Red Mosquito

cutuphalfdead wrote:If this holds true that means the good guys win.

The cousins at the heart of the Market Basket feud negotiated a possible sale of the grocery chain late into Sunday night, but a deal remained elusive even as the stalemate continued to drain millions of dollars a day from the company.

The parties were still at odds over several terms of Arthur T. Demoulas’s $1.5 billion offer to buy the 50.5 percent of the company owned by his cousin, Arthur S. Demoulas, and other family members, according to people familiar with the talks.

A board meeting had been scheduled for Sunday night, but the session was called off once it became clear Market Basket shareholders were not going to finalize a stock purchase agreement to transfer ownership of the company. The meeting’s postponement was yet another twist in a weekslong drama that continues to spool out unpredictably.

“Everybody is surprised that it’s taken this long, and I don’t think more weeks of nothing happening is prudent or is even fiscally possible for the company,” said John Davis, a professor at Harvard Business School. “There has to be some arrangement if they make a deal . . . for Arthur T. to be reinstated and for the company to get back on its feet.”

Both sides of the Demoulas family have expressed optimism that they can bring an end to their dispute, but prospects for an agreement remain uncertain. On Friday, the governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire indicated an agreement could be reached by the end of the weekend.

Arthur T. Demoulas told the Globe Friday that “there is nothing that stands in the way of getting this done this weekend.”

Market Basket’s board of directors could call a meeting at any point in the next few days to act on a deal. The company’s shareholders — all members of the Demoulas family or extended family — must first agree to the terms of a sale, and then the board could take action to get the company running again.

That would involve putting Arthur T., whose firing as president in June triggered the crisis, back into the management ranks. But when he would come back, and in what role, has been a sticking point of the negotiations, according to those briefed on the talks.

Many of the company’s employees have said they will not return to work until Arthur T. is reinstated. Their walkout and a customer boycott have strangled operations and kept fresh food out of stores.

Arthur T.’s offer, outlined for the Globe by his advisers Friday, removed a key obstacle by providing a letter from a private equity firm that is prepared to lend more than $500 million to help buy the remaining half of the company. The identity of the firm was not disclosed.

The rest of the money for the purchase would come from cash provided by Arthur T. and his sisters, as well as a mortgage loan secured by the company’s considerable real estate holdings in New England.

If an agreement is not reached soon, the financial consequences could be catastrophic for the supermarket chain. The company, losing millions of dollars a day, faces the prospect of closing stores and terminating many of its 25,000 employees in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.

Business experts warned that any deal that took shape during the weekend could take days, or even several weeks, to close. The outside financiers assisting Arthur T. Demoulas in his bid will want to evaluate not just Market Basket’s bank accounts, but its contracts, relationships with vendors, and obligations like worker pensions, said Frank Hoy, a professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

“My guess is that Arthur T. has probably lined up some people who do trust him, that probably he’s worked with in the past in some way, that are ready to move forward on this more quickly,” said Hoy. “It could be done literally in days, but I wouldn’t count on that.”

In the interim, the grocery chain’s management is in question. Davis, the Harvard Business School professor, said the management of companies typically does not turn over until a deal is completely vetted. In this instance, though, he said it would be “irresponsible” for the buyer and seller not to find some way to install Arthur T. Demoulas and his management team at the company’s helm while the deal is being closed.

“In the meantime, shelves are bare, people are out of work, customers are hurting, so do the right thing: Put the deal in place,” said Davis. “Put some penalties in place, in case either side backs away from it, and get the company going.”

Alex wrote:dude, i get market basket google alerts

spike wrote:

Alex wrote:dude, i get market basket google alerts

i unsubscribed from several email alerts just last week.

For the thousands of Market Basket workers and customers who had protested his ouster, Arthur T. Demoulas’s deal to buy out his cousins’ share of the family grocery empire was a triumphant end to six weeks of organizing, agitating, and waiting.

While some paused to digest the details Wednesday night or reflect on the cost and consequences of their efforts, most simply responded with joy. Several were in tears when they heard the news.


“Wow. I feel like I won the lottery,” said Buddy Wemmers, a Market Basket truck driver. “What a huge relief.”

For many employees, the back-and-forth negotiations and false starts of the past week represented a nerve-racking detour from the optimism that dominated earlier weeks of protests.

“I was actually really starting to worry things weren’t going to go the way we wanted,” said Ann Rogers, 55, who works in the accounts payable department at the company’s Tewksbury headquarters. “This is just fantastic.”

Rogers said the apparent resolution of the feud has been a long time coming.

“I’ve been working with this company for 28 years, and this has been hanging over the company’s head the whole time,” she said. “This fight was absolutely worth it. We wanted to make sure the right person had control.”

The improbable success of the employees’ grass-roots campaign, which included walk-outs, rallies, and more than a few online manifestos, stunned longtime observers of the grocery industry and captured the imagination and attention of a region.

“To have an internal uprising of just about everyone, without a union, is very unusual in American industry,” said David Lewin, professor of management at the University of California Los Angeles. “And it’s even more unusual for workers to say, ‘We want this guy to come back’ — and to have him actually come back.”

Under the terms of the deal, announced around 11 p.m., Arthur T. Demoulas and his siblings will buy the 50.5 percent of the company owned by their cousin, Arthur S. Demoulas, and other relatives on his side of the family.

The long-promised pact between the two bitter, entrenched factions of the Demoulas clan took weeks to craft, an agonizing delay that strained the patience of protesting workers and boycotting shoppers alike.

But even as thousands of employees lost their hours and paychecks, a cadre of middle managers lost their jobs, and boycotting customers lost their patience, most refused to abandon their cause. News of their vindication arrived in breathless phone calls and euphoric messages posted on social media sites, where the protest movement blossomed. Hundreds of triumphant posts bubbled up on Facebook and Twitter as various media outlets reported the news.

“It’s going crazy online,” said Debbie Simon, a customer from Litchfield, N.H., who was boycotting the chain, as Facebook notification tones steadily rang out in the background during an interview with a Globe reporter. Thursday morning, she said, she would go to her local Market Basket and “buy whatever I can, and I’m going to shake the director’s hand.”

While the deal is finalized, under the terms of its terms, Arthur T. will work alongside Felicia Thornton and James Gooch, the co-chief executives who were hired by his cousin to replace him but were demonized by many employees. Arthur T. will have full operational control of the company, however.

The agreement came at a critical point. With Market Basket’s cash flow choked off and bills mounting, the company’s board of directors was considering a radical plan to shutter 61 of the chain’s 71 stores and lay off most of its 25,000 workers.

Though it avoided that drastic step, many challenges await the reborn company. Newly encumbered with debt, Market Basket is faced with questions about whether it can reboot its low-margin, high-volume business model — not to mention its generous profit-sharing plan.

But most employees and customers said such worries were best left for another day. For them, Wednesday’s deal was nothing less than a decisive victory.

“I’m not worried at all. We’re going to come back bigger, better, and stronger,” said Wemmers, the truck driver. “We’ll tighten our belts a bit, but in the long run, we’re going to be a tighter company, a better family because of all this.”

For the employees, the deal means a suddenly busy schedule — and, many hoped, an imminent return to work for part-time employees.

“I know all employees will do their utmost to make the Market Basket shopping experience the same or better than before,” said Stephanie Schwechheimer, the manager of a Market Basket in Haverhill. “I don’t doubt that all of the associates would do it all over again.”

As the weeks wore on, some customers and workers started to see the protests as standing for something larger. In a country where massive corporations wield increasing power, they said, the Market Basket saga was a battle in a larger war against the decline of both middle-class jobs and family-owned businesses where employees come before maximum profit.

“If there’s anything people should take from this, it’s that America is hungry for this kind of success story where everybody wins: the customers, the employees, and the people who run the show,” said Shawn Dwyer, a manager at the Burlington Market Basket store.

Dwyer said he and other Arthur T. supporters initially underestimated the difficulty of achieving their goals.

“I thought after two weeks, they would realize Arthur T. was the best person to run the business and we’d be back to work,” he said. “We didn’t realize how thick the animosity was until we stepped in it.”

But with the animosity seemingly swept aside, workers said they are itching to get back to work and begin the daunting task of blowing the cobwebs off the half-shuttered chain.

“I am relieved that our focus can now shift from getting it done to bringing it back,” said Steve Paulenka, a fired Market Basket manager who has organized protests calling for the return of Arthur T. Demoulas. “Make no mistake about this: we made history.”

Biff Pocoroba wrote:The average white American only has one black friend
A depressing new study found that most white Americans have almost no friends of color.

"I have black friends" is no longer an excuse — the average white American has just one black friend, singular, research from the Public Religion Research Institute found.

Robert P. Jones, the researcher behind the data, wrote in The Atlantic that the average white American's social network is 91 percent white. If the average white American had 100 friends, just one would be black, one Hispanic, one Asian, one of "mixed" background and three of ambiguous descent. Jones suggests the reason is "self-segregation," and that white people reserve close relationships and "important matters" for white friends.

Meanwhile, Jones' research found that the average black American has eight white friends, as well as two Latino and three "mixed" friends.

malice wrote:

Biff Pocoroba wrote:The average white American only has one black friend
A depressing new study found that most white Americans have almost no friends of color.

"I have black friends" is no longer an excuse — the average white American has just one black friend, singular, research from the Public Religion Research Institute found.

Robert P. Jones, the researcher behind the data, wrote in The Atlantic that the average white American's social network is 91 percent white. If the average white American had 100 friends, just one would be black, one Hispanic, one Asian, one of "mixed" background and three of ambiguous descent. Jones suggests the reason is "self-segregation," and that white people reserve close relationships and "important matters" for white friends.

Meanwhile, Jones' research found that the average black American has eight white friends, as well as two Latino and three "mixed" friends.

do you think its the same thing if I have only one friend and she's also a black person?

theplatypus wrote:Brother and sister arrested for fucking 3 times in church parking lot, after watching The Notebook

http://gawker.com/brother-and-sister-ar ... socialflow

McParadigm wrote:

theplatypus wrote:Brother and sister arrested for fucking 3 times in church parking lot, after watching The Notebook

http://gawker.com/brother-and-sister-ar ... socialflow

Effingham County, Georgia.

You can't make this stuff up. You wouldn't want to.

philpritchard wrote:

McParadigm wrote:

theplatypus wrote:Brother and sister arrested for fucking 3 times in church parking lot, after watching The Notebook

http://gawker.com/brother-and-sister-ar ... socialflow

Effingham County, Georgia.

You can't make this stuff up. You wouldn't want to.

"In a tractor trailer" is a minor detail that can't be ignored.

CopperTom wrote:2. It's probably best that they stick together. Did you see their pics.