The Choice-Select spread has widened sharply in recent weeks, which is the typical seasonal tendency at this time of year. The latest boxed beef values increase the Choice-Select spread to $12.15/cwt., about double the $6.03 spread this time last year. The spread is also above the five year average level of $10.13/cwt. (for this time of year), which represent the first time the spread has exceeded the five year average weekly level since the first week of January. Thus, the Choice-Select spread has gone from a seasonal low in late March of $0.30/cwt. (well below the average seasonal low) to current levels above the average level for this time of year.
What do the increase in both Choice and Select boxed beef values from year ago levels and the widening of the Choice-Select spread in recent weeks tell us about beef market conditions and, in particular, about beef demand? Total beef production is down 2.8 percent so far this year so higher prices would be expected with steady beef demand. Thus, higher boxed beef prices do not necessarily reflect increased beef demand, though they do suggest that demand is holding steady in the face of reduced supplies and higher prices. However, the increase in Choice relative to Select prices does suggest stronger demand for high quality beef. This is borne out in the changing values of various wholesale cuts. At the current time, Choice wholesale values for Ribeye and Tenderloins are up 27 and 24 percent year over year while Chucks and Rounds are up 13 and 6 percent compared to last year.
The increase in wholesale beef prices from year ago levels could be due mostly to reduced beef production so far this year. However, the sharper increase in middle meat values relative to end meat values and the wider Choice-Select spread suggest that beef demand is improving. Wholesale values are expected to increase further with sharper year over year beef production decreases in the third quarter. Continued improvement in beef demand will determine how much higher wholesale beef prices may go.
Source: Derrell S. Peel, Oklahoma State University Extension Livestock Marketing Specialist
CTS Wholesale Sunglasses Announces The Great Summer Sunglasses Contest In Support of Cataract Awareness Month And UV Safety Month - YAHOO!
CTS Wholesale Sunglasses is launching a new contest this summer called the Great Summer Sunglasses Contest, in support of Prevent Blindness America's national Cataract Awareness Month and UV Safety Month.
Salem, OR (PRWEB) June 11, 2012
CTS Wholesale Sunglasses believes in maintaining good eye health with the use of proper eye protection. In support of Prevent Blindness America's (preventblindness.org) national Cataract Awareness Month (June 1st - 30th) and UV Safety Month (July 1- 31st), CTS Wholesale Sunglasses is announcing a new 30-day contest.According to Prevent Blindness America’s 2008 Vision Problems in the U.S. report, 50% of all Americans will develop cataracts by age 80, and more than 22 million Americans age 40 and older already have cataracts in one stage of another. It is predicted that by 2020, 30.1 million Americans 40 plus years of age will have cataracts. One of the known causes of cataracts is exposure to ultraviolet radiation.
According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO), recent studies have shown that prolonged exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays without protection may cause serious eye conditions, such as cataracts and macular degeneration, which can lead to vision loss and even blindness.
"We really believe in proper eye protection," says Kirk Bachelder, owner of CTS Wholesale LLC, "Especially when it comes to spending extended periods of time outdoors during the summer."
Summer is a busy time for Bachelder and his employees at CTS Wholesale Sunglasses. Not only are they busy filling many of their retailers' orders, who are stocking up on supplies in anticipation of a warm and sunny summer, but they are also busy manning their own vendor booths at the many summer festivals and fairs across the country. "We know firsthand just how important a pair of sunglasses is when spending long days outside in the summer," says Bachelder.
The Great Summer Sunglasses Contest will begin on Friday, June 15th, 2012 and run until Saturday, July 14th, 2012, where one lucky winner will have the option to choose from a $100 gift certificate to CTSwholesaleSunglasses.com or a fully loaded sunglasses display rack.
To enter the contest, simply visit the blog (http://blog.ctswholesalesunglasses.com) on Friday June 15th. There is no purchase necessary and entrants may enter once every day for the full contest.
About CTS Wholesale LLC:
CTS Wholesale Sunglasses markets bulk sunglasses, party hats, oil lighters and other items for retailers to buy conveniently at any time and place from the Internet store. Toll-free numbers help to clarify doubts and get any questions answered before finalizing the order. Visit the online store at http://www.CTSwholesaleSunglasses.com.
Kirk Bachelder
CTS Wholesale LLC.
503.364.3486
Email Information
Costco Wholesale's Third Quarter Earnings Report - Yahoo Finance
Costco Wholesale (Nasdaq: COST) announced its results for the most recent quarter on May 24, 2012. Costco Wholesale operates membership warehouses that offer a selection of nationally branded and selected private-label products in categories such as food, appliances, and sporting goods, at low prices.
In most situations, when earnings do not meet analyst estimates, a business' stock price will tend to drop. On the other hand, when actual earnings beat estimates by a significant amount, the share price will likely surge.SEE: 5 Tricks Companies Use During Earnings Season
The Numbers:
Costco Wholesale's EPS outpaced analyst estimates while the company's revenues came in below predictions. The company reported 88 cents per share versus the 87 cents per share estimate and revenues of $21.85 billion versus the $22.11 billion estimate. EPS rose 20.5% while revenue climbed 5.9% from the same period last year. Costco Wholesale's revenue has grown during each of the past four quarters on a year-over-year basis. The company's net income for the quarter rose 19.1% to $386 million. Last quarter marked the third in a row of rising net income.
A Look Back:
Last quarter was the fifth in a row that the company saw shrinking gross margins, as they fell 1.8 percentage points from the year-earlier quarter to 10.6%. In that span, margins have contracted an average of 0.7 percentage point per quarter on a year-over-year basis.
Net income has increased 10.3% year-over-year on average across the last five quarters. The biggest gain came in the most recent quarter, when income climbed 19.1% from the year-earlier quarter.
Looking Ahead:
For next quarter, analysts have a more positive outlook about the company's expected results. The average estimate for the fourth quarter is $1.29 per share, up from $1.28 90 days ago. Increasing earnings estimate is a positive sign about the company and it typically leads a increase in the stock price. For the fiscal year, the average estimate has moved down from $3.85 a share to $3.84 over the last 60 days.
(Company fundamentals provided by Xignite Financials. Earnings estimates provided by Zacks)
Wholesale Bridal Dresses Beautiful And Romantic - Salon
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Robert Pyper: Reform best the slow way - scotsman.com
RESTRUCTURING Scotland’s public services is a process that should be piecemeal rather than wholesale, and is complicated by the unsettled constitution, writes Robert Pyper
Recent articles on these pages by Professor Stephen Osborne and Des McNulty brought with them a certain sense of déjà vu. It seems as if we are doomed to retrace our steps across a landscape littered with think tank reports, academic articles, parliamentary papers, white and green papers, and associated contributions to the never-ending debates about the future of our public services.
The discussions about inter-agency collaborations, joint service delivery, integrated public services, joined-up approaches and partnership working have a certain circularity. They take place on the assumption that the existing mosaic of public service bodies in Scotland is more or less “a given”, and the task we face is how best to co-ordinate the work of these bodies in order to enhance service delivery. Last year, the Christie Commission devoted a section of its report to matters relating to “inter-agency training to reduce silo mentalities, drive forward service integration and build a common public service ethos.”
In his article, McNulty might justifiably have cited the thorough work carried out some time ago on this theme by the Scottish Parliament’s finance committee under his chairmanship. That committee’s 2005 investigation into “efficient government and civil service reform” gathered a plethora of evidence on the future direction of the public services in Scotland’s devolved polity.
The question of structure, which featured in the 2005 debates, remains germane to the issues and themes covered by Christie, as well as by Professor Osborne and former Labour minister McNulty. Returning to the evidence I submitted to the McNulty Committee, the continuing relevance of the key issues, and the lack of forward movement on the question of the overall structure of the Scottish public services, is striking.
It makes sense to start at the top of the structure, with the civil service. The unified, but broadly federal UK civil service has evolved under devolution to strike a balance between the core principles which emerge from Whitehall and the necessary flexibilities which allow the day-to-day governance of Scotland and Wales to reflect local culture, behaviours and priorities. Since 1997, the prevailing view in Edinburgh has been that there would be little purpose in embarking on the expensive and time-consuming rebranding exercise which would be required in order to create a distinct Scottish civil service. The SNP favours this concept, but apparently prefer to wait for the inevitable break with Whitehall which would result from independence.
What of the relationship between the civil service and the other elements of the public service? In 2005 the head of the civil service in Scotland dismissed the possibility of fundamental structural changes to the organisation and was especially negative about any proposals to bring public sector staff within “a single employment structure”.
That traditional view notwithstanding, it seems that no change for the civil service has consequences for the broader public services, and is not a long-term option. The quest for the type of integrated public service model set out in the articles by Osborne and McNulty has implications for all levels of the system, and will inevitably involve grasping the nettle of structural change. We have already seen how budgetary pressures and financial retrenchment, coupled with fundamental questions about the needs of a relatively small total population, have forced the issue of restructuring in the police service. The move to the “single Scottish force” will not be without its problems, and, of course, in any radical change of this type the major challenge is to ensure that economies of scale and the benefits of enhanced strategic coordination are achieved without loss of vital local accountabilities.
Nonetheless, the direction the rest of the public services are going could perhaps emerge from this case. In 2005 there seemed to be an opportunity to take the system of governance in the direction of an inclusive public service, and arguably facilitate a distinctly Scottish approach to public management and administration within the UK context, regardless of questions about long-term constitutional arrangements. Scottish governance would then be characterised by an approach common in many European states, where the civil service typically encompasses officials at central, federal and local levels. Undoubtedly, a series of legislative and organisational obstacles would have to be overcome in order to create a Scottish public service, but change of this type, properly managed, could help secure service integration, efficiency gains, rational policy-making, clarified lines of accountability, and opportunities to address perceived gaps in leadership or other specialised skills.
How could such a change be taken forward? Two possible routes would be a radical, “big bang” approach or a pragmatic, incremental approach. The former, implying a swift move involving extensive legislative change with only the basic required consultation and experimentation would be inadvisable, and would be at odds with the desire to engender an inclusive, cross-party culture and ethos.
The pragmatic approach would involve establishing key building blocks for reform, developing practices and processes from extant pilot schemes and moving from these to create selected experiments with public service integration, spanning, inter alia, local government, the health service and the civil service. The problem with the incremental building block approach, which features in the sub-texts of the Christie Report, is that we have seen rather a lot of it, over the years. If the “shared services”, “integrated public services” agendas and their associated offshoots are isolated from clearly enunciated commitments to broader strategic reform, they simply spawn a plethora of units and cross-cutting task forces and, ultimately, add to the problem of initiative overload and reform by management fad, from which aspects of the system of government already suffer, without producing the required outcome.
For the pragmatic approach to stand a chance of succeeding, there needs to be a clear balance struck between incremental experimentation and a specific medium to long-term commitment to use these types of building blocks as the basis for the bigger change, the major strategic overhaul of the public services within an agreed timetable.
Professor Osborne argues that constitutional change in the form of independence or devo-max could be the catalyst for long-awaited public service reforms which would link funding and delivery. McNulty questions the need for such macro change as the prerequisite for the required reforms. In 2005 there was no looming independence referendum, and the devo-max agenda, though not described by that term, was about working within the spirit of the emerging Scottish polity and seeing devolution as a “process not an event”.
If a radical reconfiguration of public services could be envisaged in that context, there is no logical reason why such a reform agenda should now been seen as being dependent on major constitutional reform and the outcome of a referendum. However, abstract logic matters little in government, and realpolitik suggests that there will be little significant movement on this reform agenda until the constitutional questions are settled.
• Professor Robert Pyper is head of the school of social sciences, and Professor of Government and Public Policy at the University of the West of Scotland.
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Print this pageGoogle defends against claims of rigged search results - CIO UK
Google is aggressively defending itself against accusations it manipulates its search results based on ad payments, and it is encouraging users to go elsewhere if they don't like what the company does.
A recent blog it posted came in response to a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece in which Nextag CEO Jeffrey Katz slammed the company and its practices.
Katz wrote that his comparison shopping site analyzes the search traffic it receives from Google and can tell "when Google makes changes to its algorithms that effectively punish its competitors," including his company.
"Our data, which we shared with the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 21, 2011, shows without a doubt that Google has stacked the deck. And as a result, it has shifted from a true search site into a commerce site -- a commerce site whose search algorithm favors products and services from Google and those from companies able to spend the most on advertising," Katz wrote.
Google was quick to counter with a detailed blog to defend itself.
Senior VP of Engineering Amit Singhal wrote that Google's natural search results are never influenced by payment and that its "ads and commercial experiences are clearly labeled and distinct from the unpaid results, and we recently announced new improvements to labeling of shopping results."
Google announced those "improvements" to shopping results on May 31 and said by the end of the year its product search results will be limited to paid advertising and be called Google Shopping. It said this would lead to better shopping results for users because "having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date."
Katz isn't the only one who takes issue with how Google is doing things these days.
"[P]aid inclusion was one of the original sins Google listed as part of its 'Don't Be Evil' creed. But these days, Google seems comfortable with paid inclusion, raising potential concerns for publishers and searchers alike," wrote Marketing Land's Danny Sullivan.
Singhal says Google clearly labels its ads and commercial experiences as such and that they're not mixed in with unpaid results.
"This is in contrast to most comparison shopping sites, which receive payment from merchants but often don't clearly label search results as being influenced by payment," he wrote.
As for Katz's declaration that changes Google makes to its algorithms have punished his company, Singhal wrote that Google makes more than 500 changes to its algorithms a year so as to help users, not websites.
"Our algorithms are always designed to give users the most relevant results -- and sometimes the best result isn't a website, but a map, a weather forecast, a fact, a quick answer, or specialized image, shopping, flight, or movie results. And that's not just Google; Bing, Yahoo and other search engines do the same thing," he wrote.
Most interesting, though, is Singhal's advice that if anyone doesn't like Google's search results, they can go ahead and use a different engine -- he even shared links directly to Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Google Minus Google.
Whether or not you like what Google is doing, you can't deny it has pluck.
To check out the rest of Singhal's assertions, visit the Google Public Policy Blog where he also says some of the company's largest advertisers are competitors and that "the great thing about the openness of the Internet is that if users don't find our results relevant and useful, they can easily navigate to Nextag, Amazon, Yelp, Bing or any other website." Follow Christina on Twitter and Google+ for even more tech news and commentary and follow Today@PCWorld on Twitter, too.
It's a Hungry Game for Jennifer Lawrence... as she goes shopping for groceries - Daily Mail
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Jennifer Lawrence was the image of bohemian chic as she headed to the supermarket yesterday to stock up on groceries.
The Hunger Games actress donned a floaty patterned skirt for her outing to Whole Foods in Los Angeles to stock up on food.
A lettuce could be seen peeping out from the top of her bag as she left the store, before continuing her shopping trip at high-end homeware shop Williams-Sonoma.
Feeling hungry: Jennifer Lawrence was spotted leaving Whole Foods in LA
Jennifer, 21, completed her hippy-esque look with a grey T-shift and green jacket, teamed with a white crochet bag.
Not very filling: A lettuce could be seen peeping out the top of her bag
The actress has recently returned from London with boyfriend Nicholas Holt.
While there the pair enjoyed the Queen's Jubilee celebrations, including watching the procession down the River Thames.
She recently finished work on comedy film Silver Linings Playbook, in which she co-stars with Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, and Julia Stiles.
Jennifer and boyfriend Nicholas, who met on the set of X Men: First Class in 2010, went public with their relationship last year.
Bohemian chic: The 21-year-old actress donned a floaty patterned dress, teamed with a grey T-shirt, green jacket and a crochet bag
Getting in the goods: After her grocery trip she headed to high-end homeware store Williams-Sonoma
Lawrence with Brit boyfriend Nicholas Holt in London earlier this month
While the couple have been tight-lipped on the subject of their relationship, Jennifer did hint at what may have attracted her to the actor during an interview earlier this year.
She told UK Glamour magazine: 'British men have these wonderful manners, and everything they say is funnier just because of the accent.
'There’s this cute "I'm trying to be adorable because I know you’re mad at me" accent, and then the drunk accent where all the consonants have vanished.
Having spent a lot of time in the UK since she started dating Hoult, Lawrence has also developed a fondness for the country's fashion.
She explained: 'I love the relaxed way British girls dress. I think I dress like one.
'I like Topshop, Portobello Road and Selfridges - although I always get Selfridges and Waitrose mixed up, which has led to a few disappointing shopping trips.'
Natural beauty: Even dressed down, Jennifer looked radiant
Businesswoman: Jennifer visited Shutters Hotel, Santa Monica, for a meeting
Heroine: Following her role in The Hunger Games, Jennifer has become an idol
MyReviewsNow.net Adds Verizon Broadband to Virtual Shopping Mall - PRWeb
Las Vegas, NV (PRWEB) June 11, 2012
MyReviewNow.net, a virtual shopping mall that lets people across the country conveniently shop at home for the Internet’s hottest products, services and brands, has added Verizon Broadband to its growing roster of top name affiliate partners.
Starting at only $19.99 a month, Verizon Broadband’s High Speed Internet (HSI) features a dedicated line that runs directly to homes, which makes the connection faster, more secure and more reliable. And for surfers who want to take the Internet with them, Verizon Broadband also offers a variety of leading edge mobile phones and mobile Internet access options. On top of this, Verizon Broadband was ranked #1 in customer service in a J.D. Power and Associates survey.
“We’re very pleased to add Verizon Broadband to our virtual shopping mall,” commented an Affiliate Relationship Spokesperson for MyReviewsNow.net. “Across the country, millions of people are making the switch to Verizon Broadband, so that they can get more speed, reliability, service, value and features. It’s a better way to experience the Internet, and with packages starting at just $19.99 a month, it’s also affordable for individuals, families and businesses.”
People who want to experience a better Internet, and who want to explore leading edge mobile phones and mobile Internet access options, can connect with Verizon Broadband via MyReviewsNow.net’s Cell Phone and Speciality Devices Portal.
Access to MyReviewsNow.net’s shopping mall is free and no membership or registration is required. People can also check out unbiased and un-sponsored consumer service and product reviews while they shop, to help them make informed buying decisions.
For more information or media inquiries, contact Lina Andrade at info(at)myreviewsnow(dot)net. Press release issued by SEOChampion.com.
About MyReviewsNow.net
A virtual shopping mall of services, products and publications available online, MyReviewsNow.net is a business directory that sets itself apart from similar sites by offering both professional reviews and customer testimonials on the Internet’s hottest offerings in a fun, simple format that is easy for visitors to shop and enjoy.
About SEO Champion
SEO Champion was started in 1999 and is owner operated by Michael Rotkin, SEO Specialist for over 17 years. Michael Rotkin’s goal for his clients is to “own” keyword placements for the top 3 slots organically, so that his clients can earn a higher return on investment from their advertising dollars. Rotkin realizes the value of SEO over Pay-Per-Click campaigns, where click-throughs are generally more expensive and harder to convert into sales. SEOChampion’s intense work ethic can be seen in daily and weekly reports that show progress through organic keyword gain. This effort is the reason his SEO firm has been able to build a loyal client base for many years. Learn more at SEO Champion.
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