Shop Talk

Christie’s sets one wine record, blows another

Christie’s auction in Geneva on Tuesday claims to have set a world record price for a bottle of red Burgundy. A  U.S. buyer bought the 750 ml bottle of 1945 Romainee-Conti for $123,889.  But the house failed to sell its showcase lot of the auction — 315 bottles representing every vintage from ’45 to ’07 produced by each of the first five growths of Bordeaux.

Meanwhile in New York on Saturday, the star lot – a complete vertical of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild spanning ’45-’07 sold to an Asian collector for $150,000.

Arbitrage in Bordeaux

New York’s branch of Christie’s is auctioning a collection of 64 bottles of Mouton-Rothschild on Saturday that spans the years 1945-2007.  It’s Geneva branch is auctioning a collection of 315 bottles spanning the same 62 vintages, but from all five first growths including Mouton-Rothschild on Tuesday.  (See story “Mystery collector to sell rare wines” [ID: nN10231397])

Saturday’s lot is selling for between $100,000 and $150,000, while Tuesday’s is estimated to sell for $696,000 to $929,000. And the price difference presents collectors with an arbitrage opportunity.

Assuming that the wines sell at the upper end of their estimates, buying Saturday’s lot for $150,000 would represent a $35,000 savings.  Granted, Tuesday’s lot has one more bottle of Mouton-Rothschild – the chateau produced two labels in 1978 and 1993 – and the Geneva lot has all four, while Saturday’s lot only has three.

And unlike Tuesday’s anonymous French collector,  Saturday’s is  California attorney Allen Grossman, who has been collecting for 40 years and waxes poetic about Mouton-Rothschild, saying of the top Bordeaux, “I have tasted them all many times. They are all wonderful wines, but I’m  just partial to the Mouton.”

$1=0.8608 CHF

Food Trucks: The Film

The fancy food truck revolution rocking the U.S. restaurant scene traces its roots beyond the 2008 launch of Kogi — the Korean-Mexican taco truck that took Los Angeles by storm and tweeted its way to international stardom — to a grittier, working-class movement.

In her bilingual documentary film “Masa Revolution”, veteran Los Angeles journalist Patricia Nazario maps the food truck industry back to the 1960s, when blue-collar entrepreneurs served plastic-wrapped sandwiches, doughnuts and coffee to factory and office workers across Southern California.

Those food truck operators pulled down around five times more money than the blue-collar workers they fed and guarded their lucrative routes like Fort Knox.

“It was a cutthroat business,” said Nazario. “Catering truck operators were very protective of their routes and would pull out knives or guns to ward off the competition.”

Her film also chronicles how recent immigrants, largely Mexican, steered clear of the rough-and-tumble business model favored by their predecessors. Instead, they parked their taco trucks, or loncheros, in Hispanic neighborhoods.

Some of those restaurants-on-wheels have been using the same spot for more than 20 years and have become part of the fabric of the communities they serve, she said.

“I’m as enthralled with the hair-raising tales of old-school route drivers as I am with how social media is driving the gourmet food truck revolution among hipsters across the country,” Nazario said.

Jimmy John’s franchise fires union workers after sick-day campaign

The owners of 10 Minnesota Jimmy John’s sandwich shops — where a rare unionization vote was narrowly rejected last year – have fired six union organizers.

The terminated workers are members of the Industrial Workers of the World, a formerly high-profile union better known as the Wobblies, and said they were fired after they put up 3,000 posters (shown here) around Minneapolis as part of a campaign to win paid sick days.

Michael Mulligan, president of MikLin Enterprises Inc, which operates the affected Jimmy John’s restaurants, told Reuters that the terminated union workers “crossed well over the line of protected activity” with their latest appeal.

“The posters dishonestly state that Jimmy John’s workers are forced to work while sick and suggest that the health of customers is at risk when eating at our restaurants,” said Mulligan, who characterized the IWW as anti-capitalist, anarchist and socialist.

“These posters are false and misleading at best, and in the view of our company, they are defamatory, disparaging and dishonest,” added Mulligan, who said that his business has operated for a decade and served 6 million sandwiches without getting diners sick.

Most fast-food restaurant workers receive low wages and get little in the way of benefits such as health insurance. Paid sick days are a rarity in the industry, which is known for squeezing out costs in order to offer low-priced fare. One exception is San Francisco, which in 2007 became the first U.S. city to require employers to give workers paid sick leave.

Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a restaurant workers organization, in October released a study showing that  nearly 88 percent of workers reported not receiving paid sick days and that more than 63 percent of all restaurant workers admitted to cooking and serving food while sick.

Root beer, roast beef, fish & chips: Who’s buying?

There’s a new batch of quick-service restaurants on the block – Arby’s, A&W and Long John Silver’s – and according to YouGov BrandIndex, A&W is the most popular of the three.

A&W, founded in 1919 and known for its root beer, had the trio’s highest satisfaction rates, said YouGov BrandIndex, which does daily consumer perception research on brands. 

A&W and Arby’s had higher satisfaction scores than an average of about two dozen fast-food chains, while Long John Silver’s fared worse. (See graphic below)

“A&W and Arby’s have a core group of supporters and satisfied customers,” said Ted Marzilli, global managing director for YouGov BrandIndex. “If I’m a buyer, that’s a strength.”

Marzilli predicted that all three brands would find buyers, although prices and other terms likely would differ.

He said A&W and Arby’s could be reinvigorated by buyers who focused on their strengths, while Long John Silver’s is more of a turnaround story.

Another big question is whether any of the chains will snag a valuation as rich as the one attached to Burger King’s $3.3 billion sale to 3G Capital last year.  The $24 per share sale price represented a 46 percent premium to Burger King’s price before news of the negotiations emerged.

from Leslie Gevirtz:

Sparkling wine — pouring style without draining your wallet

Earlier this week, I wrote about alternatives to non-vintage and cuvee Champagnes that can lend a festive atmosphere to any occasion. Below is a list of the wines that I mentioned, some alternatives and their suggested U.S. retail prices.

1. Domaine Ste. Michelle Cuvee Brut  $12
2. Santa Margherita Prosecco Di Valdobbiadene Brut  $17
3. Freixenet Cordon Rosado $10
4. Domaine Tselepos Amalia Brut $24
5. Gruet $14
6. Dom Perignon $125-$150
7. Bollinger RD 1997 $130-$150
8. Krug Brut Grande Cuvee 1998 $180-$200
9. Giulio Ferrari 1997 $100

There are many other sparklers that didn't make it into the story such as:  Lucien Albrecht ($19), Nino Franco Rustico Prosecco ($19) and The Chook, a sparkling Shiraz from Australia ($17).

Why the price disparity? In part it has to do with marketing - Champagne makers have been at it for more than 200 years. In part, it has to do with labor and the cost of land.  An acre (or hectare) costs much less in New Mexico than it does in Champagne.

The different flavors: they come from different grapes. While Gruet uses the same grapes -- Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and  Pinot Meunier found in Champagne, the taste will reflect the terroir of New Mexico -- dry and like minerals.  Prosecco is the grape and the region just outside Venice where it is grown.

The long and short of it is that you don't have to spend a fortune to pop some pleasure.

Starbucks, coffee shops see collateral benefit from Black Friday

Black Friday bargain hunting is a marathon, requiring a shopper to be alert and aggressive to outmaneuver rivals for that last $200 LCD TV at Target. But with so many retailers opening their doors at midnight, why bother going to sleep? Even if you shopped at Kohl’s, which opened at 3 am or J.C. Penney, at 4 am, you were in for very short night for most.

So bleary-eyed shoppers turned out in drove at U.S. malls on Friday, with lines at coffee shops among the longest.

Mall operator Macerich said on Friday that the Starbucks at its Tysons Corner Center in suburban Washington had lines 30 people deep at 11 a.m. At the Newport Center mall in Jersey City, exhausted shoppers could be seen forming a line of 20 to get much needed java.

After all, no one wants to be caught unawares when cashmere sweaters for 50 percent off are at stake.

(Reuters photo)

Teens, men, self-love boost Black Friday

After going AWOL for a couple of years, it sounds like men and teens are flexing their spending muscles this year and are helping retailers out this Black Friday.

“There seems to be a lot more men and a lot more younger consumers between the ages of 15 and 25,” said Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren in an interview. And it wasn’t just at Macy’s.

The Newport Centre mall in Jersey City, N.J., felt like a high school at 5 a.m. , teeming with teenagers. Half the shoppers seemed to be toting Aeropostale shopping bags and the other half bags from American Eagle Outfitters.

At the Westchester mall in White Plains, N.Y. a dozen or so teenagers sat outside an Abercrombie & Fitch-owned Hollister store at 6:40 a.m., waiting for it to open at 7:00. 

And they weren’t just pillaging the discount bins as they had the last two years, after their jobs and family allowances dried up. They were spending more. 

At Roosevelt Field Mall in Long Island, teens were shopping at mid- and high-end teen stores, Jharonne Martis-Olivo, Thomson Reuters director of consumer research told us. Teen spending is a good proxy of discretionary spending, she said, because that shows that consumers are more willing to spend their discretionary income, as opposed to saving it, or paying off credit cards as they did in 2009.

But best news of all: Lundgren said more Black Friday revelers were shopping for themselves again. So go ahead, go splurge on yourself again- everyone else is doing it.

The eye in the sky forecasts holiday sales

By  Jon Lentz

When predicting holiday shopping traffic, it can help to take a bird’s eye view.   Or even better, take a peak from outer space.   That’s what Thomson Reuters analyst Jharonne Martis-Olivo did, using mall traffic data for the 10 weeks leading up to Black Friday gleaned from satellite images showing how crowded shopping mall parking lots were as a way to detect shopping patterns. The data from the images was provided by Remote Sensing Metrics.   Her conclusion? Mall traffic for November 2010 has recently shown a steep rise, pointing to stronger same-store sales.   The data include more than 500 satellite observations of car count from shopping malls across the country.   Mall parking lots were only 30 percent full in September of 2008, a period when same-store sales declined.   During September in 2009 and 2010, more cars were parked outside the malls, which correlated with an uptick in sales.   Other factors, such as how much a customer spends on a visit, also play a role. For example, prices were slashed in 2008 in November as retailers struggled through the worst financial crisis in decades.   But prices seem to be less of a factor this year, and November sales could be looking up. Different companies are taking different approaches to attracting holiday shoppers.

Source: Image of Southtown Shopping Center in Minnesota: (C) 2010 DigitalGlobe, Remote Sensing Metrics analysis.

The time of two Thanksgivings

By James Ledbetter

You hear a lot these days about how much businesses dislike “uncertainty.” It’s too hard, goes the refrain, to figure out how financial reform is going to play out, or how much heath care reform is going to cost. Better to play it safe and not hire anyone.

But at least today’s businesses are reasonably assured of a stable calendar. During the latter years of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, this was not the case.  In August of 1939, President Roosevelt was taking a brief summer fishing trip on Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada, just over the border from southeastern Maine.  A handful of journalists were gathered in the living room of the red cottage that had belonged to the president’s mother. After some discussion of the tensions in Europe—this was August 14, less than three weeks before the German invasion of Poland—FDR said to the newsmen: “Oh! I will give you a story I had entirely forgotten. I have been having from a great many people, for the last six years, complaints that Thanksgiving Day came too close to Christmas. Now this sounds silly.” But the president went on to explain that the tradition that had begun with Abraham Lincoln of annually celebrating Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November created a time window between Labor Day and Thanksgiving that was too long without a holiday, and a time window between Thanksgiving and Christmas that was too short.

The first issue the President had already fixed, by making Columbus Day a national holiday in 1937. To address the second one, he would simply move Thanksgiving to an earlier date. “The stores and people who work, retail people, etc. are very anxious to have [Thanksgiving] set forward,” he explained. And 1939 provided an ideal opportunity for shifting what FDR labeled “a perfectly movable feast.” There were five Thursdays in November that year, and so moving Thanksgiving from the 30th to the 23rd would make it not much earlier than it had been the previous year (the 24th), and yet give the retailers the extra week between Thanksgiving and Christmas they were clamoring for.

In keeping with the light, summer mood, there was only one question from the press: “This year, Mr. President?” The answer was quick: “This year, yes,” and then the President went back to arguing that there is “nothing sacred about” the date of the celebration, noting that “in the early days of the Republic, it was held sometime in October.”

The seeming spontaneity of the announcement belied the fact that the remarks had been scripted for FDR a week before. One of his aides, Lowell Mellett, a former Scripps-Howard newsman who would go on to head the movie division of the Office of War Information, had in fact provided the President with different versions of how he might present his plan to the public.  Moreover, as FDR indicated in his press conference, the issue had come up before. In 1933 and 1934, November also had five Thursdays, and a diverse group of merchants had conducted a public campaign to have the date changed; the most prominent push had come from the National Retail Dry Goods Association. But the administration was far too busy trying to implement the National Industrial Recovery Act, and rebuffed requests to change the date.