Boulder Report

Sam's Club closing Louisville, CO store; 125 to lose jobs

The big-box Sam's Club in Louisville, Colo. told its employees on Sunday night that it had been losing money, and it would shut down in two weeks on Friday, Jan. 22.

Greeters at the front door of Sam's Club Monday were handing out a flyer announcing "This Sam's Club location is closing" and telling everyone that the store would be shutting down. The Louisville location employs about 125 workers, according to one employee.

One employee said there would be a meeting on Monday afternoon to see if employees might be offered positions at other Sam's Club or Walmart stores. But for now, he said it looked like all employees were losing their jobs. Sam's Club operates stores in Arvada, Thornton and Loveland. The Arvada and the Thornton store are the closest to the Louisville location, about 20 miles according to the flyer being handed out.

Another employee said that the store's staff was told the Louisville location had lost more than $1 million in the past year and that despite efforts to turn around its performance, the decision to close it was made. On Monday, Wal-Mart said it would be closing 10 of its money-losing club stores around the country, cutting about 1,500 jobs. Stores being closed in addition to Louisville are Nampa, Idaho; La Quinta, Calif.; Vista, Calif.; Rolling Meadows, Ill.; Clay, N.Y.; and Irvine, Calif. Houston, Phoenix and Sacramento, Calif., will lose one store each.

A few employees were seen hugging one another inside the store even as the retailer continued its normal business day.

Both the Sam's Club and the nearby Costco Warehouse just down the road in Superior compete for Boulder County shoppers. Shoppers in Boulder often pack the parking lots of both stores on weekends, since the city has not brought in a similar big box within its city limits.

The flyer being handed out at the store told Sam's Club members they could call the member service hotline at 1-888-746-7726 with any questions.

What happened to those delicious days of Boulder business lunches?

Sometime back in Colorado's booming decade of the '90s, we did a readership study at the Boulder County Business Report that came back showing our business readers ate out a local restaurants about five times a week -- or at least once a day. 

Now I'm sure that included business lunches, as well as perhaps a nice dinner or two with clients and perhaps family and friends on the weekend.

This all struck home to me the other day with the news that Dolan's Restaurant, a 15-year Boulder favorite for business lunches, parties and special events, had closed after the state stepped in for the owner's failure to pay taxes.

Over the years, Dolan's was a favorite of mine to meet business associates as well as meeting friends for its happy hour, one of the best deals in town. The menu was reliable and good -- crab cakes were a favorite -- the staff was always friendly and owner Mike Dolan was almost always there, greeting customers by their first names. In CU football season, Dolan's used to be "the" place. 

Just before Christmas, however, I met friends for weekday lunch at Dolan's, and I could clearly see things were a bit slow at the lunch hour. I said hello to Mike and asked him how things were going. "Not so good," he bluntly told me. Businesses were really cutting back on office parties, his bookings for the private rooms were way down, he said. "Businesses all seem to be doing potluck lunches with their employees," he bemoaned.

On the reader comments to the Boulder Camera story about the closing, one employee said, "Everyone working at the restaurant knew it was in trouble for months, and that closure was imminent. It was every employee's decision as to whether or not they continued working for Dolan's." So apparently the closure did not come as too much of a surprise to those working at the restaurant.

And Dolan's is certainly not the first locally owned restaurant to fall upon hard times from the recession, nor is it likely to be the last. The list of local restaurant closings keeps growing. Orchid Pavilion, Sunflower, Burnt Toast (although it was sold), the Scotch Corner Pub at One Boulder Plaza, Sobo (converted to Murphy's South) and Narayan's Nepal Restaurant.

For a relatively small city, Boulder boasts a tremendous variety of incredible restaurants -- many recently receiving accolades even from the food writer for the New York Times. The Kitchen downtown is almost always crowded at lunch; next door is Salt, a new entry in the restaurant wars that took over the spot of Boulder's cheeseburger heaven -- Tom's Tavern. Successful restaurateur Dave Query operates three restaurants in the same block downtown -- Jax Fish House, the West End Tavern and Centro. Not far away his newest restaurant is the Happy Noodle House. And, let's not forget, Boulder chef Hosea Rosenberg won Bravo's "Top Chef."

This list of places to eat out is rather endless. There's enough sushi in Boulder to keep any lover of Asian fare happy. Boulder's Frasca, where chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson won the prestigious James Beard award, is another receiving national and statewide attention, although it looks like the economy has at least stalled its plans to move closer downtown.

Boulder restaurants epitomize the quote "When one door of happiness closes, another opens." Even in the depth of the worst economy to hit the country in decades, entrepreneurial chefs continue opening new restaurants here like Full Belly, Arugula Ristorante and one of the newest soon to open, Pizzeria Basta in the Peloton development on Arapaho. 

Personally I know I do my part in helping support Boulder's restaurants, but I openly confess to watching for some deals along the way. For a birthday celebration one night over the holidays, three couples chose the "happy hour" at Bacaro in Boulder's West End. The idea was to go for some reasonably priced glasses of wine, and enjoy the tapas and other appetizers at happy hour prices. Our bill, of course, was considerably less than if we had all gone for a full dinner. This, and the wine, made us happy.

The combination of both consumers and businesses closely watching their bottom line -- and for the consumer that includes their actual bottoms, translates to a difficult and lean time for restaurants. It's not just a Boulder trend, of course. Nationally restaurants have had to become extraordinarily innovative to bring out the customers.

So here's a toast to a much healthier economy in the new decade. One that will get companies out more for business lunches, and even the occasional announcement to their overworked staff -- "Beers are on us after work today!" After all, in these lean and tough times, don't you think your employees -- who had to bring potluck for their Christmas party -- deserve some special attention?

I drank so much coffee over the past year meeting people to talk about how lousy the economy was that I've switched to tea. I still love Boulder's thriving coffeehouse scene, but it sure would be nice in 2010 if instead of "Let's meet for coffee," the invite was "Let me buy you lunch!"

Get over your clutter; it's time for end-of-year office cleanup

One small company that literally saved my life every year at the Business Report was Boulder's Officiency Inc., run by the the organizing superwoman K.J. McCorry.

Officiency is a company that helps your business increase your productivity and efficiency by not only helping you clean yourself out of the stacks of paper, useless files and whatever else you're clogging up your work environment with, but K.J. will help you set up simple and effective systems to actually keep you organized.

Now I confess, I have this problem of thinking nearly every piece of paper, including newspaper and magazine articles, that crosses my desk is of the utmost importance -- and that one day I surely will need it. With K.J.'s help at the end of each year, at least I had very handy desktop files to move things I wanted to read later,  and eventually be reminded that it should "not" move into the filing cabinet where I would never see it again.

At the end of each year, my business partner and I would call in K.J., and she'd roll the huge recycling bin directly into our offices and start the process of tossing out paper, old newspapers and files that held materials dating back several years. K.J. also can help you organized your online files, including e-mail, since those gets as packed these days as paper files.

Officiency now has a line of online reports available for purchase including: Become an Effective Email Manager, Using Time Management Tools Effectively and Getting Tasks Done. There's also some free reports, including How to Organize Your Computer Documents and online chapters from K.J.'s book, "Organize Your Work Day In No Time."

Several new reports are planned for 2010.

I was thinking of K.J. because these days I'm working from my home office, having sold our ownership in the Business Report. And with a burst of end-of-year energy, I've begun attacking my home office, spending nearly two days just shredding old bank and financial statements, as well as digging through files I've been saving for years. K.J. would be proud.

You can read K.J.'s reports, but if you really want to catch the Office Cleanup Spirit, I highly recommend giving K.J. a call and hiring her to help you dig out. Yes, it can be a bit painful at first ... it might take a half or even full day out of your workweek if your office was as cluttered as mine. But I promise you it will feel so much better when it's all done, and you once again see the top of your desk.

Few encouraging signs for job seekers after tough year

Numbers, I’ve found in years of watching local business trends, seldom tell the whole story.

And when it comes to the loss of jobs and the toll and heartaches on the unemployed and their families, officials in both Workforce Boulder County and the University of Colorado Business Research division agree that statistics alone can be deceiving.

With the holiday season here, the annual economic forecasts are just around the corner with more pontifications – and numbers -- than pre-season college football.

This summer, I wrote about the expression that’s more contagious among forecasters than H1N1 – the “jobless” recovery. It worried me then, and it worries me now.

A recovery without jobs offers little holiday cheer, for example, to my neighbor who just lost her job after 10 years at Sun Microsystems, or to the thousands like her in Colorado who are close to exhausting unemployment benefits.

Boulder County’s latest unemployment figure from September seemed hopeful at 5.5 percent, under the state’s 7 percent and several notches below the U.S. rate of 9.8 percent.

Adding to fresh optimism that business might be picking up here, the number of local job openings increased to about 1,148 in the July to September period, said Tom Miller, director of Boulder County Workforce Center offices. That’s up from 766 in the same period in 2008.

But Miller acknowledges the lower unemployment figure can be misleading. “I thought it was too low,” he said.

Gary Horvath, managing director of CU’s Business Research Division, knows well how revisions to statistics often tell a different story. In down economies, the numbers usually come back down, too, he said. The latest numbers won’t be revised until March.

Experts say the same thing about U.S. unemployment number. People whose benefits have run out just quit coming to workforce centers. Hours and pay of many full-time employees were cut back, and self-employed workers don’t get counted at all as they lose clients but cannot file for unemployment.

One Fed official estimated in August that the “real” unemployment rate was near 16 percent. The government actually calculates a broader number, called the U-6, a number of “labor underutilization.” In September, it was at 17 percent, the highest it has been since the data started in 1994.

Local job seekers I know remain wary of a real pickup in new local jobs. That’s because they know from experience how many people they must compete against when a job is advertised.

That bump of new jobs in county Workforce computers is offset terribly by some 8,600 people applying for unemployment benefits in the same July to September period.

That’s a significant jump from 5,700 job seekers in the same time in 2008. When you look at the county’s 5.5 percent unemployment stat from the Colorado Department of Labor & Employment (www.coworkforce.com), 9,554 are listed as unemployed out of the county’s civilian labor force of 172,279.

Miller says new jobs are showing up in office and administrative support, which were quite sparse this year. Somehow, jobs are getting posted in building and construction, industries slammed by the recession’s credit crisis. There are also new jobs in manufacturing production and transportation.

A noticeable difference in this recession from Colorado’s downturn in 2002-03 is the broad range of professionals -- rather than mostly tech workers -- applying for benefits, Miller said. As residential and commercial building slid to a halt, architects and engineers lost their jobs. Job openings decreased across the board. “Retail, hospitality – you name it,” Miller added, were all hit hard.

Horvath confirms that this recession hurt not only blue-collar construction workers, but the sector’s white-collar jobs as well. He estimates some 25,000 to 30,000 building-related professionals lost jobs, accounting for a huge slice of Colorado’s unemployment.

County job officials have launched two new programs for job seekers and employers, which you can find on the Hire Colorado link at www.wfbc.org.

* The Hire On-the-Job Training Program will pay businesses 50 percent of wages for one to five months (up to $5,000) to train a new employee in a job.

* New HIRE internships will provide paid employees to nonprofits and government agencies for short-term projects.

University of Colorado business researchers have just a few weeks before their annual Economic Outlook Forum on Monday, Dec. 7 in Denver. The 2009 numbers won’t be pretty. Colorado lost 115,600 jobs through September.

Horvath said it’s nearly impossible to forecast when in 2010 that companies could start hiring again. “Short answer,” he said, “at some point next year things will be on an uptick.” CU researchers right now, he said, are encouraged by higher U.S. GDP estimates. But, after all, they are only numbers.