Business

It’s been a pretty big couple of weeks for Amazon.com.  First, President Obama chose one of the company’s fulfillment centers as a backdrop for a speech on raising the minimum wage.  Then, news broke that Amazon’s founder, billionaire Jeff Bezos, had purchased the venerable Washington Post.  Amazon now has one hundred and twenty-six million monthly users.  But they might want to start reading product reviews with a grain of salt.  Cited as the largest single source of internet consumer reviews in 2010, the online giant is susceptible to a deceitful practice called astroturfing.  When Susan Crawford’s book “Captive Audience” about the Telecom Industry was published in January, it attached a number of bad reviews later revealed to be fake…with a political agenda behind them.  Our guest Mike Masnick weeded out these fake reviews and published an expose for Techdirt that reached the front page of Reddit.  Masnick is the founder and CEO of Floor64 and editor of the Techdirt blog, we spoke with him about his findings.

Anyone who’s gone grocery shopping at Market Basket knows the slogan: where you always get more for your dollar. But who exactly might be offering those purported savings may be about to change.

The subjects of science, technology, engineering, and math are all the rage these days among politicians, business and education leaders who say we need more emphasis on these subjects to compete globally. But others say we’re going overboard on STEM and that society benefits from a broader approach that includes the arts, communication, and critical thinking.

Guests:

Fred Kocher: President of the New Hampshire High Tech Council and founder and president of Kocher and Company, a marketing and communications firm.

Earlier this week, Yahoo!'s board of directors approved the tech company’s one point one billion dollar purchase of the micro-blogging site Tumblr, the latest move in CEO Marissa Mayer’s bid to revive the flagging tech company. The purchase has some Tumblr users up in arms, and others simply shrugging their shoulders at what just seems like the latest acquisition in the wake of so many to come before it.

Joining us to explain a bit more what the purchase of Tumblr means for Yahoo! and fans of the site is Lance Ulanoff, Editor in Chief at Mashable.

Hand-painted signs once dotted the landscape. They brought color, style, and distinction to stores and products, and were the nation’s first form of advertising…and today, with computer graphics and large-scale printing available for cheap, they are pretty much going the way of the horse and buggy… But a number of hand-painting holdouts are sticking with brushes – and are the subject of Sign Painters, a new documentary film about the craft directed by Sam Macon and Faythe Levine.  

More than 10,000 people filed into the Manchester Radisson’s Expo Center this weekend to taste test, try on, and purchase products made by 145 New Hampshire companies. 

Stretch’s Pickles of Keene was one of those businesses.

Owners Glenna and Craig Hjelm say both Craig’s parents and their kids pitch in to make the business thrive:

It’s all in the family, our website was created by one of our sons, they all help out at the farmers markets, boxing pickles, picking cucumbers, everything.

One of Manchester, New Hampshire’s most celebrated business owners has died. May Gruber owned Pandora sweaters for decades; it was one of the area’s biggest operations.

Several years ago May Gruber was the subject of a documentary, called “Sweater Queen.” All Things Considered host Brady Carlson talked with the film’s producer, Nancy Beach, in 2012. She started by telling the story of how Gruber and her family first came to New Hampshire.

As federal lawmakers grapple with tighter gun control laws, business is good for the firearms industry.Across the country, gun dealers can’t keep them on the shelves, and manufacturers can’t keep up with demand. But how do these trends affect New Hampshire's economy?

When we talk about holiday shopping we're usually referring to gifts. But as anyone who's ever hosted the family Christmas party knows, holding shopping can also mean food shopping.

And this year in New Hampshire, there are more options for that kind of shopping than perhaps ever before.

Some employers are willing to try anything to incentivize employees to work harder and increase productivity. But what exactly are employees looking for in a job these days, aside from the pay?  Business NH Magazine's annual competition identifies the top ten best New Hampshire companies to work for and what makes them so great. Matthew Mowry is editor for Business NH Magazine and he joins us to talk about who came out on top.

Black Friday has long been a post-holiday shopping tradition for many Americans. During the last several years, customers have found their favorite stores opening ever-earlier in anticipation of growing demand. This time around, employees are fighting back against the early hours.

Emanuella Grinberg, writer with CNN.com’s Living Section, joins us to talk about her article “Retail Employees Fight Black Friday Creep.” 

More aging adults are stepping out on a limb and starting their own businesses, says a report from the Kauffman Foundation. In New Hampshire, the Small Business Association and AARP are working together to make sure these so-called “encore entrepreneurs” have the tools they need.

The recession had hit by the time Joyce Goodwin finished her temporary position as director of a school in Hudson. She was 54, and couldn’t find another job.  

Personalized, addressable ads are finally hitting our televisions. Ad Age's Brian Steinberg explains how they're doing something that seems a little too Minority Report to be true.

And, some feedback about a listener about our coverage of the non-coverage of the Paralympics.

StateImpact's Amanda Loder discusses the economic proposals of main Democratic gubernatorial contenders Jackie Cilley and Maggie Hassan with Morning Edition host Rick Ganley.

StateImpact's Amanda Loder discusses the economic proposals of Republican gubernatorial contenders Ovide Lamontagne and Kevin Smith with Morning Edition host Rick Ganley.

In most downtowns across America, there are a handful of staple successful businesses: the pizza place, the hardware store, the movie theater.  

Then there are the niche stores that never seem to last long, the kind that make you wonder, can someone make a living selling just that?

In downtown Concord, N.H., that store might be Flagworks Over America.  And as its name implies, it sells only flags.

Patrick: “That’s a 48-star cotton flag that belonged to my wife’s grandfather, and it use to fly over in the Chicago area out in front of their house…”

The popular website glassdoor has thousands of people posting their salaries, reviews of their companies, and other juicy corporate tidbits online for all to see. Does this mark the end of salary secrecy? And what do companies think about it?

No matter what the economy throws our way, the wedding industry churns on, now topping seventy billion dollars a year. Here's the story of one photographer vying for a slice of that cake by building his own version of the latest wedding trend…a “new-timey” photobooth.

With so many Americans out of work and so many companies claiming they can’t fill vacant positions, many have blamed a so-called 'skills gap'. But business professor Peter Cappelli says this is just blaming the unemployed victim, and in fact, many companies are responsible for this bind. He says they're relying on automated, unreliable applicant tracking systems and refusing to train perfectly acceptable candidates.  We'll look at this debate.

Guests

Bleak. Troubled. Struggling. Take the phrase “North Country economy”, and you’ll almost inevitably hear one of those adjectives attached to it.

And to a certain extent, it’s true; the northern New Hampshire economy has had a difficult run since the bottom fell out of the mill economy. But can a handful of downbeat adjectives really characterize a whole region’s economy?

"Socially Responsible", its a catchword used by many businesses these days whether they want to promote their environmental friendliness, political awareness or by the way they treat their employees.  "We talk to the author of a new book who says there are many issues to consider when deeming a business socially responsible, both for the consumer and for the companies themselves. In some cases, there are uncomfortable tradeoffs, it’s nearly impossible to fulfill every ideal. And then there’s making a profit still a necessity, even if you’re eco-friendly.

Guest

News last month that trading losses at JP Morgan chase may be much larger than previously reported – possibly topping nine billion dollars. The number provides ammo for advocates of more stringent financial regulations… and for 99 percenters, proof that  corporate greed is running amok…and running the system. A number of progressive, socially responsible corporations are seeking designation as b-corps – or benefit corporations. Several states have already legislated incentives for B-Corps.

One of the buzzwords we hear around the economy these days is “certainty” – that if we all had a better idea of what the economy was going to throw our way, we’d be better able to prepare for it.