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Strike vote authorized: As expected, workers for Albertsons voted to give union officials the authority to call a strike. No date was set and an earlier contract extension means that the earliest walkout date would be April 13. It's hard to gauge how likely a strike might be because there's limited information on how the negotiations have been going - other than slowly. Albertsons, by the way, is now owned by Minnesota-based Supervalu, which, as it happens, has billionaire Ron Burkle as a major shareholder. Burkle has been considered a friend of the supermarket workers in past negotiations. What role, if any, he plays this time around is not known. LAT
Tribune shares up: They're a shade under $31 in early trading - no doubt fueled by Sam Zell's $33-a-share offer (that's what it's valued at anyway), along with sudden noises being made by billionaires Broad and Burkle about not getting a fair shake in the bidding process. Still unclear is why they're making this 11th hour incursion; the Tribune board was expected to sign off on some sort of deal by the end of the week. Northern Trust Chairman William Osborn, who heads a special committee of independent Tribune directors charged with recommending which deal to take, told the Chicago Tribune that he hadn't even seen the protest letter Broad and Burkle sent over the weekend.
Riordan critiques LAT: Everybody else is doing it, so why not L.A.'s former mayor? He tells MarketWatch's Jon Friedman that the Column One feature "used to be esoteric," but "now it is generally boring." The front page is "badly laid out and boring," news stories inside often smack of "irrelevance," and Riordan finds the Iraq coverage to be "repetitive." He also doesn't like the Web site. By the way, he said that aborting his own newspaper venture a few years back was "the smartest thing I ever did," adding that he was in over his head. "I lost a quarter-million bucks, which is nothing," he says.
Watch out for stocks: It's still early but the Dow is down almost 100 points this morning. Higher oil prices and a drop in February new home sales are among the guesses, er, explanations. For what it's worth, Countrywide Financial is down more than 3 percent.
Morgan dumps New Century mortgages: Remember the $2.5 billion credit line that Morgan Stanley offered the OC subprimer a while back? Well, the Wall Street house is in the process of holding an auction for those mortgages. NY Post reports that Morgan announced the sale of the 13,200 loans in a small public auction notice on Friday. Morgan also has $975 million in combined loans and credit facilities with New Century, although that appears to be safer.
Hot cakes gone wild?: Joe Francis wants to extend his "Girls Gone Wild" franchise into apparel and restaurants. Details seem vague, other than he'll start with owned-and-operated stores in Cancun and Cabo - followed up by smaller outlets in college towns under some sort of license or franchise arrangement. Francis tells the Business Journal that his focus will be on bar business, not family business.He tells the paper, "Being a family restaurant is not going to give you bar business. We’re very honest about that. It’s a fundamental problem with all these themed restaurants." The "Girls Gone Wild" apparel collection features mostly swimwear and casual wear.
Mark Lacter created the LA Biz Observed blog in 2006. He posted
until the day before his death on Nov. 13, 2013.