Primo Water Corporation released their quarterly results and once again were unable to post a profit selling water. Granted I’m pushing a bit of a joke here in wondering if you can drive trucks around town selling customers water for profit, I’m sure somebody out there does just that. In fact Primo actually sold almost thirty million dollars in water and services.

What always gets me though about these types of reports is the year after year reporting of losses meaning year after year a company couldn’t make money selling their product yet year after year they are able to stay in business. I can remember from years back being told by an accountant that the first rule of any business is to not make a profit because profit means you pay Uncle Sam more money.

Click here for the text of the 2014 earning conference call.

Sounds like fuel cost and low expected sales cost Greensboro and Beer Snobs the chance at a 60 million dollar brewery and brew pub as Stone Brewing will not be coming to Greensboro.

“anticipated fuel costs automatically locked North and South Carolina out of contention,”

http://www.bizjournals.com/triad/blog/2014/07/stone-brewing-passes-over-greensboro-for-60m-east.html

Boy saw this coming from a mile away. Make your own opinion as I won’t bother repeating the reporting from The Journal

http://www.journalnow.com/news/local/city-council-approves-new-financing-deal-for-ballpark/article_ff1f310a-bebb-11e3-82c6-0017a43b2370.html

I cannot even believe this story but it appears the Planning Board is about to approve a new Walmart Grocery Store on Country Club near the intersection of Country Club and Meadowlark. Anyone with half a brain knows that Country Club cannot support any more traffic than it already has especially during peak travel times. With the numerous wreaks on 421 between Peace Haven and Lewisville-Clemmons Road Country Club becomes the backup for many of those living in the Lewisville area. On top of this you have a blind curve, a hill which has an abundance of accidents on it during bad weather and an Elementary School less than half a mile away.

What fool thinks it’s a good idea to increase traffic density by building another grocery store in an area that has three grocery stores within two miles and four more in under three miles?!

Apparently the Planning Board Staff does so if you want to voice your opinions I suggest you make sure they are heard quickly.

Journal article on rezoning .

Planning Board Staff and Numbers.

Gary Roberts, Project Planner, Winston-Salem Planning Board [email protected]

Listening to a broken record? Just maybe as Winston-Salem has approved $2.25 million in incentives to Herbalife is they decide to move into the old Dell plant. The County and State are looking at adding at least another $10 million to that pot. I guess there is some logic to paying another company to come move into a building vacated by the last major business you paid to move here considering that last one, Dell, did not ever meet it’s hiring projections and closed within no time as the PC market was already dying long before the plant even opened up.

I will give Herbalife credit that as a business it has remained stable for a pretty long time but do we really need to pay businesses to open businesses? If we do isn’t there some major flaw in the environment you have have created to begin with and maybe that should be addressed?

Bankruptcy Trustee Edwin Allman III asked for and received permission to destroy some 1,300 boxes of employee records as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. The records which contain employment records were used to determine pay and benefits owed by the bankrupt company.

The records themselves were apparently removed from the company location in the final days by Lee Booth which we have mentioned before and were recovered after Allman took over as trustee.

The Employment benefits portion of the bankruptcy have been closed with the rest of the case to close later this month and a final hearing to be around the end of the year.

Primo Water Corporation released their Second Quarter 2012 numbers and to say the least the stock market nor the analyst were impressed. The stock hit a 52 week low by breaking the $1 mark trading as low as 0.96 before recovering by the end of the week to $1.20. Primo did report advancing water and dispensers sales however took almost a one million dollar loss on it’s Flavorstation product, a carbonated flavored water dispenser.

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Since it’s IPO the stock has not any major upswing in price and gone nowhere but down since August 2011. It continues to face strong pressure as analyst have not been impressed and even made a rather negative comment during the conference call which is all but unheard of.� In reference to Prim’s comments during the conference call that Primo was going to concentrate on it’s core water business through the dispensers and refill locations analyst Jim Duffy responded, “I look forward to that flawless execution, because we haven’t seen it yet, Billy.” Primo also still faces a Class Action by investors claiming the company or it’s executives made false and misleading statements about the company’s financials.

The Complaint names Primo Water, certain of its officers and directors and the underwriters of the Offerings as defendants and alleges they have violated the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The Complaint alleges that during the Class Period, defendants’ positive statements about the Company were lacking in a reasonable basis of fact and were materially false and misleading when made. Specifically, (a) neither demand nor sales of the Company’s products were as robust as represented; (b) stores owned by the Company’s largest retail customers did not carry the Company’s products so the Company was not generating any revenue from those locations; (c) the Company’s growth and business prospects were heavily dependent upon the ability of the Company’s two largest customers to sell products from other, unrelated companies before those customers would order products from Primo Water; (d) the Company’s primary retail customers would not be in position to order any of the Company’s products until after those retail customers cleared out other inventory sitting on their shelves, including inventory related to products sold by competitors to the Company; (e) the Company’s largest retail customers had delayed promotions of the Company’s products, which negatively impacted the Company’s sales; (f) the Company’s growth rate had slowed and would be slower for the rest of 2011, if not beyond; and (g) the Company would not meet the financial guidance it provided to investors.

The Street.com

In a spat over money Time Warner has dropped WXII from your cable lineup. If you did not notice on Tuesday WXI was replaced by WBRE out of Wilkes-Barre, PA. This boils down to Time Warner being unable to negotiate a new contract with Hearst Television over rebroadcast fees. Time Warner of course says the fee increase wanted by Hearst is unreasonable while Hearst says it is inline with cost and other contracts they have.

If you have a digital TV with a Digital TV Antenna you may be able to watch WXII “over the air” but due to the changes from old school TV signals we have used for decades to the new digital spectrum your reception could vary greatly depending on where you live. Digital signals do not travel as far and are very line of sight so putting a small digital antenna on that basement TV is probably not going to work. The other problem is most TV’s must be set to “cable” or “antenna” requiring you to switch your TV to antenna, search for channels then finally view the available channels and repeating the whole process when you switch back to cable.

Of course now we have Nexstar Broadcasting which owns the Wilkes-Barre station is now saying Time Warner has misappropriated their broadcast and is threatening to take action against Time Warner for using it’s signal for viewing in the Winston-Salem market. One has to remember who gets to view what content is governed by a host of contracts between the various cable, TV, broadcasting companies and so forth. Just because WBRE is an NBC affiliate does not mean the money has changed hands to allow another market (Winston-Salem) to view a professional basketball game being broadcast in Pennsylvania’s market. There are other money considerations right down to the commercials being broadcast, those drug advertisements are very targeted to specific markets and they pay huge sums of money to air their adverts to specific, agreed upon market segments, do they get a free ride to now be broadcast in Winston-Salem or does the rebroadcasting of the Wilkes-Barre station require new contracts. These are the types of things being discussed and argued in these negations and in the meantime local citizens are in general unable to view local content and news.