The upcoming St. Patrick’s holiday has retailers seeing green.
The National Retail Federation is predicting that consumers will spend an estimated $3.76 billion on St. Patrick’s Day. The average consumer is expected to dish out $34.89 this year, compared with last year’s $27.94.
“With St. Patrick’s Day falling on a Saturday this year, Americans will be in the mood to celebrate,” said NRF president and chief executive Tracy Mullin. “In addition to traditional retailers, St. Patrick’s Day will provide a great opportunity for restaurants and bars to see sales increases.”
Nearly one-third of respondents to the NRF’s survey said they plan to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by attending a party at their favorite restaurant or bar.
Photo exhibit for tolerance
The Milestones Project, a photography exhibit created by Littleton’s Richard Steckel, will not make its official debut until this summer. But about 125 British business and social leaders, including Prince Charles, took a sneak peek at the exhibit last week in London.
“It’s homegrown, but it’s globally important,” said Steckel, a nonprofit consultant who collaborated on the project with his wife, Michele.
The exhibit, which also will be turned into a book, includes photographs with a religious theme taken in seven countries, including some taken in Colorado. Steckel said the photos showcase commonalities among the world’s major religions and are intended to promote religious tolerance.
“We’d love it to be in Colorado,” Steckel said of the traveling exhibit. It is booked in London for a month this summer, starting July 4. More information is available at milestonesproject.com.
Feeling the boomtown blues
While much of the U.S. frets over a residential real estate slump, one small farming town on Washington state’s plains has the opposite worry: A boomtown economy in Quincy is inflating housing prices.
Land prices have quintupled over the past year, from $6,000 an acre to as much as $30,000, and new-home starts have grown from four or fewer a year to upwards of 1,000.
The town’s economic boom began in 2006 when tech giants Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and Intuit Inc. announced plans to build new computer-data centers in Quincy.
They were drawn by the area’s greatest economic asset – abundant cheap hydroelectric power from the Columbia River.
The town’s 5,300 residents are learning firsthand that good news can sometimes bring unintended consequences. Along with escalating property values and a new strip mall that will include the town’s first movie theater, the growth may also signal the end of cheap electricity.
“The question is, ‘Is there enough power to go around?’ – and we’re not going to know the answer to that for years,” Warren Morgan, general manager of the local Double Diamond apple packing plant, told The Wall Street Journal last week.
Employers see every word
Downloading music files. Surfing the Internet. Storing e-mails with files so large they clog the company’s server.
Employees do all kinds of counterproductive things while they’re sitting behind their computers, but Vero Beach, Fla.- based SpectorSoft is marketing a corporate solution.
Its Spector 360 program records employee e-mails, chats and instant messages, websites visited, keystrokes typed, and files transferred and printed, and takes snapshots of the computer screen to provide a visual record.
More than 10,000 companies now use Spector 360 to monitor such things as employee keystroke totals, duration of breaks, start and stop times and Internet habits. Prices for the surveillance start at $1,995.
FROM STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
