Colo. students learn
sweet smell of success
Rule No. 1 for budding entrepreneurs: Create a product with strong consumer demand.
Give credit to a Junior Achievement team of Colorado high school students for understanding America’s undying passion for ice cream.
A team of 11 students won a Junior Achievement Business Week competition by creating a new flavor of frozen custard and an accompanying marketing campaign for the Good Times fast-food chain.
The winning flavor, Midnight Mint, consists of chocolate and mint mixed into Good Times’ vanilla frozen custard.
It will be available this month at 40 Good Times locations in Colorado.
The students will pocket 15 percent of the restaurant chain’s profit on the item, estimated at $300 to $400 per student.
Verizon finds most
flunk VoIP quiz
First Michael Moore made fun of American students for not being able to find Iraq on a map. Now Verizon is lambasting Americans with an even tougher question: What is VoIP?
Twenty percent of the 1,000 respondents in Verizon’s poll thought VoIP was a European hybrid automobile. Another 10 percent believed it was a low-carbohydrate vodka.
In fact, VoIP means “voice over Internet protocol,” the Internet phone service already used by 1 million Americans.
Frontier rethinks
live TV after jet scare
Frontier Airlines executives thought twice about the live Direc TV programming available on their planes after passengers on a Sept. 21 JetBlue flight got to watch live coverage of their aircraft flying around with malfunctioning landing gear.
The TV turned from entertaining to frighteningly captivating on that flight.
As a result, Frontier executives will consider a change in Frontier’s emergency manual instructions addressing when to turn off the TVs, said Frontier spokesman Joe Hodas.
Watching such footage on television could distract passengers from directions from the flight crew, he said.
“If you’re hysterical because of what you’re seeing on the television … or if you’re focused on what the TV is telling you and you’re not paying attention to what the flight crew is telling you, that can be a safety concern, not just for the individual passenger but for the flight as a whole.”
Halloween casts
spell on consumers
Retailers anticipate scaring up some serious sales this Halloween: Consumers are expected to spend $3.29 billion on Halloween this year, up 5.4 percent from $3.12 billion in 2004, according to a survey conducted by BIG research for the National Retail Federation.
The average Halloween reveler will spend $48.48 on merchandise. Candy will be a particularly popular item, with the average person planning to spend $18.07 on sweets.
A separate survey by mall owner Macerich predicts that Harry Potter, Star Wars and Batman character costumes will prove to be the most popular, while Paris Hilton, Michael Jackson and Jessica Simpson will be the most popular celebrity costumes.
Trick or Treat Barn
at fest seeks sponsors
Local businesses will have an unusual opportunity to connect with the community at the town of Parker’s sixth Halloween with Horses festival.
Businesses can “sponsor a stall” at the Trick or Treat Barn by decorating it and bringing enough candy for the 5,000 to 7,000 children who show up with their parents.
Bill Meyer, culture and leisure programs coordinator for Parker, thinks it’s a great trade-off.
“What the businesses get out of it is 10,000 people in front of them and their name on all the promotional materials,” Meyer said. “The (cost) for them is just their time and candy.”
The event also includes a horse costume contest with a $1,000 prize, a pumpkin patch, a haunted Stable of Terror and pony rides. Call Bill Meyer at 303-805-3263 to reserve a stall.
Well-off more likely
to pinch sweetener
Higher income people are more likely to swipe Sweet’N Low packets from restaurants than those who earn less.
About 67 percent of those who earn $75,000 to $100,000 admit to taking a Sweet’N Low packet from a restaurant or coffee shop, while only 47 percent of people who earn less than $25,000 have done so, according to the Pink Packet Poll released by Cumberland Packing, maker of the artificial sweetener. The packets cost about 2 cents apiece.
FROM STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
