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© St. Petersburg Times, published January 10, 2003
GROCERY STORES TO CLOSE: Belgian supermarket retailer Delhaize plans to close 42 underperforming Food Lion and Kash n' Karry stores in the United States. The company said 41 underperforming Food Lion stores will be closed by Jan. 31, as well as one Kash n' Karry store. The stores being closed will be identified this month. The company has 1,228 Food Lion stores in 11 states and 138 Kash n' Karry stores, all in Florida.
PROGRESSIVE OPENS TRAINING CENTER: Progressive, the fourth-largest auto insurer in the country, has opened an expanded claims training center in Tampa. The 67,000-square-foot facility at 9445 Camden Field Parkway has more than twice the training capacity of the location Progressive is replacing, a Sabal Park center opened in 1995. Progressive said it will train up to 3,500 claims representatives a year at the center, up from 1,500 a year currently. The Tampa facility, one of three such centers the insurer operates nationwide, uses damaged cars and computer-based classroom training to teach representatives.
DELTA PLANS LAYOFFS: Delta Air Lines said it will lay off about 4,000 employees who did not accept voluntary offers to leave the company. In October, Delta said it would cut 7,000 to 8,000 jobs. About 3,900 employees have accepted voluntary severance packages and early retirement offers. The rest will be laid off. Most of the job cuts will be completed by May 1.
BEST BUY TO SHUT STORES: Best Buy Co., the nation's largest electronics chain, closed 90 mall-based Sam Goody music and 20 Suncoast video stores, which are part of its Musicland unit. The company said it closed the stores because of a decline in sales of prerecorded music and a slowdown in customer traffic at malls. .
U.S. SUES TENET: The Justice Department sued Tenet Healthcare for up to $323-million, accusing the nation's second-largest hospital chain of overcharging Medicare for certain procedures to inflate its revenue. The Justice lawsuit said Tenet, based in Santa Barbara, Calif., improperly assigned diagnosis codes for hospital stays so it would receive higher reimbursements than it was entitled to between 1992 and 1998. Tenet owns Seven Rivers Community Hospital in Crystal River.
CVS REACHES SETTLEMENT: Drug store chain CVS Corp. said it has reached a settlement with several states over billing practices for so-called partial-fill prescriptions. A partial-fill prescription occurs when a pharmacy only partly fills a prescription because it doesn't have the full amount of medication. However, patients are sometimes billed for the entire amount. Under the settlement, CVS agreed to pay $1.1-million to be divided among 18 states and the District of Columbia.
CORPORATE GOVERNANCE PROPOSAL: A business group looking at ways to restore trust in corporate America recommended that the jobs of chief executive and chairman be held by different people, or that companies establish an independent director to maintain a better balance of power. The report from the Conference Board's commission on public trust and private enterprise said the ultimate responsibility for good corporate governance rests with a company's board of directors.
ECHOSTAR TO RAISE RATES: Satellite-television broadcaster EchoStar Communications Corp. said its Dish Network satellite TV service will increase basic rates by $2 a month Feb. 1. The rate increase is to cover rising programming costs and the introduction of new channels, the company said.
INVENTORIES CLIMB: Wholesale inventories rose in November for the fifth time in the past six months, led by increases in autos and metals, government figures showed. Inventories were up 0.2 percent to $284.5-billion after falling a revised 0.5 percent in October, the Commerce Department said.
PENSION COSTS TO CLIMB AT GM: General Motors Corp. said the cost of its underfunded pension will triple to $3-billion this year because of declining returns on assets invested on behalf of retirees, hurting earnings in 2003. The company, whose $76-billion pension obligation is the biggest among U.S. companies, cut the expected growth rate for assets in its retirement account from 10 percent to 9 percent.