For most of my career in the fitness industry, I ran "big box" gyms - giant facilities with amenities that ranged from child care to aerobics classes to walls for climbing - in my home state of Minnesota. These clubs tried to cram as many offerings into their spaces as possible, and at first I didn't question that philosophy.
Dear FSB: I've been in business for seven years now. I'm a sole proprietor and I have an SBA loan from 2002. My question: Is it better to incorporate now, or wait? How will incorporation protect my personal assets if my business fails?
A bus carrying high school band students tipped over Saturday on Interstate 94 northwest of Minneapolis, Minnesota, killing one person.
Officials in Minnesota have closed a major bridge on the Mississippi River, citing safety concerns, the state's transportation department announced Thursday.
Authorities are charging a Minnesota woman with four counts of vehicular homicide in a school bus crash that killed four children
Now that all teams have passed the midway point of the season, I figured it was time to submit my early predictions for the playoffs. And yes, there will be some surprises, so make sure to fire off those E-mails.
Dear FSB: I am a newly appointed VP of Sales at a sporting goods manufacturer. While I've held various management roles in sales for more than 10 years, I am new to this company. Can you recommend any advanced executive training seminars that may help me in my new endeavor?
Stocks sputtered at the start of trading Thursday as investors saw oil spike higher on a pipeline explosion in Minnesota.
I'm sick of 5-6 teams. There are nine of them. They're all in contention for something or other. If I were commissioner I'd outlaw them. And as for the 6-5s? Why, they are royalty, practically assured of a berth in what promises to be the dullest first two weeks of the playoffs in history. But one of those 5-6 teams is Philadelphia, which put up such a good fight against New England. That was the voice of reason speaking, and its reward is that from now on it will wear a muzzle. And here comes something that never will be muzzled, and you know what that is. (Send comments to siwriters@simail.com)
While rivalry matches and Turkey Bowls take up much of the docket this week, playoffs rage on.
For most of my career in the fitness industry, I ran "big box" gyms - giant facilities with amenities that ranged from child care to aerobics classes to walls for climbing - in my home state of Minnesota. These clubs tried to cram as many offerings into their spaces as possible, and at first I didn't question that philosophy.
Dear FSB: I've been in business for seven years now. I'm a sole proprietor and I have an SBA loan from 2002. My question: Is it better to incorporate now, or wait? How will incorporation protect my personal assets if my business fails?
A bus carrying high school band students tipped over Saturday on Interstate 94 northwest of Minneapolis, Minnesota, killing one person.
Officials in Minnesota have closed a major bridge on the Mississippi River, citing safety concerns, the state's transportation department announced Thursday.
Authorities are charging a Minnesota woman with four counts of vehicular homicide in a school bus crash that killed four children
Now that all teams have passed the midway point of the season, I figured it was time to submit my early predictions for the playoffs. And yes, there will be some surprises, so make sure to fire off those E-mails.
Dear FSB: I am a newly appointed VP of Sales at a sporting goods manufacturer. While I've held various management roles in sales for more than 10 years, I am new to this company. Can you recommend any advanced executive training seminars that may help me in my new endeavor?
Stocks sputtered at the start of trading Thursday as investors saw oil spike higher on a pipeline explosion in Minnesota.
I'm sick of 5-6 teams. There are nine of them. They're all in contention for something or other. If I were commissioner I'd outlaw them. And as for the 6-5s? Why, they are royalty, practically assured of a berth in what promises to be the dullest first two weeks of the playoffs in history. But one of those 5-6 teams is Philadelphia, which put up such a good fight against New England. That was the voice of reason speaking, and its reward is that from now on it will wear a muzzle. And here comes something that never will be muzzled, and you know what that is. (Send comments to siwriters@simail.com)
While rivalry matches and Turkey Bowls take up much of the docket this week, playoffs rage on.
Until recently it seemed that Bob Dylan's ballad "Girl From the North Country" would be the last vestige of northern Minnesota's mining culture. The onetime world capital of iron ore had buckled under competition from foreign mines, with layoffs beginning in the 1980s and culminating in the 2001 bankruptcy of its second-biggest mine.
How ironic that as Thanksgiving arrives, some early-season NBA turkeys would be finding new life. The Heat, Warriors, Sonics and T'wolves all finally won last week, meaning all 30 clubs have now cracked the W column. In fact, only Minnesota had failed to win as many as two games as of Sunday.
Dear FSB: I would like to start a concierge/lifestyle management service. I have done tons of research and found out about several successful businesses in this area across the country. I'm wondering how successful I can be in my state. And is it feasible to start part-time while I'm still employed? I can't afford to devote myself to this full-time right now.
I admit it. The season-opening Power Rankings are, for the most part, a crapshoot. There are a few superior squads, others on the fringe of greatness and some destined to be also-rans from Day 1, but the largest group resides in the one-way-or-another category until further notice. So with regards to readers Mark Klettlinger, Chris McGurty and Justin Holmes, you'll find things more to your liking -- at some point in the season.
A Minnesota transportation official defended the selection of the most expensive bid to replace the collapsed interstate bridge
When we profiled DanMar & Associates in June 2003 founder Dan Juhl was helping farmers set up wind towers to generate their own electricity and sell power to utilities.
Gov. Ted Strickland surveyed the heavily flooded village of Ottawa and urged the federal government to declare a major disaster in north-central Ohio
It depends on where you are, but for many drought-stricken farmers, the Midwest rains are alleviating a bad summer for soybean and corn crops
A powerful storm system that swamped the upper Midwest and killed at least six people moved into Ohio on Tuesday as weary Minnesota residents returned to their water-logged homes.
Severe storms deluged parts of the upper Midwest during the night with as much as a foot of rain, causing flooding that washed away bridges and roads and killed at least four people, authorities said Sunday.
Alicia Babatz was on her way to pick up her 2-year-old daughter Wednesday when she felt the bridge give way beneath her.
The search for bodies in the Mississippi River was painstakingly slow as divers navigated debris and coped with low visibility after Wednesday's deadly bridge collapse, officials said.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters notified state transportation departments Thursday to immediately inspect all bridges of the same design as the one that collapsed Wednesday in Minnesota.
The investigation into the failure of the Minneapolis bridge is just beginning, but there are clues behind the collapse
The bag this week encompassed such an embarrassment of riches that I am singling out the one negative voice for E-mailer of the Week honors. And although I have no hand in choosing the headline for this drivel, uh, for this column, may I humbly suggest the following: Gourmet Dining -- Humble Pie. Basically I am the type of person who tends to flog something to death, as all you readers know, and so does The Flaming Redhead. When I'm just getting warmed up on one of my favorite shpiels, I'll hear, sotto voce, "eighth time." This doesn't stop me, of course, but it does serve as a reminder that I'm tiptoeing into the senility pastures that beckon to those of older vintage.
Scores of actors, writers, producers and others from the entertainment industry have contributed to Al Franken's Senate campaign, helping the Minnesota Democrat get off to a strong fundraising start.
ALSO: Eastern Conference Preview
With Kentucky fans dogging him after another disappointing finish, Tubby Smith is bolting the bluegrass for Minnesota.
Note: All statistics are through Sunday.
The $30 billion pharmaceutical industry is always looking for ways to make our bodies hang on to the medications we take. Some drugs for diseases like AIDS need to be taken five times a day, with a...
When Colton Palmer was in grade school, he participated in football, basketball and track. He was such a talent as a runner that at age nine he won a national championship in the 800-meter sprint during an AAU meet at Disney World.
While the bottom feeders in the Eastern Conference are seemingly doing their best to stay out of the playoff race (the difference between a legitimate shot at Greg Oden and a first-round sweep is frighteningly small), their West counterparts are battling for the conference's final two playoff spots.
Note: All statistics are through Sunday.
I feel bad for Kevin Garnett. For the last 11 years Garnett has been the NBA's most complete player this side of Tim Duncan. He plays through injuries (he has missed just 19 games in his career) and inconsistency (his most talented sidekicks have been Latrell Sprewell, Sam Cassell and Wally Szczerbiak), yet aside from one glorious run in 2004, KG has never been past the first round of the playoffs. Why? Two words:
Note: All statistics are through Sunday.
A year ago the Minnesota Timberwolves were 19-21 and hoping to surge into the playoffs when they sent forward Wally Szczerbiak to Boston as part of a seven-player, three-draft-pick deal in which they received swingman Ricky Davis, center Mark Blount and guard Marcus Banks. But their newcomers had a hard time fitting in, and Minnesota went 14-28 thereafter, missing the postseason for a second straight year, which brought ever more criticism upon vice president of basketball operations Kevin McHale.
The coach is always the fall guy.
Employers and their workers often don't speak the same language. A new company called TV Trainer hopes to change that with a series of videos designed to teach Spanish-speaking employees workplace English. But for the Edina, Minn., firm to succeed, it will have to compete against established teaching practices that have been used and tweaked for years. Here's how it stacks up against other teaching tools.
In a political first, a Muslim has been elected to serve in the U.S. Congress.
I drive an electric car. Not a hybrid -- a gasoline-powered car that gets some help from an electric motor -- but a full electric vehicle. I plug it in at night and can drive 100 miles the next day and go faster than 80 mph on the highway.
Established on May 11, 1858, the same day Minnesota joined team U.S.A., onetime cow town Eden Prairie is now a hot spot for businesses and families. Twenty miles southwest of Minneapolis, it has long been home to the families of Twin City sports pros and Fortune 500 execs.
Dissolving dead animals sounds creepy, but for one company it may be a profitable reality. WR[2], a private firm in Indianapolis, has patented a process called alkaline hydrolysis to turn carcasses...
I'm 24 and I've just started a Roth IRA account that I plan to max out every year. I also have about $15,000 in a money-market account for emergencies that I plan to add $50 to every month. If the stock market were to crash 20 years down the road, how much damage could this do to my accounts and is there anyway to protect my investments?
A SOBERING THOUGHT strikes you upon entering the National Center for Food Protection and Defense: This place is not very well defended. Located on the second floor of a red-brick building at the Un...
Would you pay $42 an hour for a nap while shopping? Steev RamsDell, founder of minneNAPolis, is betting $200,000 you'll say, "Yes." Opened last month in Minnesota's Mall of America, minneNAPolis ch...
There's a political scandal waiting to explode.
The mother-daughter writing team of P.J. Tracy (mother P.J. Lambrecht and daughter Traci) hit on a formula a few years ago that sparked a vibrant series in the mystery/thriller realm.
A juvenile has been arrested in connection with last week's school shootings in Red Lake, Minnesota, authorities said Monday.
A student on Monday killed two of his grandparents, then went on a shooting rampage at his Minnesota high school, killing seven people and wounding as many as 13 others before killing himself, officials said.
How reliable is technical analysis as a dependable measure for selecting entry and selling points in a given market?
As Americans prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving, we asked readers to send us their Turkey Day travel tales and thoughts on this special holiday. Here are some of their submissions. Some responses have been edited for clarity and length.
I recently got married and my new husband and I seem to be spending most of our income just trying to pay off our debt. We have stock investments that are about equal in value to our debt, and I'm wondering: Would we be better off just selling our stocks and repaying our debt, or should we leave our stock investments alone and continue to pay our debt down?
The average resident of Minnesota stands a better chance of avoiding smoking, car accidents and obesity than a friend living 900 miles to the south in Tennessee.
We don't live in red and blue states anymore. That's yesterday's wisdom. Today we live in a purple nation, where Hawaii and New Jersey, and maybe even Michigan, are trending toward President Bush, and Ohio and Florida, and maybe even Arkansas, are falling into John Kerry's column. Even Missouri is tightening. Has anyone polled Wyoming recently? What about DC?
A financial adviser has been managing about $400,000 in assets in mutual funds and a few stocks for me since 2001 for a fee of 1 percent of assets per year.
Auto insurers in the United States and Britain are experimenting with programs that put electronic monitoring devices in customers' vehicles to track how they are driving, giving the drivers a chance to obtain lower insurance rates, according to a published report.
This is our fourth annual ranking of the small and the speedy, and each year we've kept our methodology consistent. To identify fast growers, we ask financial research firm Zacks to screen annual r...
[Complete table not available. For the complete FORTUNE 500 list please visit www.fortune500.com]
Four years ago, on the frozen prairies of Manitoba, two young pharmacists, working independently, founded a billion-dollar industry. In the process they created a quandary for global health-care p...
The East Coast braced Tuesday for another beating from the winter storms that glazed roads, delayed flights and caused deadly car crashes across the eastern half of the United States.
With apologies to Warren Zevon, we can sum up this year's FSB 100 in a single phrase: oil, drugs, and money. Those categories--energy, health care, and banking--dominated, constituting a full two-t...
DATA STORAGE Sony Sees Blue Light Blue lasers squeeze much more data onto optical discs than the red lasers found in today's DVD recorders. In Japan, Sony begins selling the BDZ-S77, the first cons...
Who says the best fringe benefit you can expect these days is a paycheck? We found four small companies that give perks to employees regardless of the Dow.
Coronary heart disease kills almost six times more women than breast cancer does. Even so, if you ask a woman what disease she's most afraid of, her answer will likely be breast cancer.
"Break a leg" may be good luck in the theater but not when it comes to osteoporosis. The disease causes bones to become more porous, gradually making them brittle--and it causes 1.5 million fractur...
The symptoms of a heart attack aren't necessarily obvious. People talk of chest pain, but it's usually pressure or a squeezing sensation. This is called angina, and it occurs when blood flow in one...
An informed consumer is the best customer, but have you tried navigating your way through the maze of health information in the news these days?
By now, most people know that the French have a low risk of heart disease despite their high-fat diet. It's called the French paradox, and it's widely believed to result from their generous consump...
Once or twice a week I get a call from a patient who's just heard about a new early-warning test for cancer, heart disease, or some other serious condition and wants to know why my office hasn't ca...
When I hear that a patient has been diagnosed with colon cancer or, worse yet, that the cancer has spread outside the colon, I feel a twinge of pain. Almost all colon cancers are preventable. End o...
Stress is a popular topic. So's prostate cancer. But the thing most of my patients want to talk about is diet. They've all got friends who've lost 20 pounds in two weeks on a steak and bacon-and-eg...
You wouldn't think twice about returning a malfunctioning car you just bought, but what if your new dog is a lemon?
Yes, a virtually indestructible laptop computer is now on the market courtesy of FieldWorks, an Eden Prairie, Minnesota, tech company. Its ruggedness comes from a proprietary rubber-coated magnesiu...
What ethnic group in the U.S. has grown fastest--without the help of immigration? Native Americans, whose numbers soared 137%, to about two million, from 1970 to 1990.
As the april 17 deadline for 1994 individual Retirement Account contributions nears, many banks are trying to woo retirement savers by touting special rates on certificates of deposit for IRAs. New...
This year, in MONEY's eighth annual ranking of the livability in the 300 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, the economic action is resounding in the Southeast, roaring in the Rockies and rolling into...
In January's "Cut These State and Local Taxes," the table that ranked the tax burden in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, starting with the lowest, should have reported Maryland's ranking...
-- You might assume that employees and employers stand on opposite sides in the great debate. As FORTUNE's spring survey of the business mood shows, that's generally true. Polls of the public show ...
Searching for a lost relative need not take years. A search by a licensed private investigator typically costs $400 to $2,000, and P.I.s are wired into extensive databases -- department of motor ve...
"The Best Places to Live Now" incorrectly reported that jobs in the nation had decreased 0.37% from February 1992 to February 1993. They actually increased 0.97%. Also, Dubuque, Iowa, with 86,400 p...
More discipline and higher standards. It sounds like a recipe for military reform, but respondents to MONEY's March Readers' Poll believe it is also the answer to the question we posed: How would y...
-- Bet on the heartland to weather the recession better than the rest of the country by buying a mutual fund that invests in firms based in the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and Wisconsin. IAI...
Almost 80% of MONEYsubscribers with school-age kids gave their local schools either an A or a B on a grading scale that ranged down to F in our poll. Still, if you want to check on your system, sch...
GEORGE BUSH has declared public school choice a ''national imperative.'' Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos calls it ''the cornerstone to restructuring elementary and secondary education'' in Americ...
Q. My husband and I want to retire in 10 years. Our 30-year mortgage has an interest rate of 10% and a remaining principal of $87,000. We figure that for an extra $200 a month, we could pay off the...
Ever since high school, Carrie Olstad, 20, of Mound, Minn. has worked two jobs each summer -- this year, as a snack bar attendant and a playground supervisor -- to support her education. She had to...
A mere fortnight has passed since your correspondent last sounded off on sexual harassment, and yet it is already time to retread this fascinating turf and ponder whether a certain decision in the ...
Women cry more frequently than men in the office. That was . . .the conclusion of a 1983 study by a Minnesota researcher, who found that women in general cried four times as frequently as men . . ....
ST. LOUIS -- A court on Wednesday rejected a suit filed by a couple (whose) house . . . was infested with bats . . . Curtis and Lucinda Hamre of Wilmore, Minnesota . . . (agreed) to buy their home ...
Hundreds of workers crossed picket lines at the Geo. A. Hormel & Co. plant in Austin, Minnesota, but a bitter six-month-old dispute still smoldered between Hormel and Local P-9 of the United Food a...
It was around the 20-minute mark in Down and Out in America, directed and narrated by radical chicster Lee Grant and shown repeatedly on HBO in December, that we suddenly sensed the surfacing of a ...
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