Mac McDonald has quit his gig as the radio announcer for the Cavaliers, effective yesterday, NBC 29 reports. It seems like it was just yesterday that he came back from last time he quit — he left the job in 1985, returning in 1996. The football and basketball announcer says he wants to “pursue other opportunities.” He’s long been billed as “the voice of the Cavaliers,” a clever form of job insurance that presumably leaves CBS Collegiate Sports Properties in a tight spot. For more information, see the company’s press release.
Archive for the 'Business' Category
Lori writes:
Last night, we were up at Christian’s on Pantops. The signs were all gone and they had little hand written signs announcing that the individual slice prices were going up by a quarter and $1.00 for a pie. I know that there was an article in Sunday’s Progress about Bodo’s raising their prices slightly (and still losing money on it). One of my friends thinks that the farmers are going to be making money, money, money but they don’t seem to remember (or know) how much gasoline is used.(I’m suddenly remembering reading about the days of the Weimar Republic where people walked around with wheelbarrows full of money so they could buy a loaf of bread.)
It’s not just Christian’s, of course — prices are going up everywhere. Seth Rosen wrote about this in a pair of articles [1, 2] in the Progress this weekend. Bodo’s is taking the cost their bagels up $0.10/apiece, since the price of flour has tripled — it’s not enough to even things out for them, but it’s an improvement. Local schools are having a tough time providing food for the kids. The food bank has seen demand climb, and food stamp cases are up 10%. My wife and I went to buy a bag of grain for our horse at Southern States last week, and the price had doubled (and the quality reduced).
Remember that your standard factory-farm fertilizer is petroleum-based — your food is literally bathed in oil, and at $118/barrel, that fertilizer is getting expensive. The price of diesel has doubled, so our food economy — premised on the notion of cheap, fast transportation from California, Mexico, Chile, or New Zealand — is getting pricy along with it.
Plan 9 and the Satellite Ballroom will close at the end of May, David Moltz writes in today’s Cavalier Daily. Plan 9 is going to allow their lease to expire, seeing their possible forced closing as a sign that perhaps it’s best that they consolidate their two C’ville locations. Their subtenants — Higher Grounds, Just Curry, and Satellite Ballroom — will likewise be out come midnight, May 31. Plan 9 owner Jim Bland intends to make a formal announcement today.
1:20pm Update: C-Ville Weekly provides more details. CVS sounds like all but a sure thing, and Satellite Ballroom is looking hard for a new location, rather than simply giving up.
The downtown kiosk is finally gone, available to the highest bidder. It started its life as a Nagle/Danielson newsstand, and never really found a viable use.
Corner bar and pool hall Orbit has abruptly shut down after a 13-year run. A band scheduled to play there this week has been told that the establishment is no more, and that the building is going to be renovated over the next month or so. There’s no word on why this has happened, or what the future holds for that space. All is presumably well at Orbit’s sister restaurant, Rapture, and some of the gigs will end up there. Orbit was the first business venture of local restauranteur Andrew Vaughan, who had previously owned and operated the Java Hut coffee cart on the Downtown Mall. It quickly became a favorite among students, packed to the gills on weekends.
This is probably a good time to point out that Gravity Lounge remains very much (and very successfully) in business, despite the 2006 declaration that it was going out of business. In case anybody lives in a cave, it’s probably worth pointing out that, happily, that news hasn’t proven to be true.
Chipotle is a chain, so I won’t eat there. But the Barracks Road Chipotle buys their pork from Polyface Farm.
My head just exploded. I guess I have to go to Chipotle now.
The owner of the Anderson Brothers Building on the Corner tells John Ruscher at C-Ville Weekly that he’s looking at new tenants for the building occupied by Plan 9, the Satellite Ballroom and Just Curry. The music store leases the entire building, and in turn leases space to the other businesses; their lease is up in a few months. CVS is looking at the location, though it sounds like they’re not the only ones with their eye on it.
In today’s Daily Progress Brian McNeill writes that the area is weathering the foreclosure crisis better than most, but it still looks like a bad situation. 0.5% of area homeowners are facing foreclosure, compared to 0.8% for the whole of Virginia and 1.3% for the whole country. Piedmont Housing Alliance reports a 174% increase in people asking for help between ‘05-’07. But the most clever figure comes from the Progress itself:
Meanwhile, the number of notices of foreclosure published in the Daily Progress’ classifieds section also jumped significantly. Last year saw a 30 percent increase in the notices over 2006. Moreover, there were 47 percent more foreclosure notices in January than in the previous year.
Why the comparatively low numbers here?
A key reason Charlottesville has fewer foreclosures is because the region has far fewer subprime mortgage loans than elsewhere in the state and region. Roughly 2.43 percent of the Charlottesville area’s owner-occupied homes were financed by a subprime loan, while that figure was 5.66 percent in Richmond, 4.14 across Virginia and 5.62 percent for the nation.
I assume we’ll know if the numbers spike, because foreclosure scam signs will spring up in the median strips like mushrooms after a spring rain.
In an effort to worsen traffic on Pantops (one assumes), a Pennsylvania businessman has proposed building an indoor sports complex there. Jeremy Borden writes in the Progress about the $9M, 125k ft.2 soccer, tennis and basketball facility, which would be built on land that the guy already owns. He’s looking to work with the guy who owns the land adjacent, too, for an even larger project.
Pantops is probably an appropriate place for this sort of a thing, but without doing something radically different with the transportation network there, things are only going to get worse.
It’s been a long time since we’ve heard about a manufacturer opening in the area, but today it happened. The Virginia Distillery Company intends to start their business with a plant in Lovingston, Erin McGrath and Aaron Lee write in the Nelson County Times. The company is already in business as an importer, but is raising the $5M necessary to start manufacturing. They’ll employ nineteen people. The CEO, in explaining why they chose Nelson, says that “it looks like a piece of the Scottish Highlands has been lifted up and gently dropped down into Virginia.” (Close: try Germany and West Virginia.)
There are ten distilleries, 157 wineries and 37 breweries in the state, with Starr Hill rapidly becoming the area’s 800lb gorilla. Incidentally, they run tours of their Crozet plant (the old ConAgra facility) every Saturday, which I mention only because I’ve been planning to visit tomorrow.
One hundred and forty years after its founding, A&N is closing. The Richmond-based chain has 48 locations throughout the state, and is run by Mark Sternheimer, the great-something-grandson of founders Mark and Lena Rose Sternheimer. The place has a great history. They had 53 locations just a few years ago, with our downtown location being one of the five that were shut down recently. The company just can’t make enough money to stay in business. I’ve made an effort to shop there in the two years since I discovered it was local, but apparently not many other people did.
Rob Seal reported in the Progress a couple of days ago that a former Whisper Ridge resident is suing the mental health facility for $10.35M. The anonymous plaintiff just recently turned 18, and alleges that he was physically and sexually abused while there between 2003-5. Which, odds are, is true. It seems that Whisper Ridge (formerly The Brown Schools, before that The Millmont Center) has broken just about every law, regulation, and standard of decency that’s possible (see exhibits a, b, c, d and e), so if I were a betting man, I’d place my money on the kid winning the case. I guess what’s amazing is that it took this long for somebody to sue this place.
For folks who concern themselves with local farming, the recent arrests at Double H Farm didn’t come as an enormous surprise. But for people who don’t considering themselves a part of the local food movement, it’s got to all seem a little bizarre. In this week’s C-Ville Jayson Whitehead explains how local farming works in the area, following animals from Double H and Polyface until they’re served as food at Mas, Revolutionary Soup and Chipotle. The bad news is that local meat is generally more expensive. The good news is that it tastes better, it’s better for you, and it’s substantially less likely to kill you.
Jim Duncan noted the other day that Albemarle Place’s website is gone. And a commenter on his site noted that the development’s signs have disappeared. Tasha Kates looked into this for the Progress today, and found Albemarle Place’s developers won’t comment and Whole Foods says they’ve bailed on the thing and are building their own place on the site of the Terrace Triple. Whole Foods first announced the move two years ago.
Rumors of trouble at Albemarle Place began back in April, when a commenter said she’d heard that funding had fallen through. That was about when its developers had finally got around to noticing that the sewage system couldn’t handle the ginormous new development, which presented a significant problem to them. (Or, more accurately, to the rest of us, since the $19M upgrade would come out of our pockets, not theirs.)
It remains to be seen whether Albemarle Place has actually been reduced to a shriveled pair of striped stockings under Dorothy’s house. But I’ll bet that we can sing soon enough.
It looks like a grocery store is coming downtown, Seth Rosen writes in the Daily Progress. Developer Gabe Silverman has long wanted to bring a grocery store downtown, and now the BAR has approved some changes to his 2,400 sq. ft. space on the corner of 5th and Main that would allow him to do just that. There’s no word as to what chain, if any, would be setting up shop there.
The A&N at that location closed in January of last year, despite Silverman’s best efforts to retain them. A&N is, interestingly, a Virginia business, founded in Richmond right after the Civil War.
The couple who run Double H Farm, in Nelson, have been arrested for using non-approved labels as price tags, Dave McNair writes for The Hook. The couple, in their 60s, had their farm swarmed by ten Virginia Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services agents, a state trooper, and the Nelson County Sheriff before they were handcuffed and hauled away in separate cruisers. Their Double H pork products were seized from restaurants across the area, destroyed by soaking them with bleach. Double H’s owners are well-known advocates for the rights of family farmers, which has surely earned them no love from state regulators.
I know a fair number of people in the farming and livestock business. They are all terrified of harassment by the state, which appears to both loathe family farms, actively seeking out piddily reasons to bust them. Locally-produced food is a strong interest of mine, and I’ve encouraged some of these food producers to speak out, but they’re all terrified that if they do, VDA&CS will invent a reason to shut them down. Now I see why.
This is going to get ugly — the Virginia Independent Consumers and Farmers Association will make sure of that. I wonder if any members of the General Assembly will have the good sense to introduce legislation to support family farms and stop this harassment on the part of state regulators.
Some downtown business owners aren’t happy about having a homeless shelter downtown, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Daily Progress. Downtown Business Association co-chair Bob Stroh says that “[t]here are locations that would be more helpful to the community than locating it right smack in the middle of the most vibrant commercial district” in response to the months old news that movie director Tom Shadyac had purchased and donated the First Christian Church to serve as the COMPASS Day Haven shelter. Of course, it’s the downtown location that makes it so perfect, what with homeless people generally having to get around on foot. If the DBA has offered to donate millions of dollars in non-downtown real estate to COMPASS, that’s not mentioned in the article. Downtown police officer Casson Reynolds even digs up an old chestnut that good services for the homeless will make C’ville a magnet for the homeless, despite the fact that the local homeless population is far more likely to be local than, say, you. To Seth Rosen’s credit, he points this out.
But not all downtown merchants are grinches. Mary Loose DeViney, owner of Tuel Jewelers (disclosure: and a friend of mine) is happy about the shelter, telling the paper that “[w]e have bums to billionaires and they all walk the same bricks, as they should.” I can’t imagine what the DBA hopes to gain with this kvetching. It certainly can’t be goodwill.
Brian McNeill had an eyebrow-raising story in the Progress a few weeks ago about a Darden startup business that’s basically PayPal for porn. Not only was it surprising that Darden would have actively recruited the startup to join their business incubator, but that its founder would have done so little research into the existing market; there are oodles of PayPal competitors attempting to tap into the market, since the electronic payment company prohibits using their service for pornography or gambling payments. The head of the Darden program was asked if perhaps it wasn’t wise to be launching a company in this line of business, and he responded that “what is and what isn’t controversial is open to some interpretation.”
Now Pmints.com has been pushed out of Darden, the AP reports, a result of anger by alumni that Darden would be backing this business. (Presumably because of its premise on porn and gambling, rather than the fact that it’s a wholly unoriginal business idea.) Pmints.com’s founder says he’ll carry on without Darden, and expects to launch the business later this year.
Brian McNeill writes in the Progress today about the alarming new study that black Charlottesville-area homeowners are substantially more likely to have a high-cost mortgage than whites. Unfortunately, what McNeill found is mostly stonewalling. The Mortgage Bankers Association says that this is “oversimplifying a complex issue,” which may well be true, but they fail to provide a more complex description that would explain things. Charlottesville-area lenders wouldn’t talk to McNeill. And the Virginia Mortgage Lenders Association both says she doesn’t know and guesses the problem comes from out-of-state firms, which just sounds like wishful thinking. The only particularly useful answer comes from the Virginia Poverty Law Center, which points out that subprime lenders “market themselves to black communities by advertising on hip-hop radio stations and urban-focused television stations,” though even that falls short without knowing whether that’s taking place in Charlottesville and, if so, if it’s happening at a rate greater than anywhere else in the country.
It’s not McNeill’s fault that mortgage brokers aren’t eager to talk about racial disparity in their lending, of course, but it remains that a symptom has been identified, but we just can’t locate its cause.
Local mortgage broker Michael Martin provided a useful comment on the topic, writing in part:
I know there are the scoundrels in the mortgage business. The worst one I know of was a non-white who preyed on anyone, regardless of color. He would get massive phone lists of local people with bad credit, call them and arm twist them into the most outrageous refinances. He made up to forty grand a month this way, mostly to finance a prodigious crack addiction. He would even make deals while in prison, calling from the yard with a cell phone, having his mother show up at closing to make sure the suckers signed the loan docs.
He didn’t care about race. Im his own twisted way, he actually thought he was helping his clients. There were only two things that his victims shared: gullibility and naiveté.
All of which, I have to say, reminds me very much of the “We Buy Houses” scams.
A study of mortgage rates throughout the country has revealed that Charlottesville has the nation’s biggest disparity between rates for blacks and whites, North Carolina’s News & Observer reports. The study (250k PDF) uses 2005 data available under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act for metropolitan areas to compare mortgage rates for African American homeowners to those for white homeowners and found that 43% of all loans to blacks in the area were high cost, while only 11% of those to whites were. That makes blacks 388% more likely to have high cost loans than whites, and that’s using data across all income levels. We’re tied with Durham, N.C. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition writes in the study:
The Charlottesville, VA MSA also ranked the worst in home lending to low- to moderate-income (LMI) African-American borrowers. Of all loans to LMI African-American borrowers, 48.0% were high-cost, while only 15.2% of the loans received by LMI whites were high-cost. This means that LMI African-American borrowers were 3.16 times more likely to receive a high-cost loan than LMI white borrowers.
The report was presented today at the NAACP conference in Detroit.
In this week’s C-Ville, Meg McEvoy has a long look at the local food movement. Like anybody else who’s given it a whirl, she discovers that locally-grown food is almost universally tastier than its flavorless supermarket counterparts and not hard to find. But area farmers complain that state and local laws make it difficult for them to compete against factory farms, so they’ve gotten organized and they’re doing something about it.
The topic of the importance of a strong, self-sufficient local economy and food supply is near and dear to my heart. For more on this topic, see UVa’s 2006 regional food assessment, Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” or Bill McKibben’s “Deep Economy.” Or, on the blogging front, horticulturist Tracey Gerlach blogs about her adventures with producing some of her own food at “Life in Sugar Hollow.”
Within two years, Wal-Mart will likely be the biggest private employer in the area, Brian McNeill writes in today’s Daily Progress. Between the location on 29N, the growing distribution center in Zion Crossroads, the planned location in Louisa and the newly-announced location in Greene, they’ll have 1,970 people working for them. The company’s low wages, poor benefits and discriminatory hiring practices make it less than clear that there’s anything particularly good about this news. McNeill’s article ends with a mysterious quote from Darden professor Paul Farris claiming that Wal-Mart’s presence may well be good for local retailers which, as The Hook’s Hawes Spencer points out, would seem to challenge traditional logic.
Coran Capshaw is shutting down Starr Hill after buying the Satellite Ballroom, The Hook reports. The folks who established the Satellite Ballroom on The Corner saw part of their mission as providing a venue not owned or operated by Coran Capshaw, so this may well have been a sale of last resort for them. The restaurant at Starr Hill, which occupies the downstairs of the two story building, has long been awkward to operate, since Capshaw has gone back and forth on whether he’s interested in it turning a profit. The paper says that a sports bar is due to move into the current Starr Hill location, continuing the tradition for the spot established by the long-standing Blue Ridge Brewery that previously occupied the location. The last gig will be local boys Navel, on July 7, according to a press release by Starr Hill.
07/06 Update: One of the owners of Satellite Ballroom posts a quick clarifying note.
Pizza lovers rejoice: Christian’s will be adding three new locations around town, says today’s Daily Progress. (The story isn’t online.) Owner Christian Tamm had established a Corner location back when he owned Sylvia’s, but has stuck with his downtown location since he established Christian’s a few years back. Now he’s adding locations at Pantops, 29 N. and the Corner, all simultaneously. To keep quality high, he’ll make his best current employees into managers of the new locations.
Wal-Mart is going to open a 153,000 square foot location near the 29/33 intersection in Greene County, Brian McNeill writes in the Progress. The company figures that enough people drive down to the location on 29N, in Albemarle, that they’d get even more business with another location 11 miles north. Though Greene is “ecstatic” about the new jobs, Wal-Mart actually destroys more jobs than they create, since they put locally-owned companies out of business by undercutting them, and those jobs at Wal-Mart pay less and provide less benefits. Local retailers, in fact, describe themselves as “afraid,” as well they should be.
Wal-Mart recently announced they’d be opening a Louisa location. They also operate a distribution center in Louisa, which was subsidized by the state with a $500,000 grant, a strange thing to do for the nation’s largest private employer.
A group of business owners along 29 N. are protesting the still-under-development Places 29 plan, Jeremy Borden wrote in the Daily Progress earlier this week. The purpose of Places 29 is to figure out what the 29 corridor should look like, because the current process will leave us with sprawl clear to Culpeper and bumper-to-bumper traffic before long. The North Charlottesville Business Council has boldly proposed, instead, absolutely nothing.
Rivanna Supervisor Ken Boyd’s district includes a bunch of 29 N., and he makes clear in the article that he’s with the businesses here. That highlights the coming clash, between now and November, between Boyd and planning commission chair Marcia Joseph, the Democratic candidate running against Boyd. Surely Boyd is angling for high-dollar campaign contributions from developers who oppose any sort of restrictions, given that Joseph has made clear through her work on the planning commission that she supports smart growth. Thanks to Charlottesville Tomorrow’s collaboration with the Virginia Public Access Project, it’ll be easy for everybody to see where each candidate’s money is coming from, as with all candidates in Charlottesville and Albemarle.
Frank Batten Sr. has given the university $100M to start a School of Leadership and Public Policy, UVa reports in a press release. It was just a few months ago that they announced their five-year masters of public policy program, making this a big step forward in very little time. I was surprised to learn a few years ago that UVa had no public policy department, something remarkable for its absence. They intend to hire a dean to start in the fall, and accept their first incoming class in the fall of 2009.
Call me slow to take a hint, but I’ll be applying to this program. I’d love to get a masters in public policy from the university.
More on the topic of the CPC looking to sell a big chunk of their downtown holdings, in the form of an interesting financial revelation from Hawes Spencer at The Hook:
In the mid 1990s, says Spencer Connerat, who was a young banker at the time, he was fascinated when Jim Berry and Hovey Dabney– his bosses at Jefferson National Bank (now Wachovia)– began buying CPC shares for themselves. During 1996 and 1997, Berry and Dabney divided up shares as they became available, each purchasing blocks of shares ranging from 1,485 to 29,690 at prices of $1.00 and $1.05 per share.
[…]
According to our calculations, the per-share dividend just on the sale of the Water Street asphalt lot could be nearly $20.
The city sold off its three major parking lots, counting on CPC — masquerading as a non-profit — to provide for its parking needs and all the while CPC’s major stockholders appear to have known that the business was little more than a real estate investment for them, and that eventually that parking would turn into office buildings or condos.
In today’s Daily Progress, Brian McNeill writes that Charlottesville Parking Center Inc. intends to sell off their Water St. surface lot, the land that the Water St. parking garage is on, and 284 spaces in the Water St. garage. 
The organization long insisted that there was no danger of any such thing happening, pointing to their mission of 48-year-old mission of providing inexpensive parking downtown rather than profit-seeking. The trouble is that those pillar-of-the-community types are all elderly or deceased (i.e., Hovey Dabney), leaving a business that’s as interested in profit as any other. Former city manager Cole Hendrix seems to figure that’s it, telling the Progress that “now that the CPC people are retiring or passing away, like Hovey Dabney, maybe it’s the beginning of the end of an era.”
It was hard not to see this coming, particularly given last July’s news that CPC was raising rates while seeking to sell off their open lot. Now the city is entirely reliant on this private corporation to make downtown work, a corporation that in no way resembles the one that the city has come to count on. (It was only a few years ago that the city sold off the final free parking lot to a private developer, who put up that hideous rich-folks condo on the corner of Fifth and Water.) That’s launched an interesting debate within the city as to what the proper response is for the city. Mayor David Brown tells the Progress that the city should try to buy the parking lots from CPC, but Councilor Kevin Lynch counters that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to reward a company for treating the city so badly.
If you’ve got any advice for the city on this, I expect they could use it.
McIntire Business Park has been sold, Brian McNeill reports in today’s Daily Progress, and new owner Keith Woodard has a lot of changes in mind. The ten-acre complex has been owned by the company that built it for half a century, and it’s started to change in the past decade. It’s functioned basically as light industrial throughout my memory, changing to include things like Circa, Cville Coffee and Blue Ridge Yoga as downtown rents have gone up. It’s often difficult to find parking for Cville Coffee, presumably because the business park just wasn’t designed to be a destination. Interestingly, there are a half dozen apartments on site, and Woodard is interested in adding even more. Woodard says he doesn’t want to make any radical changes, he just wants to make it better.
A real estate agency has filed suit in federal court against Wintergreen and Roy Wheeler, accusing them of colluding in violation of state and federal anti-monopoly laws, Brian McNeill writes in the Progress. Mountain Area Realty says that they’ve been shut out of the market by the exclusive marketing relationship, and they’re seeking $6M in damages. The firm says that Real Estate III and Montague Miller have shuttered their Wintergreen offices as a result of the deal (Montague Miller disagrees). In a rare display of candor, Mountain Area Realty’s attorney says that attorneys’ fees on both sides will be “umpteen-jillion dollars.”
Real estate agent Jim Duncan figures this could have a far-reaching impact on any “exclusively marketed by” deals, while attorney Jennifer McKeever points out that having a monopoly isn’t actually illegal, and that the case should move through pretty quickly. Plus, the Sherman Antitrust Act has basically gone unenforced since President Bush took office; I can’t see that changing now.
Martha Jefferson Hospital is due to move out of downtown in a few years, consolidating all of their operations up on Pantops, and they’re hoping to keep the neighborhood from hating them for it. Brian McNeill writes in today’s Daily Progress about what is permitted to replace the hospital under zoning regulations, what might end up there, and how it could affect the neighborhood. The whole area has developed around the hospital for the past 80 years; it’s going to be awfully tough to find something else to go in there that won’t radically disrupt the human settlement and usage patterns of what will long be known as the Martha Jefferson neighborhood.
Charlottesville has tied for third place with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation in an analysis of November employment data. We’re at 2.1%, with Fargo, ND (1.7%) and Logan, UT (2%) coming in ahead of us. We tied with Billings, MT.
Every year around this time, the National Low Income Housing Coalition releases a report called Out of Reach, which analyzes housing costs vs. wage levels in communities all across the U.S. The report focuses on a statistic they call the “Housing Wage,” which is the amount of money that a worker has to earn in order to afford an average two-bedroom rental unit in his/her community.
Well, Out of Reach 2006 was released today. And the 2006 Housing Wage for the Charlottesville area has been calculated at…(drum roll please)…$15.23. Know many retail or service jobs around here that are paying that much?
The good news is that somebody can pay their rent here with a minimum wage job. They just need to work five days a week, 52 weeks a year, for 23.6 hours per day in order to make the necessary $31,680/year. And they’d be wise to get a job for the remaining 24 minutes each day, so they can start saving for their next rent increase.
Presumably the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce will drop their opposition to a living wage now. I kid, of course: they have their head so far up their collective ass that, last month, they shot down a program envisioned by members of their own leadership program that would have acknowledged those local businesses that choose to pay their employees a living wage. The Chamber, you’ll recall, is opposed to any minimum wage; they think our existing minimum wage is just too darned high. Let’s put their staff on minimum wage and see how long that lasts.
Local technical mailing lists have been filled with the anger of Adelphia — now Comcast — cable modem users who have found that they simply can’t view some websites. Comcast has had a routing problem since about the 17th of last month. They’ve been telling callers that the difficulty is with the Comcast network, not with individual computers or connections, and is affecting the entire area. Brian McNeill talked to Comcast for the Daily Progress, and they told him:
Lisa Altman, a Comcast spokeswoman, said the Philadelphia-based company has received only a handful of complaints from the Charlottesville area.
“We do have a very limited number of customers that are experiencing some issues and we’re working around the clock to resolve the issues,” Altman said.
[…]
Altman declined to say precisely how many complaints Comcast has received.
So they’re both incompetent and liars. If you’re a Comcast customer, consider registering your complaint with them at 888-683-1000.
Better yet, vote with your wallet. The two most popular alternatives are the Waynesboro-based Ntelos (nee CFW) and Embarq (nee Sprint). I’m a big Ntelos fan, particularly because they know they can’t get away with pulling a Comcast, what with being local.
There are a good number of local businesses wondering how to reach the thousands of people who read local blogs; here’s how to do it.
Some folks have taken to advertising here via Blogads (the image-and-text vertical rectangles often found at right), but there are now a couple of other local blogs that are newly part of the Blogads network. Sean Tubbs’ Charlottesville Podcasting Network starts at $10 for a one-week run of a full-sized Blogad, and nailgun (the excellent and popular local music blog) starts at the same rate. Also, I’m now accepting them over at Charlottesville Blogs for $15/week.
I think local businesses would do well to give ‘em a whirl.
Adelphia has begun the transition to Comcast, John Yellig writes in today’s Progress, the result of Comcast’s$17.6B acquisition of Adelphia that went through this summer. Much like the current Sprint/Embarq switch they’ll gradually rebrand everything and move people on old plans onto new plans. They promise everybody rainbows and ponies and that we’ll all just be the best of friends, they just know it. I’m confident that we’ll all soon think of ironic applications for the trademark-verb “Comcastic” very soon.