Glaedelig Syttende Mai!

Happy Norwegian Independence Day!

Lehi Roller Mills Not Footloose

Lehi Roller Mills, Inc., owner of the iconic mills at the north end of Utah County featured in the movie Footloose, has filed Chapter 11.  Whether it can accomplish a reorganization or not is a very open question.  It has issues flying at it from all over, a couple of them governmental.  Personally, my Magic 8-Ball sees a conversion to Chapter 7.  And if you're wondering why I don't have a local media link to a story on the bankruptcy filing, it's because there aren't any.  Our glorious local media are too busy writing puff pieces at the direction of the Tourism Board to cover this.

Speaking of glaring omissions, does anyone else notice a total lack of comment by the city?  Lehi frankly doesn't have many historic sites left, and nothing to compare with this, yet no one from the city is even shedding crocodile tears.  What's the deal?  I think rantnraven and Gentler_Reader may be on to something in their comments in the Tribune article I linked to.  The mills are prime development ground, and I've often figured major developers have been drooling over the site but that the Robinsons wouldn't play ball.  Perhaps the Williamsons are willing to play ball, and their notes are the leverage the developers need to boot the Robinsons out.  And if that's so, no one with any sense would be surprised if the developers had already approached the city to grease the skids for the whole process.  So the city is keeping its head down, waiting for applications for a demolition permit and a brand new strip mall, and counting its projected tax revenue.  Provided the developers can lease the new site out without making a bunch of other places in town go dark.  And provided anyone stops in Lehi when they can no longer tell the town is there after the mills have been torn down.

Dave Brubeck Dies

Dave Brubeck has died.  Only Eugene Wright remains of the classic Dave Brubeck Quartet, and he'll be 90 next year.  We're running out of the people who projected the United States around the globe; soon we'll be left with little but vapid media constructs.

Brubeck didn't just write and play jazz, he promoted it.  At a time when jazz, the quintessential American music, was being killed here by the music industry and our instant gratification culture, he constantly toured and lectured, bringing the music to new generations.  I saw him play once, a million years ago when I was in high school, when he and his sons Chris and Darius were the guest pros for a high school jazz festival I was attending.  Our little, podunk combo actually got to be part of the program.  We were jazzed, pun intended.  That, and thousands of stories just like it, will be Brubeck's true legacy.

Normandie Cafe Chapter 11

In another display of the fine business reporting one gets here, Paul Toscano took Mezzanine, Inc., which operates the Normandie Cafe in Holladay, into Chapter 11 yesterday (Case No. 12-34490), and there has been NO local coverage.  Great job, people.  If the case gets converted to a Chapter 7 and yet another small business goes dark, do you think our fearless newscritters will bother to notice.  Probably not, and they'd view it as a gain if Olive Garden or Sonny Bryan's moves in.

Crash Goes the Trolley

File this under "I am shocked.  Not."  Trolley Square Associates has defaulted on a stack of loans for about $57 million, and a lender group headed by Bank of America has filed for a receivership.  I would first note that I buy none of B of A's high-toned rhetoric about just wanting to preserve the assets.  If that were true, the creditors would have filed an involuntary bankruptcy and had a judge and trustee who knew something about preserving a going concern.  Over in state court, you'll probably get a judge who doesn't know how to administer a receivership and just lets the creditors run roughshod.


Anyway.  It's not like Trolley has ever been much of a going concern, and it's not like Trolley Square Associates has ever demonstrated it was up to this job.  I've given TSA kudos here for getting special events to the Square and chided the tenants for not taking advantage, but in a real mall, the leases have "special event clauses that allow the landlord to force tenants to be open for such events.  And don't even get me started about places like the candy shop, which locks up a corner location all year for two months of operations.  A normal mall owner wouldn't put up with that, but requires being a chooser not a beggar, and Trolley and its owner are definitely the latter.  Let's face it, anyone who has to borrow from B of A, the gang that couldn't lend straight, is already in trouble.  We'll see how this plays out, but right now my Magic 8-ball says "Blight."

Worst Practices Entry

Once upon a time, two friends and I decided to start a business.  We had devised some medical software that made a certain piece of medical hardware a lot more useful.  It was a good product, frankly far better than anything else out there.  The problem was that we hadn't a clue how to market it.  We knew we had to sell, though, and that's what we tried to do.  We spent a lot of our scarce resources sending one of us around the country to conventions and trade shows, selling directly to hospitals and labs that bought the hardware.  Too much effort and too much expense for too few sales, and soon we shut down.

The problem is there was a far better solution right under my nose, and it would have made us.  There were only two companies that made the hardware.  If we had licensed our software to them, they could have worried about bundling it along to their customers.  We would have had two customers that would have been doing the heavy sale lifting for us.

Having a product means selling it, but sometimes your customers aren't who you think they are.

I'm Not Crying for Argentina

It's just that I'm not crying for the bondholders either.  We're having a big brouhaha over at Credit Slips over Argentina's default on its bonds, its workout agreements with most bondholders, and recent court decisions on its obligations to pay the holdouts.  I think both the Ghana court and the Second Circuit were flat wrong on the law, and call me funny, but I believe that's what the courts are there to enforce.  A pair of Germans on the board, though, are really going after me because I refuse to buy into their arguments, which really only amount to argumenta ad passiones.   Willi1 sunk 500 million euros (probably his retirement) into this junk and now wants it back.  Jakob represents 150 people who pulled the same stunt and want the same results.  They can't accept that everyone is going to take a massive haircut and that it's just reality and not a massive conspiracy the international legal community cooked up just to defraud them.

The problem is that the same greed they accuse the Argentine government of (properly, in my in no way humble opinion) is what got them into this in the first place.  They sunk their retirement accounts into this refuse pile because all they could see were the promised returns; they never bothered to look at the risks.  They also probably never sought professional advice to sort it out for them either, although I would note that if Jakob advised these folks to buy, and he were in the US, his insurance carrier would be defending a malpractice class action right now.  As I've said repeatedly, if you can't afford to lose the money, don't put it on the craps table, and if you don't understand the rules, DON'T PLAY.