stlplaceThis is what I got from Ameren UE web site. Note the number 1299 only reflects the outage of my neighborhood. From what I heard from radio Ameren tries to restore majority of customers by this evening.
Current Outage
Outage start date/time: Saturday Jan 13, 2007 7:01 AM
Outage status: Order assigned to servicemen or crew
Cause of outage: Tree contact
Estimated restoration time: Tuesday Jan 16, 2007 3:15 PM
Number of customers out: 1299
It seems like it. I noticed the Crocs Kiosk (pavilion) in the malls before Xmas. Now it looks they are going to open stores. The following is what I saw from Chesterfield Mall today.
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Update (19Jan07) I went to the mall again tonight, and found out they changed the display of the “store”. Obviously they are not going to open a Crocs store. This is just a place for display. Sorry for “pull the trigger too early”.
Because of the weather. Just when I felt I was lucky last night (this morning) my condo did not lose power this time, oops, the storm hit us. So next time I should not feel too good about it. Some of the Panera Bread stores also lost power, e.g., the one at Old Olive (where I usually go) and the New Ballas store, finally I set down at the Olive and Woodsmill store. You can imagine this is a very crowd place. Because I am not the only unlucky person.
Interestingly, at Panera I noticed there are three young kids wearing Crocs. I remember the article at fool.com in which the author tried to count the Crocs and Heelys at Disney World in Orlando: an informal way to gauge the popularity of those products.
While power outage bring inconveniene to ordinary people, how will it affect the business? Obviously not good for retailers, restaurants and hotels, because they lose business on this. Some grocery store has backup generator (Schnucks) but they can not generate enough power for the freezers. I can only think of one business currently benefit from this: the tree and limb services companies. They are probablly the busiest people besisdes Ameren UE people.
Are on sale, online or in the store. I bought one pair last weekend at Nordstrom West County store. Drive carefully if you go there today amid all the freezing rains.
Note the MSRP of Lucky Brand is usually more than $100, now you can get it about 50% off. I know it’s a bit expensive, but hey I would rather “being lucky” than “being good” 🙂
I bought a little Panera Bread PNRA shares today. I have watched the stock for more than 6 months. This noon I went to the store at St. Charles Rock road as usual, and I saw the biggest crowd. After I ordered food, I can see and hear the associate calling the customer name (when food is ready) about every 20 to 30 seconds. It took me about 15 minutes to get my food, probablly a record for me. But I am not complaining here; I always see a large crowd during lunch hour there and today’s wait helped me make the decision to buy some stocks. I noticed this place is more popular than my old favorite lunch place Fazoli’s and there is reasons behind that: better food; people always want to be in the “crowded restaurant”, whether in China or the United States.
Here is a good introduction of Panera Bread.
My 2001 Nissan Altima runs fine except one minor problem: its “service engine soon” light will be ON and OFF randomly. Usually it will be ON for 2 weeks, after I fill the gas, it will be OFF for a while. This is OK except here in St. Louis all the cars need to pass the emission test, and from my experience this light will cause problem to pass the test.
So what did I do? This afternoon as soon as I saw the “light” is off (I put in gas in the morning), I drove to the test station. I was nervous initially because the tester made me turned off engine in the station. Lucky when it restarts the light stayed OFF and my car passed the test. I know two years later I may have the same worry, but right now I am a happy camper 🙂
I went to the “First Night St. Louis” with some friends at Grand Center at St Louis University. It features parade, lots of arts and performances, and we had much fun there counting down the clock while watching the fire work display. Here is a picture from scanews, the Chinese Newspaper in St. Louis.
It is my first walking tour (yes, walk in freezing cold) to that area. I saw Fox Theatre, Schelton Concert Hall, Scottish Rite (cathedral?), St. Louis Xavier college Church and Third Baptist Church, KETC Channel 9. All these are kind eye opening for me because I heard these key art/cultural things a lot but never been there. Now I know where they are 🙂
Went to the BB’s Jazz, Blues and Soup at 700 South Broadway, which is quite a blast. This is my first time to a Jazz bar, although I have listened to the Jazz on NPR in the Sunday evenings for a long time. I thought about going to New Orleans, which is the birth place of the Jazz, but never made the trip. I heard St. Louis has the Jazz and Blues traditions especially in the 50s, the scene I saw at BB’s confirmed this. There are quite a good turn out at the bar. Although I may not be the best person to comment on the music, I enjoy it very much. Life is more than work, computer, stock and other cold hard stuffs. Music and friends should be a big part of it, especially in the holiday season.
I loaded some Heelys HLYS stocks at its IPO yesterday: pulled the trigger a little early and I am under water for now. Since I can’t do anything about the day to day stock price, I decided to check out it in the real world…Please note this is by no means a substitute for the fundamental or financial analysis of the company, this is just my informal reality check of heelys in the market place.
I visited some retail stores which carries Heelys in the area. Here is what I found:
1) Sports Authority: I visited three stores, one in Brentwood, one in St. Charle Rock Road, and last one at Ballwin. They all put the Heelys in the main aisle; but they don’t have a nice display like Nordstrom’s. I saw some action about Heelys: one customer exchanged her son/daughter’s shoes at the Brentwood store. SA sells about 11% of heelys in US domestic market (from its S1).
2) Nordstrom: St. Louis only Nordstrom is at West County mall, it has a good display for the product, although not extensive. As I mentioned before I happened to see a customer buying a pair for her grandson. I noticed the Nordstrom did not offer as many styles as Sports Authority, and they don’t have any discount (SA gives 10$ off for a few products).
3) Dick’s Sporting Good: this is a big outdoor sports gear store. But it has a small display like Nordstrom. Not very impressive.
4) Finish Line and Journeys. The former is a sports shoes store, the latter kids/teenager shoes store. I am impressed by Finished Line’s display (see the photo below). But from S1 we know Journeys sell 11.6% which is even higher than SA. This is the first time I went to the Journeys, it seems a very popular place. I saw the Converse shoes, which sponsors Dwyane Wade. One of my coworker told me his son likes his Converse all-star shoes very much (it costs more than 100, although it’s not good for his foot), and eventually he hurt his foot by wearing them. I think that’s a typical phenomena in American teen’s spending: fashion is much more important than substance.
I still have not seen kids skating in the malls or streets, according to its road show presentation, I heard it just started getting into midwest market. From Heelys web site I saw they have a demo team and here are their calendar. It seems to me their focus is the two coasts (east and west), and southwest for now. Like many other things, the trend starts from California or NY 🙂
I also searched “heelys” at flickr and found there are 70 pictures. Some are pretty cool.
(Update 11Dec06) I went to Galleria on Sunday. Besides Journeys, I found Kids Footlocker also has Heelys. I went to Chesterfield Mall this evening, both Journeys and Finishline have Heelys, again Finishline puts the Heelys in a more obvious location.
I came back to St. Louis today. The weekend San Jose trip was great; both the weather and everything else. I got to see the Montery Bay, which includes 17 miles drive and world famous Pebble beach (golf course). Not to mention the Chinese food etc. As a guy in the tech industry, I always have great respect for Sillicon Valley and its entrepreneurships. There are just too many familar names: from big players such as Yahoo, Sun Micro, Cisco, Adobe to smaller ones such as Tivo, Redback Networks, Foundry Networks, Hyperion…Today’s San Jose Mercury News featured a little known startup called PanDigital which makes the LCD picture frame: it has only about 10 people in San Jose, and it oursourced manufacturing and support to China and India respectively; it is expected to sell 50,000 units with $50 million revenue. The key component is a chip which stores and shows the digital photos. I started to appreciate the innovation of chip: software combined with hardware really make the difference in our digital lives.
St. Louis is cold, and still covered with snow. Tomorrow is going to be warmer.