Monday, January 26, 2015

Legal Marijuana Is The Fastest-Growing Industry In The U.S.: Report

Legal marijuana is the fastest-growing industry in the United States and if the trend toward legalization spreads to all 50 states, marijuana could become larger than the organic food industry, according to a new report obtained by The Huffington Post.

Researchers from The ArcView Group, a cannabis industry investment and research firm based in Oakland, California, found that the U.S. market for legal cannabis grew 74 percent in 2014 to $2.7 billion, up from $1.5 billion in 2013.

The group surveyed hundreds of medical and recreational marijuana retailers in states where sales are legal, as well as ancillary business operators and independent cultivators of the plant, over the course of seven months during 2013 and 2014. ArcView also compiled data from state agencies, nonprofit organizations and private companies in the marijuana industry for a more complete look at the marketplace.

"In the last year, the rise of the cannabis industry went from an interesting cocktail conversation to being taken seriously as the fastest growing industry in America," Troy Dayton, CEO of The ArcView Group and publisher of the third edition of the State of Legal Marijuana Markets, said in the executive summary of the report. "At this point, it’s hard to imagine that any serious businessperson who is paying attention hasn’t spent some time thinking about the possibilities in this market."

Graph courtesy of ArcView Market Research.

The report also projects a strong year for legal marijuana in 2015 and projects 32 percent growth in the market. Dayton said that places "cannabis in the top spot" when compared with other fast-growing industries.

Over the next five years, the marijuana industry is expected to continue to grow, with ArcView predicting that 14 more states will legalize recreational marijuana and two more states will legalize medical marijuana. At least 10 states are already considering legalizing recreational marijuana in just the next two years through ballot measures or state legislatures.

To date, four states -- Colorado, Washington, Alaska and Oregon -- have legalized retail marijuana. Washington, D.C., voters also legalized recreational marijuana use, but sales currently remain banned. Twenty-three states have legalized medical cannabis. Still, marijuana remains illegal at the federal level.

The report projects that, by 2019, all of the state-legal marijuana markets combined will make for a potential overall market worth almost $11 billion annually.

Graph courtesy of ArcView Market Research.

The report also breaks out some interesting marijuana trends from around the nation. California still has the largest legal cannabis market in the U.S., at $1.3 billion. Arizona was found to have the fastest-growing major marijuana market in 2014, expanding to $155 million, up more than $120 million from the previous year. Medical marijuana is already legal in Arizona and California and recreational legalization measures are likely to appear on the 2016 ballots in both states.

More than 1.5 million shoppers purchased legal marijuana from a dispensary, either medical or recreational, in 2014. Five states now boast marijuana markets that are larger than $100 million, and in Colorado and Washington -- the first states to open retail marijuana shops in the U.S. -- consumers bought $370 million in marijuana products last year.

Oregon and Alaska are expected to add a combined $275 million in retail marijuana sales in their first year of operation, the report projects. And while D.C. has also legalized recreational marijuana use, ArcView couldn't project a market size in the District because of an ongoing attempt by congressional Republicans to block the new law.

Graph courtesy of ArcView Market Research.

The huge growth potential of the industry appears to be limited only by the possibility of states rejecting the loosening of their drug laws. The report projects a marijuana industry that could be more valuable than the entire organic food industry -- that is, if the legalization trend continues to the point that all 50 states legalize recreational marijuana. The total market value of all states legalizing marijuana would top $36.8 billion -- more than $3 billion larger than the organic food industry.

"These are exciting times," Dayton said in the executive summary, "and new millionaires and possibly billionaires are about to be made, while simultaneously society will become safer and freer."

Much Too Responsible

The United States and Europe have a lot in common. Both are multicultural and democratic; both are immensely wealthy; both possess currencies with global reach.

Read the whole story at New York Times

Saudi Prince: Oil Will Never Be $100 A Barrel Again

CNBC

The world will never again see the price of oil at $100 per barrel, according to one of Saudi Arabia's biggest investors.

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the chairman of Kingdom Holdings, spoke with CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" following the death of his uncle, Saudi Arabian King Abdullah. While he admitted that his country—which derives 90 percent of its budget from oil—is feeling the pain of the commodity's collapse, he predicted that Saudi Arabia would not be the first to blink.

He said that a "confluence of events" have led to the fall in oil's price, not—as some have suggested—a Saudi plot to harm America's energy industry.

Read More: It's downhill for US after Saudi king dies: Kilduff

"I can assure you that Saudi Arabia is not using the oil price right now to impact the fracking industry in the United States," he said, adding that "there's an oversupply and demand is not so high."

The lack of balance between oil's supply and demand means the road back to $60-$70 range will be "not that easy, not that quick," he said.

More from CNBC:
-- 'Doomsday Clock' moves two minutes closer to midnight
-- When—and where—oil is too cheap to be profitable
-- Oil fields at risk: Where the slowdown has already begun

Given this weakness in oil's price, Alwaleed admitted that the global strength of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has weakened.

"I would not say that OPEC is dead, but I think the impact of OPEC as it was years ago is not the same for sure today," he said.

He allowed that "there's a game of who should cut production first" between OPEC countries and non-OPEC nations.

"Eventually there's no doubt that some countries have to blink and reduce their production... I don't see Saudi Arabia or the OPEC countries blinking," he said.

Read More: Saudi oil policy 'just took turn for the worse'

Alwaleed said he thought oil's price could lead to political turmoil in countries like Venezuela that depend so much on the commodity and "don't have a lot of extra wealth on the side for that rainy day"—unlike Saudi Arabia and its neighbors.

Weighing in on the global currency market, Alwaleed simply said "I'm a dollar man." As for equities, he said Kingdom Holdings will continue to maintain its diversified strategy, but that it was interested in some new company's like China's JD.com.

Following reports of Abdullah's passing, former crown prince Salman bin Abdulaziz succeeded him as the new ruler of the world's top oil exporter.

Salman is a reformer at heart, Alwaleed said, and the country will continue down the same paths of financial, social, and political reform as during Abdullah's reign.

Read More: Icahn: Oil will go lower, 'tremendous opportunity'

Alwaleed said his family had just concluded the burial of the late king, and that there would be a meeting later that night to pay allegiance to the new king and crown prince.

Reflecting on recent political turmoil in Saudi Arabia's southern neighbor of Yemen, Alwaleed said the resignations of that country's prime minister and president means "clearly we have seen the hands of Iran infiltrating that country through its blatant and open support of the Houthis there."

He called it an "unfortunate situation" as Yemen's political vacuum could eventually be a "seat of trouble" in the region.

This CEO Fought For Better Wages At His Company. Guess What Happened.

Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna, explained how he increased wages for his workers, arguing that taking better care of his employees would in turn lead to better care for Aetna's customers.

Bertolini told HuffPost Live at Davos his company increased wages and adjusted benefits in order to give its employees a better quality of life.

"Not everybody should be at $16 an hour, there may be people who need to be higher," Bertolini said, noting people's lifestyles are directly impacted by how they are paid.

Bertolini's company also implemented yoga and mindfulness practices at work and studied the effect they had on the employees.

"After we completed the [yoga] course, the results were amazing," Bertolini said, saying in addition to weight loss and happier workers, there was an increase in productivity by 69 minutes a month.

"We think it's about a $3,000 a year savings," Bertolini said, noting his company's health care costs actually went down after implementing mindfulness practices.

Below, live updates from the 2015 Davos Annual Meeting:

live blog

Oldest Newest Share + Today 12:42 PM ESTHow Data Can Make Our Cities Safer And Smarter

Dan Koh, chief of staff for the city of Boston and Arianna's former chief of staff, writes:

Michael Lewis' book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, documents how the Oakland Athletics, a baseball team with a near league low million payroll, won over 100 games by focusing on the most valuable, not the most expensive, skills. Perhaps just as importantly, general manager Billy Beane had people on his team that bought into his philosophy.
On 6 January 2014, Mayor Martin J. Walsh took over as the first new mayor in the city of Boston in 20 years. He set out to change how government was operated -- and measured. Although the concept of Moneyball originates in baseball, its philosophy directly applies to governing.

Tootsie Roll CEO Melvin Gordon Dies At 95

(Adds analyst comment, details, updates shares)

By Sruthi Ramakrishnan and Nayan Das

Jan 21 (Reuters) - The chief executive of Tootsie Roll Industries Inc has died after more than half a century at the helm of the U.S. candy maker, sparking speculation that the company could soon be ripe for acquisition.

Tootsie Roll's shares rose as much as 8 percent to a 17-month high of $33.28 on Wednesday.

Melvin Gordon died, aged 95, after a brief illness, according to a statement from the company he had headed since 1962. His wife, Ellen Gordon, takes over as chief executive.

The Tootsie Roll is named after the daughter of an Austrian immigrant, Leo Hirshfield, who first produced the chewy chocolate candy in a small New York City store in 1896. Now based in Chicago, the company has a market capitalization of about $1.9 billion.

Ellen Gordon, who is in her 80s and was previously chief operating officer, is the company's largest shareholder, with a 26 percent stake as of March 14. Melvin Gordon had a 21.9 percent stake as of Dec. 12.

"There's been speculation for years that it's going to be sold," said Timothy Chen, analyst at Rhone Trading Partners.

Growing through acquisitions, Tootsie Roll became the world's largest maker of lollipops when it bought The Charms Co in 1988.

It later acquired Sugar Daddy and Junior Mints and, in 2004, Concord Confections, adding Dubble Bubble and Wack-o-Wax to the candies it produces.

After four straight years of growth, though, Tootsie Roll reported revenue of $543.4 million for 2013, a 1.2 percent drop.

One of the oldest CEOs of a U.S. company, Gordon rarely gave interviews.

The company was well-known, however, for its commercials: it claims to have received more than 20,000 letters from children trying to answer a question posed by an owl in a 1970s commercial: how many licks does it take to reach the center of a Tootsie Pop?

Elliott Schlang, managing director of the Great Lakes Review, said the popularity of Tootsie Roll's brands, as well as its real estate assets in Chicago and the fact that Gordon's children are not directly involved in the business, make the company an attractive target.

Schlang said the company could be a target for candy makers, including Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc through its See's Candies division. Berkshire Hathaway did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tootsie Roll's shares closed up 7.1 percent at $32.99 on the New York Stock Exchange. (Additional reporting by Siddharth Cavale; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Simon Jennings)

Chipotle Doesn't Know When Carnitas Shortage Will End

The hottest fast food chain in the country has been out of a key menu item for four days at hundreds of its restaurants, and it's still not clear when it will come back.

Chipotle announced Tuesday that about one-third of its more than 1,600 stores would stop selling carnitas, a traditional Mexican dish made by slow-cooking pork until it becomes tender. The popular Mexican chain made the decision earlier this week, after discovering that one of its suppliers didn’t meet its standards for humanely raised pork.

Carnitas is one of just six burrito bases the chain offers.

Chris Arnold, a Chipotle spokesman, wrote in an email that the burrito joint is looking into several different ways to rebuild its supply, including getting more pork from current suppliers, using different cuts of pork (the dish is typically made from the shoulder) and looking for additional suppliers. Carnitas make up about 6 percent of entree orders, he said.

“We are working through those options now, but it’s too soon to say how long this might last,” Arnold said.

It's also too early to tell whether the shortage will hurt Chipotle's bottom line. The company's stock price was down slightly when the market opened the morning after the chain first announced the shortage. Still, at around $711 a share, the Friday stock price was up about 34 percent from the same time last year.

A sign declaring no carnitas at a Manhattan Chipotle Friday.

Despite a sign notifying customers there weren't carnitas, several customers at a Chipotle in Manhattan’s Union Square during Friday's lunch rush said they hadn’t heard about the shortage. Many said they typically order something else; others prioritized ethically treated animals over their tastebuds.

“It would make me not want to come here more if they did have the (carnitas) and (the pork) was mistreated,” 15-year-old carnitas fan Lincoln Barron said after being told the reason behind shortage.

Even if some carnitas lovers do turn elsewhere for their fix, the publicity over the shortage will more than make up for any sales hits. There’s marketing power in scarcity, according to Aaron Allen, the founder of Aaron Allen & Associates, a restaurant consulting firm. Though the pork shortage is unintentional, the fact that carnitas is limited makes it a little bit more special, he said.

More significant, in marketing terms, Chipotle’s decision reminds fans why they like the restaurant in the first place. The Mexican chain sells itself as a place that sells fresh, healthy food. That reputation is a big part of why it's been growing rapidly for the past several months, while places like McDonald's have stagnated.

“It’s not just buzz around some promotional activity,” Allen said. “It’s really reinforcing what the brand stands for.”

Of course, Chipotle will still lose some business while carnitas are gone.

“My desire to be there is significantly diminished if they’re not going to have carnitas or if it’s going to be spotty,” said Doug Ludemann, a 36-year-old who owns an aquarium cleaning business near Minneapolis. “It’s not going to draw me in and make me pay 10 bucks for lunch.”

Still, Ludemann said he respects Chipotle's decision, even it means they don't have the only thing he orders there.

“I wish it didn’t mean that I had to not shop there,” he said. “My hope is that it increases the demand for more humanely produced pork.”

3 Reasons The Euro Just Crashed To Its Lowest Level In 11 Years

Book that European vacation now, America: It hasn't been this cheap in 11 years.

The euro was in a crashy mood on Friday, briefly falling to its lowest level against the U.S. dollar since November 2003, according to Bloomberg. One euro is now about $1.15, down from about $1.40 less than a year ago.

Here is a chart, courtesy of FXStreet.com, singing the sad song of the euro today. It measures the number of dollars a euro will buy. The lower the line, the weaker the euro:

As you can see, Europe's common currency has battled back a bit, but it's still in a deep pit. Here's a longer-term chart, courtesy of Bloomberg.com, for perspective:

What ails the euro? At least three things:

Thing One: Europe's economy is in a depression, basically, that is going on its eighth year.

Thing Two: The European Central Bank is getting ready to buy a bunch of bonds to help the economy. This is basically "quantitative easing," the same thing the Federal Reserve did in the U.S., only about seven years too late. The ECB's bond-buying will flood the market with euros, which will make them cheaper.

Third Thing: The Swiss National Bank on Thursday threw a boulder to the drowning euro by giving up on trying to keep its own currency, the franc, artificially cheap by buying euros. Investors have been buying francs and dumping euros because Switzerland is a safer economy, basically. The Swiss hate that because it makes Swiss vacations even more expensive than they already were. But the SNB finally just said, "Eh, whatevs," and let its currency soar, crushing the euro.

Oh, well, who needs Alps when you can see Paris/Berlin/Venice/Barcelona on the cheap this summer? Assuming, that is, that Europe's problems don't spread overseas and cost us all our jobs.

Target To Close All 133 Stores In Canada

Target is pulling out of Canada, the retail giant announced Thursday.

The chain plans to close all 133 of its stores in the country, and has received initial Canadian court approval to go through with the liquidation process. The decision comes after a review by company executives found that Target Canada wouldn’t become profitable until at least 2021, according to a statement by Brian Cornell, the company’s CEO.

“We have determined that it is in the best interest of our business and our shareholders to exit the Canadian market and focus on driving growth and building further momentum in our U.S. business,” Cornell said in the statement, noting that it was “a very difficult decision.” About 17,600 people work at Target Canada.

Target expanded into Canada in 2013 and has been plagued by problems ever since. Canadian shoppers were greeted with empty shelves during Target's first few weeks of operation in the Great White North as the chain couldn’t keep up with demand. Shoppers also complained that prices at the big-box store were too high.

Despite efforts to slash prices -- Target Canada eventually became cheaper than Walmart, according to one study -- and fewer inventory problems, Target’s botched first few weeks in the country left a bad impression and it’s been difficult to turn sales around. After a little more than a year in the country, Target had lost more than $1.5 billion in Canada.

Executives were hoping the holiday season, a crucial time for retailers, would give Target Canada a boost, but Cornell said performance wasn’t good enough to convince executives it made sense to stay in the country.

"Simply put, we were losing money every day," the CEO said in a Q&A on Target's website.

The Canada exit comes as Target is struggling in the United States as well. Once a favorite of middle-class shoppers looking for hip items on the cheap, Target is still working to regain trust after a massive credit card hack at the end of 2013 that compromised personal information of up to 70 million customers.

The chain is also suffering from some of the same ills plaguing other big-box stores. With shopping sites like Amazon and drugstore and pharmacy chains offering many of the same products in a more convenient setting, Target and others are struggling to lure shoppers out to the suburbs and into their stores.

Under the direction of Cornell, who became the company's CEO in July 2014, Target has tried to fight back, offering free shipping during the holiday season and launching a line of smaller stores in urban areas. Target is also getting back to its roots, focusing more on efforts like designer collaborations, which have led some to nickname the chain "Tar-zhay."

This story has been updated to include further detail.

Consumer Prices Just Fell The Most In 6 Years. Start Worrying

Good news, consumers: Everything's on sale! The bad news: Low, low prices aren't always such a great thing.

The U.S. consumer price index tumbled 0.4 percent in December from the month before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday, led by a 9.4-percent crash in the cost of gasoline. It was the biggest one-month drop for consumer prices since December 2008, when the world was still gripped by the financial crisis.

Please note the context there: Sometimes prices fall not because of angel kisses and unicorn dreams, but because everything is going to hell.

Is everything going to hell right now? Maybe not. Probably not? But some scary things are happening. The price of crude oil has been cut in half in a matter of months. The Swiss National Bank on Thursday gave up trying to keep panicky investors from buying the safe-haven Swiss franc, causing turmoil and bloodshed in currency markets. Interest rates around the world keep plunging to record lows, in a year everybody expects interest rates to rise because of booming economic growth and demand for loans.

Meanwhile, U.S. consumer prices are up just 0.8 percent in the past year, the weakest 12-month stretch since 2009. The euro zone is in outright "deflation," which is the opposite of inflation -- prices fall instead of rise. Japan, the World Deflation Champion for two decades, is tottering on the edge of it again.

Everybody loves falling prices, but sometimes we love them too much. If prices fall and fall and keep falling, then we'll put off buying stuff because we expect that stuff to be cheaper tomorrow and even cheaper the day after that. When everybody's sitting around not buying stuff, you can have what is known as a depression. Depressions are not good.

To fight off the risk of a depression, central banks around the world have cut interest rates to zero and, in some cases, less than zero, to try to get people to pull money out of banks and spend it on clothes or Google Glass or meth or something, anything.

It's working OK for the U.S., at least. The Federal Reserve got out in front of the deflation thing early and has managed to keep the U.S. economy humping along. Job growth is steady and improving, and wages might some day start rising, which could encourage people to spend more. The Fed expects this recent bout of falling prices to be temporary.

The Fed is so darn confident that all of this stuff will pass, in fact, that it's planning to start raising interest rates, pulling support away from the U.S. economy, just at the moment the rest of the world is having a bit of a moment. Should be interesting.

The Top Ideas About Climate Change From 2014's World Economic Forum

As Ian Goldin of the Oxford Martin Commission pointed out last year, it's a bit ironic to discuss climate change at Davos, a remote location in Switzerland that requires a tremendous carbon footprint to even get to. Nevertheless, the topic was a key focus of 2014's World Economic Forum.

Climate change will likely be discussed again next week at 2015's annual meeting in Davos, so we took a look back at what several key influencers like Goldin, as well as Jim Leape, director general of World Wildlife Fund, and Kumi Naidoo, international executive director of Greenpeace, said last year.

"On something pressing like this, citizens have to act, cities have to act, states have to ask and corporates have to act," Goldin said last year. Climate change "is not something that's waiting."

The World Economic Forum annual meeting will take place from January 21-24.

Where Scotch Costs $41 A Glass, And Everyone Can Afford It

Being rich just got a little more expensive.

Switzerland’s central bank on Thursday ended a three-year campaign to keep its highly coveted currency, the Swiss franc, cheap against the euro and other money. The franc immediately soared in value. This chart from Quartz’s Matt Phillips puts the size of the move in context. The straight line up at the very end of the chart shows the franc’s dizzying one-day move:

This sort of thing inevitably causes pain, particularly for bloodied currency traders.

Also bearing the immediate burden are the people holing up in the charming ski town of Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum’s annual exchange of buzzwords.

The jump in the Swiss franc means everything in Davos is going to be more expensive, from champagne to grilled sausages, Bloomberg reports. A glass of Johnnie Walker Blue is up $6 to $41 at the Belvedere Hotel, where many delegates stay and everyone wants to stay.

The thing about Davos, though, is that it was already incredibly expensive before the Swiss currency cap was lifted. The World Economic Forum’s 120 “strategic partners” pay 500,000 francs, or about $577,000, each year just for the privilege of sending five executives to the conference. Each executive then has to pay about $20,000 for a ticket to the conference. Then there are thousands of dollars per person in plane tickets and car bills and hotel rooms, and tens of thousands more to entertain clients in private dining rooms and big cocktail parties.

The result: A small group of wealthy people who had already agreed to be price-gouged will now face a bit more price-gouging.

And things will get even more expensive next year, when the price to be a strategic partner rises to 600,000 Swiss francs. Attendees are already complaining about that price increase, announced in October.

But they can, and will, continue to pay up.

They’ll keep paying because Davos is a good way to generate positive PR; see lots of clients in a really short time; and, above all, gossip and gather information in informal situations.

It doesn’t come cheap. But if you could afford it before the Swiss franc exploded, then you can probably still afford it.

Breastaurants Booming As The Restaurant Industry Struggles

For many Americans, it's becoming less appealing to take the time to sit down to an uninspiring pasta dish, a bland hamburger or a plate of once-frozen wings at a middle-brow restaurant chain.

But serve that burger with a side of cleavage, and the crowds come pouring in.

Sales at the Tilted Kilt, Twin Peaks and Brick House, casual eateries featuring scantily clad waitresses, have grown at a double-digit pace over the last year, according to projections from Technomic, a food market research firm. At the same time, sales limped along at most big restaurant chains like Olive Garden and TGI Friday's.

Sales at "breastaurants" have thrived even while more generic sit-down chains struggle. (Data from Technomic)

The so-called "breastaurants" take inspiration from Hooters, the 30-year-old chain known for big-breasted waitresses wearing short shorts and oddly orange pantyhose. But today's cleavage chains have updated the concept with fresher-looking spaces and menus better suited to today's young people who are increasingly interested in artisanal food and craft beer.

Twin Peaks, dubbed the foodie’s breastaurant, makes all of its dishes from scratch -- no frozen wings. The menu, which is locally sourced, features sophisticated twists on classic bar food like venison chili, blackened fish tacos and wings with an optional topping of green chili parmesan sauce.

Of course, the menu also highlights the restaurant's “well-built sandwiches": The waitresses wear miniscule shorts and tiny plaid shirts that tie just below the chest, exposing their midriffs.

“Men are simple creatures and so you don’t have to get too crazy to get them in the door,” said Kristen Colby, the chain’s senior director of marketing, adding that all it takes is an ice cold beer, sports on TV and beautiful girls.

“We know we're not for everybody and that’s okay,” she said, noting that other casual dining chains have struggled in part because they’re trying to be all things to all people.

At the Titled Kilt, where "the beer never looked so good," three-quarters of the customers are men. The restaurant's waitresses wear sexy Celtic-inspired uniforms of short plaid skirts and skimpy white shirts. Company founder Mark DiMartino dreamed up the costumes, which are influenced by the Catholic schoolgirl look, according to Ron Lynch, the company's president. “All of us guys had a crush on a cute girl in school and obviously he had crushes on the cute girls with plaid skirts,” Lynch said of DiMartino.

Lynch said he “shudders” when he hears the chain lumped into the “breastaurant” category because he finds the term degrading to women. He sees his chain, which started in Las Vegas, channelling the original TGI Friday's, with its "outrageous" staff, uniforms covered in pins and the "flair" made infamous by the 1999 movie "Office Space."

It's no secret, of course, that sex sells. It also comes with a big helping of controversy and criticism.

The restaurants create an environment that exacerbates an already prevalent problem, said Liz Watson, the director of workplace justice for women at the National Women’s Law Center. The restaurant industry is notoriously rife with sexual harassment -- nearly 80 percent of female servers say they’ve been harassed on the job, according to a report released last year by Restaurant Opportunities United, a restaurant worker advocacy group.

It’s especially a problem for women who work for tips, Watson said.

“The fact that womens’ wages are coming in from customers is already making them vulnerable to harassment,” she said. "It's only being compounded by these types of restaurants."

Some workers see it differently. Taylor Fogerty, a former Hooters waitress, has blogged about how she doesn’t see her former job at Hooters as anti-feminist. Instead, she said she was just “using the world of female objectification” to her advantage.

“Obviously there were some creeps, but I think you get creeps at any waiting job you go to,” she said in an interview iwth The Huffington Post, noting that the tips are usually better at a place like Hooters because servers are encouraged to spend time with customers. “You have the girls that you work with, it almost feels like a sorority. You’re all together sharing this experience.”

Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill is the self-proclaimed “only breastaurant in America.” (The chain has trademarked the term, though it is used in the industry to describe the category of restaurants more generally.) Doug Guller, the chain's CEO, came under fire last month after the TV show “Undercover Boss" showed him axing a bartender who wore a T-shirt instead of a bikini and offering to pay for another employee's breast augmentation surgery.

But a little attention was probably good for business. The chain has seen an uptick in sales since the episode aired, owing largely to the exposure, Guller told HuffPost. He believes that some of the criticism he received was unfair, noting that it wasn't just a waitress' refusal to wear a bikini that got her fired -- she was also over-serving alcohol to a customer. Regarding the other incident, he says it was the waitress, not him, who first brought up the possibility of getting a breast augmentation.

The headlines gave the wrong impression that "I just hand out free boobs like water," he said. Guller said his chain takes a more direct approach than others, embracing the "breastaurant" moniker to lure its target customers, men between the ages of 25 and 55.

"We're just a little bit more straightforward," he said.

Restaurant chains with modestly clad, co-ed servers have been struggling since the Great Recession began. Darden, the parent company of Olive Garden, has been throwing everything but the pasta at the wall to try and turn things around. Applebee's and TGI Friday's have tried to lure diners in with loyalty programs and free food to turn around sluggish sales.

Hooters, the grandmother of breastaurants, also has faced difficulties in recent years. According to Darren Tristano, an executive vice president at Technomic, the chain was distracted from its core business by fluctuating ownership and a focus on things like international expansion and a now-defunct affiliated airline. But Hooters is now revamping many of its restaurants and has had a stable management team in place for three years, which has helped the chain outperform the restaurant industry overall.

Hooters’ newer competitors are doing even better, thanks in large part to the struggles of other casual dining chains. As restaurants like Bennigan's and Ruby Tuesday abandoned their locations during the recession, Tilted Kilt, Twin Peaks and others snapped them up, revamped the spaces and opened sports bar-themed eateries with pretty servers, according to Tristano.

“We saw the millennial consumer who was growing up going to these restaurants because they had cold beer, good food,” said Tristano. “And the price points, like the servers, were very attractive.”

Financial, Economic and Money News

Monday, January 26, 2015

Legal Marijuana Is The Fastest-Growing Industry In The U.S.: Report

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Much Too Responsible

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Saudi Prince: Oil Will Never Be $100 A Barrel Again

Friday, January 23, 2015

This CEO Fought For Better Wages At His Company. Guess What Happened.

live blog

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Tootsie Roll CEO Melvin Gordon Dies At 95

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Chipotle Doesn't Know When Carnitas Shortage Will End

3 Reasons The Euro Just Crashed To Its Lowest Level In 11 Years

Monday, January 19, 2015

Target To Close All 133 Stores In Canada

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Consumer Prices Just Fell The Most In 6 Years. Start Worrying

Saturday, January 17, 2015

The Top Ideas About Climate Change From 2014's World Economic Forum

Friday, January 16, 2015

Where Scotch Costs $41 A Glass, And Everyone Can Afford It

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Breastaurants Booming As The Restaurant Industry Struggles