Sandwich chain Potbelly is prospecting for franchisees in Wichita. The chain has 216 company owned restaurants in the eastern part of the country and is looking for a cheap way to move west.
The chain’s plan is generally for one owner per store, and hasn’t said how many it wants to put here. Its gimmick is that its a quirky, authentic neighborhood sandwich place complete with potbelly stoves and live music reminiscent of the original Potbelly antique store in Chicago that started selling sandwiches to boost traffic. For more info, go to www.potbelly.com.
WICHITA — Corporate profits lead to corporate jets, and the good news from a survey released by the National Association of Business Economists is that more companies are reporting growing profits than shrinking profits for the first time in more than a year.
The bad news is that it will take perhaps 18 to 24 months for that to start showing up in the aircraft makers’ order books.
Keith Lawing, head of the Workforce Alliance for South Central Kansas, says that he didn’t spend all of his federal stimulus summer jobs money last summer so he’ll have a good bit of money left for another jobs program next summer. I don’t know exact numbers.
He had meant to spend $2 million to hire hire 500 young adults to do various jobs, but he said many who applied didn’t meet the income requirements or simply didn’t follow through on the applications.
One of the most interesting bits from a wind energy conference I went to last week came from a workshop on how local manufacturers could get into the wind makers supply chain. Some of our aircraft suppliers would match up pretty well in some ways — makers require a wide mix of parts at low volume with a high degree of precision.
But there’s one big difference: profit margins. Aircraft is traditionally a pretty fat business profitwise, and that profit is spread to some extent over the supply chain. On the other hand, turbine manufacturing is already a world-wide industry. US companies would be competing against established Chinese and European turbine makers and suppliers, tightening up the margins. The upshot, said one of the speakers, is that aircraft suppliers may find it difficult to adapt to the price pressure.
Ran across this this survey from CareerBuilder. High “ick factor,” but pretty funny:
Given the following embarrassing situations, which of your co-workers you would tell the following:
1. Your zipper is undone
a. Same level co-worker – 67 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 62 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 50 percent
2. You have something in your nose
a. Same level co-worker – 51 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 46 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 33 percent
3. You have food in your teeth or on your face
a. Same level co-worker – 66 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 60 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 49 percent
4. Your hair is messy
a. Same level co-worker – 33 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 30 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 13 percent
5. You have a stain on your clothes
a. Same level co-worker – 51 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 47 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 34 percent
6. You need a breath mint
a. Same level co-worker – 33 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 29 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 14 percent
7. You need a shower
a. Same level co-worker – 28 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 28 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 11 percent
8. Your apparel is not appropriate for the office
a. Same level co-worker – 32 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 37 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 10 percent
WICHITA — I love the Census Bureau because it sometimes comes up with kooky, but revealing stats. This month it revealed that Kansas is in the top 10 states for workers who drive to work alone, with 81 percent riding alone. That means we’re among the least users of carpooling and mass transit in the US, or maybe they’re just less tolerant of neighbors and coworkers. One look at our anemic bus system would confirm that.
The states (or territories) with the highest percentage of more than one commuter per car: as you’d expect, the one’s with big cities. Washington DC, New York, Illinois, California. But, strangely, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho are also on the list.
WICHITA – A study of a new cap-and-trade bill now in Congress aimed at reducing greenhouse gases shows that, if enacted, it would cut Kansas’ economy by $310 million to $532 million a year by 2020. And yet, said study author Margo Thorning, it really wouldn’t do much to curb greenhouse gases worldwide because China and India have done nothing. Her take is that the U.S. needs to focus on getting agreements with emerging economies, more R&D to lower the price of alternative energy and carbon capture technologies, and changes to the tax code to encourage producers to invest in greener technologies.
The study is by the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Council of Capital Formation.
Other findings:
By 2015, gasoline prices would rise 6-9 percent and natural gas by 16 to 25 percent. As a result, Kansans’ disposable income would fall $130 to $261 per year.
By 2020, gas prices would rise to 19-24 percent and natural gas by 64 to 77 percent. Kansans’ disposable income would fall $851 to $1,397 a year.
By 2030, Kansas would have lost between 21,417 and 29,168 jobs because of the higher energy costs.
WICHITA — American homebuyers will save $11.5 billion over five years because of the government intervention in the mortgage market to lower interest rates, according to First American CoreLogic.
WICHITA — One of the big unknowns in whether we really are in a recovery has been consumer spending. Consumers have been laid off or scared of losing their jobs or trying madly to pay off their bills for about a year. It makes for some pretty conservative spending habits.
That’s why this August report on chain store sales from the International Council of Shopping Centers is good news. It’s down from last August, but only 2 percent, better than the companies expected. It suggests that consumers are feeling better about life and are willing to spend. That supports retailers, which supports manufacturers. Consumer spending is 70 percent of the US economy.
Of course, this is fragile, given the massive amounts of consumer, corporate and national debt that must still be paid down. Some predict the recovery will fall back into recession next year. But, for now, let’s embrace the encouraging news.
WICHITA — Worker productivity rose 6.6 percent in the second quarter because companies cut their work forces a lot faster than their sales fell. Apparently, companies didn’t wait to see how bad this recession would be and just started swinging their axes, leaving their remaining workers to manage somehow. That’s different than in the past when companies laid off workers only after sales started falling. That’s why jobs and the unemployment rates are traditionally considered a lagging indicator — the last thing to go down in a recession and the last thing to snap back.
That’s bad in the short run. Obviously, millions are unemployed, and tens of millions more are having to work harder to compensate. For companies, there’s rising profits from running extremely lean (and furloughing and cutting salaries, eliminating the 401(k) contribution, etc.)
But there is a possible silver lining. Because companies cut quickly and deeply, it may mean they rehire more quickly than they have in the past. Companies may not be able to have that “jobless recovery” because they’re already so thin.
WICHITA — Check out this ranking from U.S. News & World Report. It puts Wichita in the top 10 in the nation for jobs — Hah!
Every few years Wichita sucks in a bunch of people who put together those national rankings. They sit in some office in Washington or New York and look at employment rates around the country and what kind of money people make, etc. and Wichita looks darn good. What they don’t fully grasp is that our economy goes up and down about a year after the nation as a whole. If they looked at numbers even 6 months old, Wichita still looks OK. Today, with 9.9 percent unemployment, Wichita doesn’t look so hot.
On the other hand, when Wichita shows up 230th out of 250 on the 2011 list, don’t feel bad about the Peerless Princess of the Plains. Our time is coming.
WICHITA — I was shocked when I saw the July unemployment numbers for Wichita. It was 9.9 percent for the metro area, 10.2 for Sedgwick County and 11 percent for Wichita city. That’s up 1.4 percentage points from June.
Will it go down? Very likely, but it doesn’t mean the economy is improving. Unemployment rates are calculated two ways: seasonally adjusted means statisticians have taken out the regular yearly ups and downs to look at the underlying trend; and not-seasonally adjusted, which is the actual rate. Kansas had a 7.4 percent seasonally adjusted rate in July and a 7.7 not-seasonally adjusted rate. The U.S. rate (9.4 percent) is always seasonally adjusted.
The state figures the Wichita rate as not-seasonally adjusted, which means July is almost always the highest rate of the year because some workers are regularly laid off in July and rehired in August and September. Just because the rate may go down in September, doesn’t mean the city’s economy is creating new jobs again.
And, Wichita has a history of taking more than a year to hit bottom as the downturn ripples through the service economy. That may mean that unemployment rate in July 2010 will be over 9.9 percent.