New York Times to Deliver News on TV Screens to Promote Brand

Greg Bensinger writes at Bloomberg BusinessWeek that the New York Times Co. will distribute its news to 850 television screens in Dunkin’ Donuts coffee shops and other locations in five U.S. cities to promote its brand and help sell subscriptions to the newspaper.

The publisher will stream short news blurbs to TV screens operated by San Francisco-based RMG Networks starting today, Murray Gaylord, NYTimes.com vice president for marketing, said in an interview.

“It’s a branding play to a large degree,” Gaylord said. “We’re getting the value of our content to millions of people in a new venue that’s very important for us.”

Times Co. has been seeking new sources of revenue as circulation and advertising sales continue to slide. The New York-based publisher will begin charging for some Web content next year.

The screens will rotate business, movie, technology and health news, among other New York Times content, he said. About 20 percent of the advertisements will be for New York Times subscriptions or other products, Gaylord said.

RMG will double the number of screens — now in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston — by August and bring in new cities, Chief Executive Officer Garry McGuire said in an interview. Closely held RMG will keep the revenue it collects from advertisers.

Read More at: Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Top 10 States for Foreclosures

There’s no humor in this top 10 list: The states hardest hit by foreclosure.

Bankrate.com reports that it’s especially unfunny for homeowners and agents in Nevada, Florida, California and Arizona, who’ve languished in the top four for most of the real estate recession.

“Those states had similar scenarios,” says Rick Sharga, senior vice president of RealtyTrac, a California-based firm that tracks U.S. foreclosures. “They all had unsustainably high home prices and had many buyers who really couldn’t afford them — most with toxic mortgages — followed by (downturn-related) unemployment.”

Some of the country’s foreclosure problems revolved around a pervasive American mindset of “object identity,” says Barbara Fitch of Pacific Star Real Estate in Corona, Calif. “The house is who they are and that is why (so many) are in this jam.”

Unfortunately, the foreclosure beat goes on. RealtyTrac reports more than 300,000 U.S. properties received a foreclosure filing in November 2009 for the ninth straight month.

Here’s a look at the top 10 states for foreclosure and how they got there:

No. 1: Nevada — In third-quarter 2009, Las Vegas suffered the nation’s highest foreclosure rate at 5.13 percent, or more than one foreclosure for every 20 households — almost seven times the national average. Investors, who snapped up one of every three homes sold at the boom’s height, were gambling on future gains after watching Vegas-area median home prices jump 122 percent from 2000 and 2006 — twice the U.S. rise of 49 percent in that span. The crash arrived, and real estate and construction jobs fell away — followed by many casino jobs. While foreclosure numbers were improving near year-end 2009, a 13 percent Las Vegas unemployment rate and 12.2 percent rate in Reno/Sparks helped keep Nevada in the top spot.

No. 2: Florida — In Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, unemployment soared from just over 3 percent in early 2006 to 11 percent in fourth-quarter 2009, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, or USBLS. Orlando and Daytona Beach posted slightly higher unemployment, while Cape Coral-Fort Myers posted a 13.7 percent rate, helping place it at No. 4 on RealtyTrac’s top 10 foreclosure cities. “It’s likely that California will recover before Florida does, partly because of its net growth in population and partly because Florida is lousy with condos, which are typically the last to come back,” Sharga says. From 2003 to 2007 Florida prices doubled and tripled based largely on speculation, says Bernard Haddigan, managing director of Marcus & Millichap, a national commercial real estate brokerage specializing in real estate investment services. Homeowners were aggressively borrowing on future values and lenders were happy to cooperate, he says.

No. 3: California — At year-end 2009, the Golden State had 18 statistical metro areas where unemployment exceeded 10 percent — with nine of its cities in the bottom 14 in employment, according to the USBLS. In the hard-hit region surrounding Ontario, San Bernardino and Riverside, home values spiked from around $300,000 pre-boom to $800,000-plus at the market’s zenith. When the bust hit, jobs were whacked quickly along with home values. “We learned to borrow against everything,” says Fitch. “Buyers should buy houses for less than what they qualify for — not because it’s the largest or because it’s a bargain.” Pamela Haile, a Realtor with Coldwell Banker Gonella Realty in hard-hit Merced, Calif. — the top foreclosure city in the country — says, “We had a lot of lender fraud going on with non-English speaking residents. They were rushed through with lenders who added income to their applications and lied to buyers that it was legal.” In Merced, one in every 83 homes received a foreclosure filing in November. “Builders were manufacturing homes using an assembly line (in the area),” explains Julie Jalone of Roseville, Calif.-based MagnumOne Realty. “These homes were sold, sometimes in lottery style, before they were even built.” Consequently, she says, owners with mortgages higher than the purchase price came to represent a large portion of the market.

No. 4: Arizona — The 8.7 percent jobless rate in Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale is the lowest of the top five foreclosure states. However, Arizona foreclosure activity still jumped nearly 8 percent in November with one in every 186 homes getting a notice. Despite a breakneck growth rate through the past decade, the area remains overbuilt residentially and commercially, says Kevin Schuck, senior vice president for CB Richard Ellis, a national commercial real estate firm. All the growth fueled a run-up in service-related and construction-related jobs “that gave people a false sense that it would continue forever,” he says. In Phoenix and other high-foreclosure markets, banks are holding back foreclosure inventory to keep from flooding the market, Sharga says. Nevertheless, “we don’t think the (overall U.S.) market will not feel much better until 2013,” he says.

No. 5: Idaho — The inclusion of Idaho, where one in every 259 homes received a filing in November, in the top five may surprise some — but not Dale Alverson, certified buyer-broker with Boise, Idaho-based 43 Degrees North Real Estate. “It’s not really surprising considering we had 20 percent-plus appreciation annually from 2003-2006,” he says. “What economy can sustain that?” Add in interest-only loans, “stated-income” loans and investor over- exuberance, “and you had all the ingredients for the perfect real estate tsunami.” On the upside, buying opportunities currently abound in most distressed markets. “As many savvy billionaires have stated, ‘Buy when everyone else is selling and sell when everyone else is buying,’” Alverson says.

No. 6: Michigan — The state’s automotive-related job losses have been well chronicled. Nearly 16,000 Michigan residences received foreclosure filings in November, or almost 10 percent above the state’s totals in November 2008.
No. 7: Illinois — The Land of Lincoln saw 16,422 properties owners receive foreclosure notices in November, nearly 108 percent higher than November 2008 and the third highest in volume among all states, according to RealtyTrac.

No. 8: Utah — Between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, 2009, about 42.4 percent of all Utah subprime adjustable-rate mortgages, or ARMs, were reset, compared with 27.8 percent nationally, according to the Federal Reserve.

No. 9: Maryland — More than 30 percent of the state’s foreclosures occurred in Prince George’s County, which has just 10 percent of Maryland’s housing stock. County officials blamed the problem on exotic loans and balloon mortgages.

No. 10: New Jersey — About 3,000 New Jerseyans have received counseling through the Garden State’s “Foreclosure Mediation Program.”

Bankrate.com

Increased Sugar Prices May Soon Leave Bad Taste in Consumers Mouths

Misty Harris in Canwest News Service writes that Canadians with a sweet tooth may soon find cavities in their wallets as sugar prices soar to their highest level in three decades.

Production shortages have seen the cost of sugar nearly triple in the last year, flirting with 30 cents U.S. per pound in comparison to the 11 cents at which it formerly hovered. Analysts predict things will get worse before they get better, with potential price implications for everything from cupcakes to double-doubles.

“I think we’ll be going through most of 2010 at abnormally high levels,” says Edward Makin, president and CEO of Lantic, which represents more than half of Canadian sugar sales. “The 30-cents level we touched last week was probably justified, and we’ll likely go even higher.”

Sandra Marsden, president of the Canadian Sugar Institute says long-term contracts have helped limit the exposure of many retailers and food processors to the latest sugar swings. But until the predicted return to surplus in 2011, individual manufacturers and smaller businesses will have to either hold the line at lower profits or start passing costs along to consumers.

If prices stay as high as they are now — or worse, climb higher — Lantic’s Makin says companies of every size will face that same decision.

“With things like this, you’re best to keep your head down and hope it all goes away. But I don’t think it’s going to do that any time soon,” says Makin, noting that he wouldn’t be surprised to see sugar trading in the mid-thirties over the next several months.

Already, the price of bags of sugar at grocery stores has risen with the fall in production, which was caused by unfavourable weather in India and Brazil. And across the country, bakeries — many still recovering from the record wheat prices of recent years — are preparing to raise the price of their goods.

“We’re definitely at the point where we have to increase prices by five to 10 per cent,” says Lori Joyce, co-founder of the Cupcakes franchise in British Columbia. Although the bakery chain won’t implement changes until after the Olympics, the fear that Canadians will presume price-gouging still looms large.

“I’m really nervous,” says Joyce. “The consumer just thinks retailers are getting greedy . . . This (situation) forces us to look like the bad guy.”

Even an organization as embedded as Tim Hortons isn’t immune to sugar shock, with coffee and doughnuts having been subjected to price increases of about five cents each late last year.

“High sugar prices have increased the cost of business for our local franchisees. In fact, franchisees have been hit from several directions, dealing with increased labour costs and commodities, such as coffee and dairy products,” says David Morelli, director of public affairs for Tim Hortons.

For competitive reasons, the company isn’t tipping its hand to this year’s pricing strategy. But if industry predictions are correct, Canadians who enjoy a good sugar fix should start fattening up their piggy banks now.

Canwest News Service

Forecast for ‘10: Partly sunny with certainty of more challenges

Jim Verdonik  in the Triangle Business Journal writes that “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”, by Bob Dylan.

What’s your weather information source? Do you trust weathermen? Or do you look out the window to check? If your weatherman had been struck by lightning a dozen times, would you get a new weatherman?

I ask, because it’s 2010 economic forecast season. Even if they’ve been wrong the past 10 years, “experts” can’t resist the temptation to try again.

Personally, my New Year’s resolutions included not making economic forecasts this year. Instead, I’ll advise about steps to consider in light of the consensus forecast of the “experts.”

Economic forecasters are boldly predicting we’ll see bumps in 2010 but that falling off a cliff like in 2008 isn’t likely. We may see improvement, but don’t be surprised if we don’t. It’s the weather equivalent of: “Partly sunny with a chance of scattered showers.”

The experts are covering all the bases and not going out on limbs. Perhaps that’s a good theme for running your business in 2010. Here are a few tips about how to deal with partly sunny with scattered showers.

• First, remember the millions of people fired in 2009? They’re both risks and opportunities. Should you rehire at first signs of a recovery or wait? There’s lots of talent available willing to work cheap, but it’s painful and expensive firing people – which is what will happen if you bet wrong on economic recovery. Do you want to risk running a revolving door hiring and firing? Suggestion: Weed out the remaining underproductive people in your organization and recruit better talent. Use this opportunity to upgrade your team’s quality while keeping expenses and headcount the same.
• Second, the world is still de-leveraging. What’s your company’s balance sheet look like these days? Should you increase debt to grow? Build up equity? Reinvest profits? Take profit out to rebuild your personal balance sheet? There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Suggestion: Consider why you own a business. Is being bigger your goal? Interest rates are low, if you can get a loan. Maybe you’ll expand into a rising marketplace. Or do you want stability and personal financial freedom? If so, take some profits out of your business instead of borrowing. One warning: Be careful about personally guaranteeing debt. Pay off personally guaranteed debt, if you can. Taking business risks is one thing, but it’s probably not the time to put more personal chips on the table.
• Third, with health-care law changes, there will be winners and losers. This year’s biggest potential swing factor is how you play the health-care game once Congress deals the cards. Make the effort to determine how to reduce employee health-care expenses in light of whatever new law emerges. Now isn’t the time to be an ostrich with your head in the sand.

So, no predictions from me this year – just some card game advice about knowing when to hold them and knowing when to fold them.

Have a prosperous New Year!

Read more at: Triangle Business Journal

What Business Success Ultimately Boils Down to is Leadership

Edward Marshall at the Triangle Business Journal writes that over the past 50 years, almost every time a business has a burning platform, the weapon of choice has been a structural solution. Top leaders get terminated. The company is reorganized. There is either centralization or decentralization; re-engineering or de-construction. More recently, the ultimate hammer has been the “Matrix” form of management, ostensibly installed to cope with complexity in our businesses.

What we have failed to grasp is that, just like you can’t save your way to prosperity, you can’t restructure your way out of the fundamentals of sound business. And those fundamentals have to do with how people either do or do not work together. It’s about relationships – trust, fear, values, culture, and behavior – not who reports to whom.

The Matrix is expensive. We’re not just throwing something over one wall to another function like we used to; we’re throwing multiple somethings over multiple walls and hoping they get picked up.

Some of the things don’t get picked up. Accountability is lacking. There are unclear lines of authority and responsibility. Decisions are made slowly, if at all.

People report to two or more bosses – some dotted, some hard line – but we all know it’s politics that matter. Leadership’s influence can be undermined if some leaders have hard-line relationships to headquarters. Strategies get sub-optimized. Processes become expensive because silo systems don’t talk to each other. It’s time to move beyond the well-worn phrases asserting that focusing on people, behavior and culture is “soft stuff.” In fact, dealing with people issues effectively is the hardest work that any leader will attempt.

Digging down into the stuff that matters in those relationships – ego, power, trust, anxiety, and fears of all kinds – is not the domain of human resources or the corporate psychologist. This is the primary domain of leadership in the 21st century. It requires:

n Collaborative Leadership: This is leadership that values transparency, walks the talk, engages the work force, builds a culture of ownership, and trusts the work force with the business. These leaders are self-aware, on an inward journey, and capable of talking about their own humanness.

n New Behavior: The days of command and control are over. It doesn’t work in this complex world. Leadership needs to be about engagement, reaching across the walls, focusing on what is right rather than wrong, on what can be learned from mistakes, rather than just the mistakes.

n New Vision: We live in a bounded world, limited by resources, climate change, and economic interdependencies. The old approaches to visioning no longer apply. Leaders need to boldly seek out a new vision, not just for the business, but for their communities, nation, and the world.

n Leadership Strategy: It is time to create a new leadership strategy that embodies all of these critical elements and instills new attitudes, values, and commitments at all levels of management. It is time to develop a leadership strategy for the next generation, not just this one.

Triangle Business Journal 

Landlords to Restaurant Chains: Let’s Make a Deal

David Farkas of Chain Leader reports the recession has turned the tables on landlords, who are now offering restaurant chains attractive rents and more.
 
Pizza Inn, an aging chain in a crowded category, says the chain is nonetheless attracting more tenant improvement dollars than ever, says Vice President of Franchising Madison Jobe.
 
This past year, mall landlords gave Häagen-Dazs build-out extensions for the first time, saving the ice-cream chain tens of thousands of dollars.
 
Kevin Kruse, vice president of franchise development for Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, claims he’s hasn’t seen “this many high quality sites in a very, very long time.” 

Had more landlords been willing to work with Chili’s Grill & Bar in the 1980s, the casual-dining chain might have opened a lot more restaurants. But developers sometimes balked at Chili’s loudly striped awnings, a crucial brand element.

“We killed many deals if they wanted us to have their awning,” recalls Clark Knippers, then vice president of real estate and development for Chili’s parent company Brinker International.

Until recently, landlords have had no problem asking for—and often getting—their awningsor whatever else they wanted in leasehold agreements. Competition for good sites was fierce among fast-growing restaurants and retailers, which typically acceded to landlords’ demands.

Not anymore. “Supply and demand has flipped; now it’s a tenants’ market,” says Knippers, founder and president of Dallas-based Foremark, a consultancy specializing in restaurant real estate.

Space Available

Blame the poor economy, which is tanking businesses and freeing up loads of commercial space at attractive prices. Spring ReCount data from market research firm NPD Group show the U.S. total restaurant count slipped 0.6 percent in 2008, to 570,980. Experts believe that percentage is sure to climb when new data are out later this month. “I definitely think there is reason to believe so given persistently weak industry sales trends,” offers restaurant analyst Mark Kalinowski of Janney Montgomery Scott.

Excess capacity means lower rents, already down 10 percent on average nationally, according to Jones Lang LaSalle. They will tumble another 5 to 7 percent this year, especially in secondary markets, notes a report from the Chicago-based real-estate services firm. “Rent declines in the most construction-heavy markets like Atlanta, Charlotte and Miami will approach double digits in the first half of [2010],” the report adds. The firm doesn’t expect rents to begin rising until well into 2011.

And a fall survey of property owners by National Real Estate Investor, a trade publication, showed that 52 percent expected effective rents to decrease for the next 12 months compared to 38 percent who projected declines three months earlier.

The upside for restaurant chains, especially growth-oriented chains, is deals galore. Lease terms (including mid-lease) have changed dramatically over the last 12 months.

“We are getting real-estate deals we’ve never gotten before,” declares Larry Feldman, CEO of Subway Development Corp. of Washington, sub-franchisor of more than 1,000 sandwich shops in the mid-Atlantic region. “Landlords are splitting space and cutting rents.”

In one case, a landlord is charging Feldman half the rent he would have paid two years ago in a rehabbed food court in Washington, D.C. In another, a Georgetown, Md., developer divided a shuttered Blockbuster, offering Feldman’s franchisee 3,500 square feet—a deal Feldman claims never would have happened two years ago. “We walk into a landlord, and now we’re on top,” he says.

Rent Relief

Perhaps the most remarked-upon change in lease structures has been landlords’ willingness to grant rent relief mid-lease, a practice all but unheard of until recently.

“I have never seen anything like this,” says Madison Jobe, vice president of development for Dallas-based, 315-unit Pizza Inn, referring to rent restructuring. “I have never experienced anything like what we are going through now, nor have any colleagues I’ve talked to.”

“Rent relief is part of the reason occupancy is where it is today,” Taubman Centers CEO Robert Taubman told investors in the company’s third-quarter 2009 conference call. Occupancy had slipped just 1.4 percent in the prior 12 months at the 25 malls the Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based company operates. Tenant sales per square foot, however, tumbled nearly 12 percent, to $497 per square foot.

Taubman was mum on how many tenants have received abatement. “We would prefer not to be specific about the absolute number of rent relief cases,” he said.

Rents won’t rise (or even stabilize) until more consumers renew their love affair with meals away from home. That’s unlikely until the second half of the year, when NPD Group predicts traffic will turn slightly positive. It likely won’t spark new building. The International Franchise Association forecasts new-unit growth of just 2 percent among franchised businesses overall, well below the 5 percent average annual increase from 2001 to 2008.

As a result, many landlords will remain on the hunt for tenants as well as working to keep those they now have. “The dynamics have turned around so much that my e-mail is going crazy with landlords asking, ‘What it will take to get you to stay in our center,’” says Sam Osborne, an area developer for Destin, Fla.-based Tropical Smoothie Café who has opened 20 locations in Central Florida.

For instance, Osborne recently helped renegotiate a lease, saving a franchisee $1,000 a month, or about $20,000 on the remainder of the lease. He says he told the landlord the franchisee wanted to stay but was exploring options. Osborne then asked the landlord “to work with us.”

Read more at Chain Leader

Humane Society Buys Stock to Pressure Restaurants

Bret Thorn reports at  Nation’s Restaurant News that the Humane Society of the United States, or HSUS, has purchased shares in Steak ’n Shake Co. and Jack in the Box Inc. in an attempt to influence their purchasing decisions with regard to chicken, eggs and pork, the political lobbying group said.

The HSUS holds a stake in 38 food-related companies, and works to pressure companies to change procedures or purchasing decisions related to animal welfare.

“The HSUS intends to use its stockholder position to move the company toward moving away from eggs from caged hens, pork from crated pigs and poultry from producers that use a particularly cruel but standard method of slaughter…” it said in a statement this week announcing its purchase in Steak ’n Shake stock.

“Steak ’n Shake’s complete lack of meaningful movement on animal welfare puts the company at odds with its competition and public opposition to farm animal abuse,” said Matthew Prescott, corporate outreach director for the group’s factory farming campaign.

In announcing its purchase of Jack in the Box shares, HSUS said it would encourage that company to “influence its poultry suppliers to switch from the current slaughter system … to controlled-atmosphere killing (CAK), which has been shown to greatly improve animal welfare.”

Indianapolis-based Steak ’n Shake, which franchises or operates 485 family-dining restaurants, did not return phone calls at press time.

A spokesman for San Diego-based Jack in the Box, which operates or franchises 2,200 quick-service restaurants and also owns the 500-unit Qdoba fast-casual burrito chain, said the company had no comment about the stock purchase.

Richard Lobb, spokesman for the National Chicken Council, which represents chicken producers and processors, said the HSUS “is basically PETA with a nice suit,” referring to the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

 
Read more: Nation’s Restaurant News

Top 5 Trends in Small Business

Steve Strauss in USA TODAY outlines the top 5 Trends in Small Business.

5. Social Media Grows Up: Have you noticed that “social media” is a term that doesn’t really describe the experience that well anymore? Yes its social, and yes its media, but for business it has become so much more than that. Tapping, nay, mastering, social media is one of the hottest of all online trends:

• Everyone from Jet Blue to Comcast has turned to Twitter as a customer service tool.
• Companies like Whole Foods and Popeys increasingly use it to get feedback, post company news, etc.
• Big business has discovered what many small businesses already know: Facebook is a great place to advertise. “Facebook” in fact was the most searched term in 2009. (Source: Experian Hitwise)

Hop on the social media train, Jane, because it’s headed out of the station at light speed.

4. Going Local: Consumers are increasingly looking for a local angle when looking where to spend their hard-earned dollar. Example: The explosion of farmers markets across the country. According to Entrepreneur, “there are almost 5,000 farmers markets across the country, the result of more than 5% annual growth for the past five years.”

Additionally, with people staying closer to home right now because of the economy, with folks focused ever more on community and family, and with the green ethos growing, home is where the heart (and dollar) is.

3. Sharing vs. Shared Experiences: According to a recent NPR podcast, we used to share national experiences. The nightly news was a shared ritual for instance. The OJ Simpson trial was a shared experience, the same with Vietnam, and so on.

But that is changing, for two reasons. The first is the fragmentation of the media. With innumerable news outlets, websites, cable channels, mobile options and the like, the opportunity to create shared experiences is diminishing. We are all not watching or experiencing the same thing nearly as much.

Secondly, with the advent of easy to generate user-created content, sharing experiences and opinions is becoming ever more prevalent. YouTube, blogs, Facebook, Yelp, email even, all contribute to both the media fragmentation as well as the sharing culture.

For the small business person, it is vital to realize that 1) people look for, and increasingly expect, the personal, and 2) small, localized, immediate user-created media are where the eyeballs are headed.

2. Mobile Mania: Maybe the only marketing trend that is hotter than social media is mobile mania. Why? Maybe because there are four-times more cellphones than PCs worldwide, or because they are the favorite product of Gen Y, or because in 2000, there were almost no texts sent but this year, 130 billion texts will be sent a month, and only 23% of those will come from my daughters.

So yes, mobile marketing is exploding. Whether it is creating the Next Big App, offering customers a real-time mobile coupon, or creating a text marketing campaign, in 2010 there will be mobile options galore for small business.

Even better maybe: The variety of ways to measure the success of your mobile campaign. According to the Mobile Marketing Association, they will include: “The number of eyeballs, shakes and finger swipes. The number of blogs, articles, tweets and diggs. The number of acquisitions, conversions, calls, responses or purchases. Total basket size, consumer recall, loyalty and recommendations. Check-ins on foursquare and check-outs on Amazon.”

It is a new world indeed.

1. The Start-Up Economy: Last year, 2009, my top trend was entitled “Economic Tumult,” and tumultuous it indeed turned out to be; the Great Recession is great in all the wrong ways.

But this year, while the state of the economy will continue to be the most significant trend effecting small business, the outlook is both brighter and calmer. It is calmer because things are slowly getting back to, if not normal, at least something recognizable. And it is brighter because out of the rubble, a new, vital, innovative start-up economy is being born.

We have entered the era of small business. Whereas GM president Charles Wilson once said “What’s good for the country is good for GM, and vice versa,” it can now safely be said that what is good for small business is good for the country. Consider these statistics.

Small businesses now

• Number almost 30 million
• Employ more than half of all workers
• Constitute 99.7% of all employers
• Constitute 97% of all exporters
• Create the majority of business innovations
(Source: U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy, 2009)

With 10% unemployment for as far as the eye can see, with the unemployed running out of benefits, and with benefits not what they once were for the employed, start-ups of all shapes and sizes are taking root: One person shops, home-based businesses, part-time ventures, online enterprises, high tech companies – you name it. These are the folks who, with their creative energy, drive, ingenuity, and hard work will be leading us out of this anything but great recession.

We will have to wait until next year’s list to see just how far they will take us. My hunch is that the companies born in this recession will be the stuff of legend by the end of the decade.

Aught Naught: The “Worst” Decade

The first 10 years of the new millennium are done, and looking back we can dub it the “Decade of the Worst.”

Gary Weiss  publishes at Portfolio.com  his top ten worst list of the decade:

For people who have gone through a change in millennium, the mere entrance of a new decade may not seem like much. But what a decade! Why, has anyone ever seen anything so awful?

Think of all the “worsts” that blessed the business world since 2000: worst stock-market performance, worst scandals, worst companies, worst CEOs, worst regulators, and, all too often, worst journalism. We missed a lot, but then again, we were part of the decade’s agony (see No. 10).

So in compiling this list of the top-10 biggest stories of the decade, I had a great deal of big and usually bad news to choose from, and some of gaudier stories of the decade didn’t make the cut. Martha Stewart’s trip to prison didn’t make the cut, and neither did Dick Grasso’s nine-figure paycheck. Sure, there were smatterings of good news here and there, but they got muscled out by the Big Terrible (No. 1) and its accomplices.

So here they are, in inverse order of importance:

10. The Death of Old Media

As the decade began, AOL was merging with Time Warner in what was widely heralded as an indication of the future for old-fashioned paper-and-ink media properties. It was a sign of the future—as in “funeral.” By 2009, AOL was de-merging from Time Warner, and the old media were in a state of disintegration. Magazines shuttered, and newspapers were on the endangered-species list. The formerly august Miami Herald was actually asking for reader contributions. The 1980s newspaper film Absence of Malice today would have the title Absence of Advertisers.

9. Automakers Go Bust

In any other decade, the bankruptcy of two of the Big Three automakers, General Motors and Chrysler, would be the defining events of an epoch. In this decade, they rate also-ran status. It was hardly earth-shattering news that the Big Three were failing to make cars Americans wanted to buy, after all. In a sense, this was just the dénouement of four decades of mismanagement and decay.

8. Enron and Friends

Jeff Skilling, his cohorts at Enron, and all the other corporate bad actors of the first half of the decade—John Rigas of Adelphia Communications, Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco International, and their counterparts at Global Crossing and WorldCom—made people mad as hell. Until, that is, they stopped being mad and forgot about the whole thing. Sarbanes-Oxley was passed to prevent it from ever happening again. By the end of the decade, it was all ancient history and Sox was being dismantled.

7. Bernard Madoff

The corporate scandals of yore could not compete with the man who is arguably the worst financial criminal in history. Madoff stole more, over a longer period of time, than anyone since the Spaniards robbed the Incas. But look where he stands on the list: Lots worse to come.

6. The Real Estate Bubble

The all-American act of buying a house became a crucial part of a gargantuan pump-and-dump scheme. Take overvalued assets, combine with predatory lending and Wall Street bankers selling toxic derivatives to uninformed institutional investors based on absurd credit ratings, and one has the ingredients for a pretty wild crash.

5. Derivatives Mania

Derivatives, including the mortgage-backed securities and swaps that turned banks like Lehman into ashtrays, have been around for a long time. Long enough that there was plenty of opportunity to poorly regulate them. Just before the decade began, in 1999, Congress exempted over-the-counter (translation: “the worst”) derivatives from regulation, at the urging of, among others, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. By October 2008, “the Maestro” was apologizing for the mess that resulted.

4. The Subprime/Real Estate Crash

Any attentive high-school economics student will tell you that every boom is followed by bust. But this being the Decade of the Worst, we didn’t have any old real estate bust. We had a crash accelerated by all kinds of exotic mortgages, their existence a product of years of regulatory neglect, as well as subprime mortgages sold to people who could not afford them. It took No. 3 to turn a bad downturn into an economy-crunching disaster.

3. The Bear Stearns-Lehman Brothers Implosion

By an accident of history, Bear Stearns was the first major Wall Street bank to suffer from its own greed-induced venture into toxic derivatives and mortgage-backed securities. So Bear got the Federal Reserve bailout and the sale to JPMorgan in March 2008, while Lehman was allowed to go bankrupt six months later. To this day, nobody can adequately explain why the Fed allowed Lehman to sink, and the ethically challenged Bear to survive.

2. The Market Meltdown of 2008

Fortunately, for those of us who like the simple life (i.e., those without savings), a cyclical decline in the market that commenced in October 2007 when the market indices peaked turned into a rout when Bear, Lehman, and the rest of the major banks imploded because of their serial incompetence. By March, when Bear self-destructed, the market was down 50 percent. All the gains of the 1990s were gone. Even brainy John Thain couldn’t rescue Merrill Lynch—or himself. That meant we were doomed.

1. The Great Recession

Now we come to the granddaddy of big stories of the decade, all that we’ve been building up to for the past 10 years. Stagnation, high unemployment, and the worst market crash since 1929 combined to give “great” to this particular recession. Hey, it didn’t happen without a lot of help, giving a cyclical twist in the business cycle the odor of premeditation. Where would we have been without the bankers screwing up and betting their Hamptons mansions on mortgage-backed securities it took a supercomputer not to understand? Or the real estate boom and bust that the predatory lenders exacerbated, with help from somnolent regulators?

KFC Grilled Chicken Tops List of Memorable New Products, McCafe Second

Stuart Elliot reports in the New York Times that a two-piece Kentucky Grilled Chicken meal at a KFC location in Louisville, Ky. An annual survey of memorable new products gave the top honor for 2009 to the Kentucky Grilled Chicken menu item, which was introduced by the KFC unit of Yum Brands.

Five of the top 11 most-remembered new products (there was a tie for 10th place) were fast-food items, reflecting the perilous state of the economy this year. In 2007 and 2008, technology products dominated the list.

The grilled chicken landed atop the eighth annual Most Memorable New Product Launch Survey, conducted by Schneider Associates, IRI and Sentient Decision Science. Consumers are asked to name a product introduced during the year; if they are unable to, they are provided a list of 50 products in a process known as aided recall.

Underlining just how difficult it is to bring out new products is the fact that 51 percent of survey respondents could not remember a single new product that came out in 2009. As high as that figure was, it was lower than the 69 percent who could not recall a new product in 2008.

These are the four other fast-food products that scored the highest in 2009: the McCafe coffees from the McDonald’s Corporation, No. 2; the Torpedo sandwich from Quiznos, No. 6; the Angus Deluxe, also from McDonald’s, No. 7; and Taco Bell Volcano Nachos, from another unit of Yum Brands, No. 8.

The rest of the list: the Beatles Rock Band video game, No. 3; the Snuggie, No. 4; the Blackberry Storm, from Research in Motion, No. 5; the T-Mobile Google G-1 phone, No. 9; and in that two-way tie for 10th place, Samsung L.E.D. TV sets and the Off Clip-On insecticide from S.C. Johnson & Son.

At KFC, the reason for the popularity of Kentucky Grilled Chicken is that “it hits a sweet spot in the market,” said Javier Benito, chief marketing officer at KFC in Louisville, Ky. He added that consumers considered it to be “a great-tasting product that’s good for you at a great price.”

The new menu item was tested for four years before being introduced in April, he added.

Usually, about 7 percent of customers of fast-food restaurants try a new menu item, Mr. Benito said, but in this instance the grilled chicken was tried by 13 percent — a figure that rose to 19 percent after a fuss over too much demand for coupons that had been promoted on an episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

“You can imagine no one expected” the demand for the coupons, Mr. Benito said. “It was crazy.”

For 2010, KFC intends to keep trying to build consumer awareness for the grilled chicken because “over 80 percent” of those who try it buy it again, he said.

In conducting the survey, Schneider Associates said it found several trends at work, among them the increasing importance of word-of-mouth marketing to the success of a product and the rising number of information sources used by consumers to learn about products.

But some things do not change. The survey found that 92 percent of respondents said that free samples are the most influential source of information to make purchase decisions.

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