Sabtu, 29 Februari 2020

Companies are canceling US domestic travel over coronavirus fears - msnNOW

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Major companies are beginning to cancel conferences and travel plans within the United States due to the coronavirus, which analysts warn will have cascading impacts on the country’s hotels, airlines and convention centers.

International travel — particularly to Asia — has so far been the hardest-hit part of the industry, though analysts say that could soon change as fears of the coronavirus spread to Europe and North America. Hotels around the country have begun reporting a rise in group cancellations. Some air carriers, including Alaska Airlines and JetBlue Airways, are doing away with cancellation fees as jittery travelers rethink their plans.

“The cancellations are starting to move toward North America,” said Scott Solombrino, executive director of the Global Business Travel Association, which estimates that the slowdown in global travel has already cost American businesses $7 billion this year. “Obviously the concern is that this will have a long-term impact on the U.S. economy.”

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Analysts said wide-scale cancellations — which so far have been concentrated in large cities such as New York, Washington and Los Angeles — are starting to hit smaller U.S. cities, as companies change their internal travel policies.

Workday called off a sales conference in Orlando scheduled for next week, while Google and Facebook canceled multiple events in California and Nevada between March and May. Amazon this week told employees to put off “nonessential travel” in the United States, though it did not offer details on what types of trips would qualify. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Mounting cancellations, analysts said, are likely to have ripple effects throughout the economy, particularly for upscale hotels that rely on group bookings for about one-third of their sales, according to Jan Freitag, senior vice president of lodging insights for STR, a hospitality research firm.

“The most noticeable impact so far has been in group travel, with large conferences around the world being canceled,” he said. “These large group conferences take years and years to plan. If they don’t happen now, there is a good chance they won’t happen at all.”

Executives at Marriott International, the world’s largest hotel chain, said this week that group bookings in the United States have started to take a hit. The Bethesda-based hospitality giant said much of the impact so far has been concentrated in Asia, where it has 800 hotels.

“To date, we have not yet seen a significant impact in the U.S., and our first quarter is off to a solid start, but the situation is fluid,” Leeny Oberg, Marriott’s chief financial officer, told CNBC on Wednesday. “We have seen a handful of citywide cancellations.”

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Booking Holdings, which owns Priceline, Booking.com and Kayak, said this week that it expects hotel room bookings to fall as much as 10 percent this quarter because of the coronavirus.

Shares of hotel companies and airlines plunged this week, as coronavirus-related fears led global markets to post their worst weekly losses since the Great Recession. Shares of Marriott and InterContinental Hotels Group fell about 9 percent apiece, while American Airlines and Jet Blue posted declines of more than 20 percent. Expedia Group, meanwhile, posted a 13 percent drop in share price.

“Every day we think we could be near a bottom, and every day we are not,” Helane Becker, an airline industry analyst for Cowen, wrote in a note to clients this week. “The virus has spread, and the question is how much do people change their travel plans.”

Hostelling International USA, which oversees nearly 50 properties around the country, said group cancellations are on the rise. Individual travelers, though, are “so far going strong,” spokeswoman Netanya Trimboli said.

The company is taking extra precautions by training employees on how to properly clean surfaces and encouraging them to stay home if they feel sick. New signs at its hostels remind guests to wash their hands and cough into their elbows.

Other hotels also report stalling demand, as Americans put off travel plans. But analysts say the largest impact on the hospitality market could come from a slowdown of Chinese visitors, who last year contributed $34 billion to the U.S. economy, according to Philadelphia-based Tourism Economics. Chinese visitors typically spend about $6,000 and spend an average of 15 nights in a hotel while in the United States, the firm said. It expects the number of Chinese travelers to the United States to drop by 25 percent this year.

“Right now there’s a lot of uncertainty,” said Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics. “It’s shaping up to be very similar to SARS, when we saw very severe impacts.”

This time, he said, could be worse: Visits from China to the United States have grown nearly 13-fold since 2002, making a possible coronavirus outbreak much more devastating to the U.S. economy than the SARS epidemic was in 2003.

“Reservations are at a standstill,” said Kim Lee, who handles sales at Arc The.Hotel, a boutique property in Washington’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, where multiple groups have canceled reservations in recent weeks. “We’ve seen a real decline.

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2020-02-29 17:14:00Z
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The Dow is up 38% since Trump's election, down from 61% in a matter of days amid sell-off - CNBC

Donald Trump

Carlo Allegri | Reuters

The week's blistering stock sell-off has slashed the Dow Jones Industrial Average's gains since President Donald Trump's election.

What was once a 61% Dow gain just 16 days ago on Feb. 12 has eroded to a far thinner 38.6% rally as the index fell from an all-time high of 29,568 to around 25,409. The gain in the Dow is just 28.8% if you measure from Trump's inauguration day more than three years ago.

These calculations measure the percent price change of the Dow over a given period and exclude fixed returns like dividends.

The dramatic fall in Dow (and S&P 500) gains since the president's election came after the single worst week on Wall Street since the financial crisis. 

For the week, the Dow fell more than 3,500 points, or 12%, in its biggest weekly percentage loss since 2008. The blue-chip index ended the week firmly in correction territory, down more than 14% from its record close notched earlier this month.

The S&P 500 lost 11.5% over the week and, as such, also clinched its worst weekly performance since the crisis and closed in a correction. The typical correction sees the S&P 500 fall 13.7% and usually takes four months to recover.

Despite the hefty near-40% gain Trump still has, he is irate at the sell-off, according to CNBC sources. The stock market is falling amid growing concerns over the coronavirus and its potential impact on the global economy.

The president blamed both the threat of 2020 Democratic candidates as well as the coronavirus for the week's steep declines. The president said on Wednesday that he believes "quite a bit" of the sell-off was thanks to investor fears over Democratic candidates' radical economic and policy ideas expressed during this week's debate.

"I think [investors] look at the people that you watched debating last night and they say 'if there's even a possibility'" a Democrat is elected the economy will decline, Trump said on Wednesday. "I think the financial markets are very upset when they look at the Democrat candidates standing on that stage making fools out of themselves."

The president even went so far on Friday as to categorize the criticism of his administration's response to the disease a new "hoax" cooked up by Democrats hoping to oust him from office in the 2020 presidential election.

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2020-02-29 16:13:00Z
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Market Correction: What You Should Know - Seeking Alpha

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  1. Market Correction: What You Should Know  Seeking Alpha
  2. Markets plunge in worst 1-day drop in history on coronavirus fears l ABC News  ABC News
  3. These are the only 7 stocks in the S&P 500 that rose while the market plunged  MarketWatch
  4. The S&P 500 is plunging at unprecedented speed  CNN
  5. Wall Street has worst week since 2008 as S&P 500 drops 11.5%  SF Gate
  6. View Full Coverage on Google News

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2020-02-29 14:35:00Z
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Trader Joe's founder Joe Coulombe dies at 89 - New York Post

The original Trader Joe has died.

Joe Coulombe, the national supermarket chain founder, died Friday at his Pasadena, Calif. home following a long illness, his son Joseph told The Associated Press. The supermarketer was 89.

Trader Joe’s wasn’t Coulombe’s first foray into the supermarket biz. The lifelong Californian, who owned a chain of 18 convenience stores called Pronto Markets, realized his shops couldn’t compete when the better-funded 7/11 entered L.A. in 1967.

The two-time Stanford grad noted some national trends — increased education levels and interest in international foods. He also learned those with more schooling drink more booze, according to The New York Times.

Coulombe infused his Pronto Markets with the trends he saw, and Trader Joe’s was born.

“Trader Joe’s is for overeducated and underpaid people, for all the classical musicians, museum curators, journalists,” Coloumbe told the Los Angeles Times in 2011.

He opened his first tropical-themed store in Pasadena in 1967, where he emphasized affordable, healthy foods — a legacy that lives on today in more than 500 Trader Joe’s shops spanning 40 states.

The original Trader Joe's grocery store
The original Trader Joe’s grocery storeAP Photo/Chris Pizzello

Coloumbe “did lots of taste tests … always the aim was to provide good food and good value to people,” his son said.

He was able to keep costs of high-quality goods low by buying them directly from wholesalers and putting the Trader Joe’s label on his products.

Coloumbe did extensive research on products like his infamous “Two Buck Chuck” wines, which he sourced from Napa Valley — scouring for a grape that tasted comparable to more expensive French versions.

Although Coloumbe sold Trader Joe’s to German supermarket company Aldi in 1979, he remained CEO until 1988.

He is survived by his wife of 67 years Alice, three children and six grandchildren.

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2020-02-29 14:19:00Z
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As New Coronavirus Cases Slow In China, Factories Start Reopening - NPR

Workers wear protective face masks at the Yanfeng Adient factory in Shanghai, where car seats are assembled, on Feb. 24. Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

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As new cases of coronavirus infection slow in China, the country is gradually getting back to work. Authorities and businesses are taking a range of measures: Local governments are chartering buses for workers. Some companies are buying out entire hotels to house quarantined staff. A temporarily shuttered movie studio is even loaning employees to factories that are short on labor.

Strict quarantine measures designed to stop the spread of the new coronavirus prevented nearly 300 million migrant workers from returning to their jobs, shutting down one of the largest economies in the world for nearly three weeks and paralyzing global supply chains.

Now the government is advising local officials to balance seemingly contradictory mandates: use all methods possible to limit the further spread of a deadly new virus while meeting annual economic growth targets.

Earlier this month, at a top-level political meeting, China's leader Xi Jinping called for an all-out "people's war" against the deadly virus. But at the same meeting, he also urged officials to continue to "reach goals and tasks of economic and social development this year."

And so, beginning last week, factories across China started slowly reopening. At least eight provinces and regions downgraded their emergency levels, loosening the most draconian restrictions on movement to allow people to leave their homes and return to work. But the biggest bottleneck continues to be a shrunken workforce, as many returning workers must be quarantined for two weeks before entering factories.

A late-February survey by the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing found that 45% of firms surveyed had "no way to resume work," mostly due to labor shortages. Just 11% predicted their production capacity would reach between 80% and 100% by the end of February.

China's purchasing managers' index, a measure compiled by China's state statistics agency and an industry group that measures manufacturing and service sector activity, plunged to 35.7 in February from January's 50. The index is on a 100-point scale; numbers below 50 indicate activity contracting.

According to the European and German chambers of commerce, 59% of their member companies in China responding to an internal survey claimed the outbreak and China's containment measures have had a "high impact" on their businesses; 48% said they would lower their financial outlook by more than 10% for the first half of 2020.

Another survey, released Thursday by the American Chamber of Commerce in China, found that nearly a third of American firms surveyed are facing increased costs and sinking revenues as a result of disruptions to operations and travel.

A migrant worker has his temperature taken on Feb. 25 after arriving on a chartered "point-to-point" bus from Henan, at a factory in Zouping, in China's Shandong province. Many enterprises are arranging chartered transport to enable employees to return to work. STR/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

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Especially for large-scale companies that are integral to global supply chains, time is of the essence. One such company is Ningbo Xusheng Auto Technology, which manufactures machine parts for European and American cars in the Chinese port city of Ningbo, in Zhejiang province.

"Our clients are international, and they didn't stop operations during the outbreak. Unlike other companies who sell to Chinese clients, who all had to shut down, we really have to get back to work," Cloud Zhao, a Xusheng sales director, tells NPR. The factory is now running at 80% of its pre-virus operating capacity, Zhao says, after going through an expedited permit process with local authorities.

All businesses must navigate a lengthy list of requirements to obtain permission from local authorities to reopen. First, Xusheng provided officials with a full list of employees, which in turn was vetted using "big data methods," says Zhao. Then workers had to enter their national ID numbers and phone numbers into a new provincial app created as part of virus control efforts, which identifies the cities and provinces they visited in the previous two weeks. Xusheng Auto must quarantine for two weeks anyone who spent time in a heavily infected area, before allowing them to enter the factory.

To protect healthy workers, the automaker also had to show teams of inspectors that it is stocked with masks and disinfectants, and has enough space to serve as quarantine wards.

Michael Chen, a manager at an electronics manufacturing plant in the neighboring province of Jiangsu, says his company has rented an entire hotel — now empty because there are no travelers — to quarantine his returning workers. His plant, normally staffed by around 2,000 workers, is back up to 70% of its pre-virus operation levels, he says, but revenues likely will only be about half what they were before the outbreak.

"Our sales have been badly hit. It has been a big hassle," says Chen. "It is not that demand is actually down, but some of our supply chains are not coming back, especially if they are in Hubei province." Hubei is the epicenter of China's coronavirus outbreak, where most of the coronavirus' 2,800-plus deaths have occurred.

Workers wear protective face masks as they sew shoe parts at the Zhejiang Xuda Shoes Co. factory in Wenzhou, China, on Feb. 27. Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

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Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images

Chen says every week he has to buy thousands of surgical masks — which now cost three times the normal price — for his workers. The city of Kunshan, where Chen works, chartered buses to ferry workers back to work, but Chen says there were not enough: "You have to mainly rely on yourself. A lot of this is outward-oriented propaganda. In reality, the measures were not enough."

Last weekend, Xi gave a teleconferenced speech to 170,000 officials, promising the economic impact on would be "short-lived." China's central bank has also said it will make it easier for small- and medium-sized businesses to take out loans or repay debt, perhaps even cut taxes, but more specific measures haven't been spelled out yet.

"We haven't received very specific policies of how the central or local government will support private businesses, but we trust that they are also waiting for more specific information," said Zhao, of Xusheng Auto.

Chucheng Feng, a partner in the political risk firm Plenum, says over-centralization of power in China's political system means policy can move slowly: "It takes time, province to province, to comprehend what Xi Jinping is talking about. Especially lower-ranking officials, they don't have incentives to work on their own, because the risk is if they are at odds with central policy, from central decision making, they may be purged."

Calls by the central government to ease access to loans and delay paying off corporate debts are also a sharp reversal from earlier instructions passed on to local governments. "They've been told the entire year to focus on poverty alleviation, to focus on financial de-risking, which means they were originally under the impression to lower credit," explains Feng.

Even if business owners manage to secure reopening permits, widespread labor shortages are still hampering full resumption of national production. Research released this week on Henan province, a major source of migrant labor for industrial hubs like Beijing and the Pearl River Delta, indicated that only 5% of migrant workers have been able to leave.

To address the labor shortfall, regional authorities are promoting a plan they've dubbed "employee-sharing," which allows firms to borrow workers from places that remain shut down.

The Hengdian Group, a large private enterprise in Zhejiang province, resumed production in two of its factories in February after bringing employees from a subsidiary company — Hengdian World Studios, the world's largest film and television production site that doubles as a sprawling theme park — to work on the assembly lines. Employees who used to sell tickets at the theme park are now sorting and packing Hengdian's magnetic and lighting goods.

According to Chinese state media, over 1,000 studio workers were temporarily hired to help with factory production, including to Apeloa Pharmaceuticals, another Hengdian subsidiary. But when reached by phone, an Apeloa administrator told NPR that hadn't happened.

"It would take too long to train" studio workers, he explained, "because they are unskilled and unsuitable for the technical tasks required in our factory lines."

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2020-02-29 13:03:00Z
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Joe Coulombe, founder of Trader Joe’s, dies - Boston.com

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Joe Coulombe envisioned a new generation of young grocery shoppers emerging in the 1960s, one that wanted healthy, tasty, high-quality food they couldn’t find in most supermarkets and couldn’t afford to buy in the few high-end gourmet outlets.

So he found a new way to bring everything from a then-exotic snack food called granola to the California-produced wines that for flavor compared with anything from France. And he made shopping for them almost as much fun as sailing the high seas when he created Trader Joe’s, a quirky little grocery store filled with nautical themes and staffed not by managers and clerks but by “captains and mates.”

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From the time he opened his first store in Pasadena, California, in 1967 until his death Friday at age 89, Coulombe watched his namesake business rise from a cult favorite of educated but underpaid young people — and a few hippies — to a retail giant with more than 500 outlets in over 40 states.

A giant yes, but one that across more than half a century has never lost its reputation for friendly service from employees decked out in goofy Hawaiian shirts, a newsletter that looks like it was published in the 1890s, and rows and rows of high-quality, moderately priced healthy food and great wine, even if you sometimes can’t ever again find exactly the same thing.

“He wanted to make sure whatever was sold in our store was of good value,” said Coulombe’s son, also named Joe, who added that his father died following a long illness. “He always did lots of taste tests. My sisters and I remember him bringing home all kinds of things for us to try. At his offices he had practically daily tastings of new products. Always the aim was to provide good food and good value to people.”

He achieved that by buying directly from wholesalers and cutting out the middleman, in many cases slapping the name Trader Joe’s on a bag of nuts, trail mix, organic dried mango, honey-oat cereal or Angus beef chili. He named several products after his daughters Charlotte and Madeleine and gave quirky names to others. Among them were Trader Darwin vitamins and a non-alcoholic sparkling juice called Eve’s Apple Sparkled by Adam.

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He prided himself on checking out every vintage of wine from California’s Napa Valley, including Trader Joe’s standby, Charles Shaw, affectionately known as Two-Buck Chuck because it sold for $1.99. (It still does in the California stores, although shipping costs have increased the price in other states.)

“He sold a lot of better wines too,” his son noted with a laugh, recalling trips the family made to France to seek them out.

After selling Trader Joe’s to German grocery retailer Aldi in 1979, Coulombe remained as its CEO until 1988, when he left to launch a second career as what he called a “temp,” coming in as interim CEO or consultant for several large companies in transition. He retired in 2013.

Joseph Hardin Coulombe, an only child, was born on June 3, 1930, in San Diego and lived on an avocado ranch in nearby Del Mar. After serving in the Air Force, he attended Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics, a master’s in business administration and met and married his wife, Alice.

A few years after graduation, he was hired by the Rexall drugstore chain, which tasked him with establishing a chain of convenience stores called Pronto. When Rexall lost interest in the stores, he bought them and had grown the chain to about a dozen outlets when the huge 7-Eleven company made a major push into Southern California.

“So I had to do something different,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2014. “Scientific American had a story that of all people qualified to go to college, 60% were going. I felt this newly educated — not smarter but better-educated — class of people would want something different, and that was the genesis of Trader Joe’s.”

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His wife’s parents had introduced him to a world of foods previously unfamiliar to him, including fine olive oil, fresh seafood and inexpensive quality wine, and he figured things like that would be perfect for the younger audience he was seeking.

As he bargained for those products, he’d sometimes come across a particularly exceptional olive oil or vintage wine, never to find it again, and he wouldn’t stock an inferior product in its place.

He eschewed promotional gimmicks like loyalty clubs or loss-leader sales, getting the word out with brief radio spots and the Trader Joe’s “Fearless Flyer” newsletter, whose old-style appearance was inspired by another money-saving effort. He wanted to dress up the newsletter’s stories with illustrations he cut out of magazines, but he made sure he only took ones on which the copyrights had expired.

He passed such savings on not only to his customers but employees, which Trader Joe’s boasts are among retail’s best compensated, with medical, dental, vision and retirement plans and annual salary increases the company says range from 7% to 10%. Many workers have remained with Trader Joe’s for decades.

“He just had a visit yesterday from employee No. 1,” his daughter Charlotte said shortly before her father’s death.

He and his wife also became well known in Southern California philanthropic circles, contributing time and money to such causes as Planned Parenthood, the Los Angeles Opera and the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens.

Stories differ on how the name Trader Joe’s came about, with some saying it was inspired by a ride on Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise boat or a book he read called “White Shadows in the South Seas” or his favorite college hangout being a Trader Vic’s bar near Stanford.

Coulombe, who loved to travel, did acknowledge over the years that he had a fascination with the South Seas and put Trader into the name and a nautical theme inside the stores to lend that exotic appeal to customers.

In addition to his three children and wife of 67 years, Coulombe is survived by six grandchildren.

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2020-02-29 12:47:12Z
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Joe Coulombe, Who Founded Trader Joe’s, Dies at 89 - The New York Times

Joseph Coulombe, who in 1967 parsed a few cultural trends, added his retail instincts and created Trader Joe’s, the popular grocery chain known for unusual foods, a generous wine selection and a laid-back atmosphere, died on Friday at his home in Pasadena, Calif.. He was 89.

The death was confirmed by his son, Joseph.

In the mid-1960s Mr. Coulombe (pronounced coo-LOAM) owned a modest chain of convenience stores in the Los Angeles area, Pronto Markets, but began to realize he couldn’t compete with better-financed convenience chains like 7-Eleven.

He had noted that education levels in the United States were increasing and that Boeing was planning a new plane, the 747, that he thought would mean more international travel and thus more interest among Americans in exotic foods. He also read somewhere that the more education people had, the more alcohol they drank.

He fashioned those and other tidbits into Trader Joe’s, opening the first store in Pasadena, Calif. He gave it a South Seas motif, had employees wear tropical shirts and be extra friendly, and included exotic cheeses and foods from afar among the stock for the adventurous palate.

“I had no choice,” Mr. Coulombe told Supermarket News in 2002. “I had to do something different.”

Soon he was emphasizing natural foods, organic foods and other “green” trends and had launched Trader Joe’s own label for numerous products, many of them at low prices.

He envisioned the stores as being “for overeducated and underpaid people, for all the classical musicians, museum curators, journalists,” as he put it in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2011.

The founding sensibility remained as the chain grew. By the time Mr. Coulombe retired in 1988 (having sold his interest to the German company Aldi Nord in 1979 but having remained at the helm), there were either 19 or, by some accounts, 27 stores in Southern California.

His successor as chief executive, John V. Shields Jr., took the chain national. When the first Trader Joe’s opened in New York City in 2006, it was the 253rd. Today, according to the company’s website, there are more than 500.

The chain’s distinctive spot in the grocery landscape is evident from the way Mr. Coulombe’s creation has been described over the years.

“He grafted the gourmet store onto the convenience store onto the health food store onto the liquor store,” Los Angeles Magazine said in 2011.

“Equal parts gourmet shop, discount warehouse and Tiki trading post,” The New York Times said in 2014.

And Fortune magazine, in 2010, described Trader Joe’s as “an offbeat, fun discovery zone that elevates food shopping from a chore to a cultural experience.”

Whatever the description, for Mr. Coulombe the key was keeping the focus on the target group he originally envisioned, those “overeducated, underpaid” consumers eager for healthy products at a good price.

“What you want is a coherent group of customers,” he told Investor’s Business Daily in 1998, “and you shape yourself around it.”

Joseph Hardin Coulombe was born on June 3, 1930, in San Diego. His father, also named Joseph, was an engineer at Convair, an aircraft manufacturer, and his mother, Carmelita (Hardin) Coulombe, was a teacher. Although he would make his mark with stores known for interesting, healthy foods, the cuisine of his childhood, he told Los Angeles Magazine, was dominated by New England boiled dinners, a legacy of his paternal grandmother, and bacon-fat-heavy “Southern suicide cuisine” from his mother’s side of the family.

Mr. Coulombe graduated from San Diego High School in 1947 and earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at Stanford. He also served a year in the Air Force.

After earning a master’s degree at Stanford in 1954, he went to work for the drugstore chain Rexall, which set him to the task of developing a chain of convenience stores. His preparation for that included driving his family around the various neighborhoods of Los Angeles, studying the demographics and possible locations. His son recalled learning to count by counting parking spaces at potential sites.

He had six Pronto Markets up and running when Rexall changed directions and told him to liquidate them; instead he borrowed money and bought them himself, leaving Rexall. He had grown the chain to 18 stores when 7-Eleven set its sights on the Los Angeles market.

“They were so huge, I decided I’d better get the hell out of convenience-store retailing,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1987.

Mr. Coulombe prided himself on paying his employees well and on an ever-changing display, one of the things that set him apart from supermarkets.

“We deliberately pursued a policy of discontinuity, as opposed to, say, Coca-Cola, which is in infinite supply,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2011. “For example, we had the only vintage-dated, field-specific canned corn in existence, and it was the best damned canned corn there was. But there was only so much produced every year, and when you’re out, you’re out.”

In addition to his son, Mr. Coulombe is survived by his wife, Alice (Steere) Coulombe, whom he met when both were students at Stanford and married in 1952; two daughters, Charlotte Schoenmann and Madeleine Coulombe; and six grandchildren.

Another point of pride for Mr. Coulombe was that someone taste-tested what he sold. Sometimes it was a staff member. Often it was Mr. Coulombe himself.

“I must sample about 4,000 wines a year,” he told The New York Times in 1987. “Of course, we don’t buy them all.”

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

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2020-02-29 11:25:00Z
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China economic activity plunges as coronavirus hit intensifies - South China Morning Post

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2020-02-29 11:00:05Z
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