’s rather a downer for the industry-led National Hamburger Month that there have been a couple of major ground beef fiascos in the past few days, including the news that meat tainted with the e. coli bacteria may be linked to illnesses in four states, as the Los Angeles Times reported. When 1.8 […]
Only a few weeks remain until the kick-off of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil – and the much-watched football (or soccer, to those of us in the United States) tournament will bring all eyes to South America’s largest economy. FIFA, by the way, stands for Fédération Internationale de Football Association and the league, […]
