Results tagged “profit”

Hearst's special investigative team reveals today that the Boy Scouts aren't the angels of righteousness and environmental integrity everyone thought. No, instead they are foreign hucksters. Oh, wait. We're mistaken. The honey-launderers were the foreign hucksters. The Boy Scouts of America are profiteering tree-haters, as it were. The charge is that over the past twenty years, various BSA councils in the Northwest have irresponsibly and potentially illegally logged their land in order to turn their assets into cash to fund the organization's programs. Our biggest takeaway from the story is that apparently, foresting laws are unsettlingly easy to bypass. You gotta wonder, though: which secretly dirty all-American institution is the P-I going to go after next? The sins of pie? Football, maybe?

The region's...er...inclement weather must have given an extra boost to Amazon.com's sales this season. Or maybe depressed, laid-off people everywhere felt like the malls were too much to handle and decided to shop online, instead. Either way, Amazon had the best Christmas ever! All that money couldn't plow the roads, though, and Seattlest's gifts, guaranteed by Amazon to arrive at our house by Christmas Eve, still haven't landed on our doorstep. We pulled the trusty "print out a picture from the website and put it in a pretty envelope" trick to make up for it.

We were sure it was just a typo, a major one, in a headline by the Associated Press: "Starbucks profit down 97% in the 4th Quarter." Surely there's just an extra 7 in that number...? But no. Starbucks stock was only earning a penny a share after last quarter, largely due to the cost of closing under-performing stores. Starbucks swears if you took out the cost of closing stores, which we thought was supposed to save the company money, not cost it more, the stocks would actually have earned ten cents a share. Still, none of the numbers sound good to us.