Payless Shoesource Files Chapter 11, Closes 400 Stores
Payless Shoesource is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The family footwear giant also announced plans to close nearly 400 stores nationwide as part of a restructuring plan. Once that’s done, the company expects to cut its debt in half and focus on global growth and online expansion.
What does 400 stores closing mean exactly? Payless operates nearly 44-hundred stores in more than 30 countries. The company says they’re looking to "optimize its store footprint, with the immediate closure of nearly 400 underperforming locations in the U.S. and Puerto Rico." And by the way? That’s better than two months ago when the company planned to shutter 1000 stores.
Source: USA Today
Amazon Wins The Bidding War For NFL “Thursday Night Football” Stream-The nation’s most popular sport has just found yet another way to make big money.
The NFL's "Thursday Night Football" is coming to Amazon. Amazon announced late yesterday that it's won the streaming rights for the Thursday night prime-time games. The games will be available exclusively to Amazon Prime subscribers.
The web giant beat out Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for the streaming rights. Amazon will pay 50-million dollars to stream next season's ten Thursday night games. That's a big jump from the 10-million dollars Twitter paid to stream the games last season.
The deal is part of Amazon’s plan to get more into livestreaming sports. The deal, though is not an exclusive one, CBS and NBC, which host the game TV broadcasts are also allowed to stream them as is Verizon to its customers.Source: Recode
Today is National Caramel Day
April 5th is National Caramel Day! What exactly are caramels? These ooey gooey bits of deliciousness are made by adding milk and butter to sugar over heat. Once warmed and combined, it’s stirred constantly until it reaches a light brown color.
In the United States, caramelized sugar and water were blended to make candies as early as the seventeenth century – not surprising as it was very inexpensive to produce. Around 1850, someone discovered that by adding milk and a fat product (like butter) to the cooked sugar mixture that a soft chewy candy would be produced. This candy very quickly became popular.
These days, caramel is used as everything from syrup to a dessert topping, as well as an ingredient in a variety of desserts. Made thin enough, it can also be used as the glue holding together nuts and popcorn. Cooked thicker and more solid, it’s perfect for caramel apples. Cooked to a higher temperature, caramel can become brittle and is perfect for just that kind of candy making.
Restaurant Sees Brisk Business After Child Ban
A ban on children in one North Carolina restaurant has turned into a great business move.
A North Carolina restaurant is seeing a surge in reservations since imposing a ban on children under five years old. Caruso's is an upscale Italian eatery in Mooresville and decided to impose the ban after asking a family to leave when their daughter refused to turn down the volume on her iPad. Her parents refused to take control of the situation, so out they went.
Though that iPad incident was the last straw, it took a lot of complaints to finally impose the ban. “I had several customers complain, get up and leave because children were bothering them, and the parents were doing nothing,” Caruso’s owner says. “It started to feel like it wasn’t Caruso’s anymore, that it was a local pizzeria instead.”
The kids' ban went into effect in January, and since then sales have skyrocketed. Caruso's is reporting about 80 diners a day at the restaurant, up from around 50 a day prior to the ban.Source: Washington Post
THIS Is How Many Steps We Should Be Walking Every Day
In your quest to get in shape, you got yourself a Fitbit. And it’s a great tool to help you track your steps, but just how many should you be walking every day to be healthy? According to a new study, the magic number is 15,000 steps a day - which is somewhere around three hours of walking!
To come up with their number, researchers in England actually measured the waist sizes, BMI, blood sugar levels, and cholesterol levels of post office workers in Scotland, who spend a lot of time walking every day. And compared to their coworkers stuck in an office all day, the walkers were healthier, which isn’t surprising at all. They had better metabolic rates and no increased risk of heart disease, compared to those sitting a lot more.
But 15,000 steps is a lot of walking. So how do we log that many, if our job doesn’t have us walking all day? Little things like parking your car farther away in the parking lot, taking the stairs instead of an elevator, and walking around as you talk on the phone can help those steps add up. And even if you don’t hit 15,000, you’ll be walking more than before, which can only help.
Source: PureWow
The Eclipse Will Be Live Streamed From 100,000 Feet
If you want to watch the Solar Eclipse, you're in luck! NASA is teaming up with online video platform Stream to help you see the eclipse from 100,000 feet. More than 50 high altitude balloons will help capture the August 21st event.
Why is this cool? This eclipse will be the first total solar eclipse to be livestreamed using a high altitude platform!
What's even cooler? According to Stream's CMO, Will Jamieson, there will be 57 teams launching balloons at the same time to capture the absolute best view possible.
Follow NASA on Facebook for more on when and where exactly you can watch this ‘out of this world’ event!
Source: Mashable
New Jersey Teen Accepted Into All Ivy League Schools And Stanford
While most high school seniors would be excited just to get into one Ivy League college, a New Jersey student has her choice of all of them. Ifeoma White-Thorpe was accepted into all eight Ivy League schools, as well as Stanford. Pretty impressive!
White-Thorpe is the head of student government at Morris Hills High School and takes Advanced Placement classes. She plans to study biology and wants to go into global health policy, but she hasn’t decided which college to attend yet. Her parents say the choice is hers and she says it could come down to which one offers the most financial aid.
In case you need a refresher, the Ivy League colleges are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University and Yale University.
Source: MSN
How Do You Eat A Chocolate Bunny Feet First or Ears First?
When it comes to chocolate bunnies, 59% of people eat the ears first, new research reports. Another 4% begin by devouring the tail or feet, while about a third of the 28,113 online subjects studied had no starting-point preference when it comes to candy-bunny binging. Kathleen Yaremchuk, an otolaryngologist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, headed the study — "Seasonality of auricular amputations in rabbits" — that was published this month in The Laryngoscope journal.
- What’s your eating plan when it comes to eating a chocolate bunny?