A new linens store opens Friday in the Millcreek Mall Pavillion space once occupied by Linens N Things.
The new store, headed by the former chief executive of Elder-Beerman and backed financially by former Cafaro Co. executive J.J. Cafaro, is called Linens & More For Less.
The 35,000-square-foot store, located next door to Gander Mountain, will have an assortment of bedding, towels, cookware, glassware and flatware.
The company said in a news release that this is not a discount store chain, “but a value-driven quality retailer, offering top-grade merchandise at amazingly low prices.”
This marks the third location for the newly formed chain, which opened its first store in July in Warren, Ohio. There are immediate plans for three more stores in 2010, and nine more in 2011.
The company’s chief executive is Fred Mershard, former chief executive of Elder-Beerman Stores Corp.
Until recently, Cafaro was a top executive at Cafaro Co., which owns the Millcreek Mall.
– Jim Martin

Gas prices at some Erie area stations fell to $2.65 for a gallon of unleaded regular today.
That’s a 4-cent-a-gallon drop from yesterday.
The decline is welcome news, coming just ahead of the Labor Day holiday.
Government forecasters expect gasoline prices to continue falling through autumn, perhaps to as low as $2.30 a gallon.
– Doug Oathout

The headline in Monday’s Wall Street journal could not have been good news to those at Erie Insurance.

“More Go Without Life Insurance,” it read.

The story, citing a report by Limra of Windsor, Conn., said nearly a third of U.S. households have no life insurance coverage, “the highest percentage in more than four decades.”

About 35 million U.S. households neither own their own life-insurance policies nor are covered under employer-sponsored plans, up from 24 million in 2004, according to the survey.

The growing percentage without life insurance is a sign of the financial pressures on middle-income families as the economy struggles, the story says. The organization also attributed the rise to insurance agents themselves, who Limra says have focused too much on wealthy clients and not on middle-class ones.

Afraid you’ll lose your ESPN channels come Thursday? It’s a possibility, given the corporate tug of war being waged between ESPN parent Walt Disney Co. and Time Warner Cable Inc.

But it appeared Monday the firms were on their way to resolving their dispute without disrupting our television viewing.

Both companies have agreed to pull marketing campaigns that they had launched this past summer aimed at persuading public opinion to their side. They now expect to reach a deal, according to wire reports Monday.

A combination of generosity and paper airplane-making skills will win someone an Apple i Pad.
Star 104 and Best Buy are teaming up Friday to collect school supplies for needy children.
Participants who show up at Best Buy between 4 and 6 p.m. will have a chance to win the i Pad. The first 200 people who donate a notebook or other school supply will be given a blank sheet of paper from which they’ll be asked to make a paper airplane.
Contestants will form a circle around the i Pad and will be asked to launch their paper aircraft toward the tablet-sized computer.
The person who comes closest to the i Pad gets to take it home.
The school supplies will be distributed to children from low-income families.
— Jim Martin

So much of the bad news about real estate doesn’t seem to apply to Erie.
Local housing prices never crashed because they never soared all that high in the first place. And there’s no indication that there’s a glut of unsold houses languishing on the market.
But the news isn’t all good.
A new report shows that 8.3 percent of Erie County homes with a mortgage are worth less than what the owner owes on them.
CoreLogic, an online source of information about the real estate industry, reports that more than 4,200 or 8.3 percent of residential properties are what the industry refers to as “underwater,” meaning that they’re worth less than what it would take to pay them off.
Another 2.8 percent were reported to be near the point of negative equity.
It’s only by comparison that those numbers sound good.
While Erie’s rate of negative equity is worse than Pennsylvania’s rate of 7.3 percent, it’s vastly better than the national negative equity rate of 23 percent.
Nevada, a booming real estate market just a few years ago, has the highest rate of negative equity in the nation. A full 68 percent of residential properties in the Silver State are worth less than the payoff amount.
— Jim Martin

A federal agency says 380,000 pounds of possibly tainted deli meat products sold in sandwiches at Walmart stores have been recalled by a food company in Buffalo, according to the Associated Press.

The Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service said Tuesday that roast beef and ham distributed to delis at the nation’s largest retailer might be contaminated with Listeria bacteria.

Agency spokesman Gary Mickelson says that no illnesses have been linked to the meats made by Zemco Industries and that most have already been consumed. The sandwiches were removed from store shelves.

Listeria can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people.

Workers at Accuride’s aluminum truck wheel plant on East 12th Street have reached a collective bargaining agreement with management of the Indiana-based company.
The four-year agreement affects about 215 employees who are members of UAW Local 1186.
The contract follows closely on the heels of promising second-quarter earnings report for Accuride.
In that report, issued Aug. 3, reported that net sales for the quarter were up 44 percent to $195.6 million compared to the same quarter in 2009.
—Jim Martin

If you’ve ever eaten an ice cream cone, chances are good you’ve sampled a cone baked in Mercer County at the world’s largest ice cream cone plant.
And it’s about to get bigger.
The Joy Cone Co., a family-owned company based in Hermitage, has announced a $21 million expansion project that will expand the company’s local facility by another 190,000 square feet.
That expansion, equal to the size of about two Walmart stores, will allow the company to add another 50 jobs for a total of 375 positions.
The project is getting a boost from a $2 million loan from the Pennsylvania Industrial Development Authority, $21,000 in job training assistance and $47,000 in job creation tax credits.
The company, which produces about 1.5 billion cones a year, was founded 85 years ago by the George family. The plant is still owned by the same family along with employees through an employee stock ownership plan.
Prior to the expansion, the cone plant ranked as the county’s 18th largest employer.
— Jim Martin

The price of a gallon of unleaded regular dropped this week at some stations to $2.74. A week — and two price cuts — ago, it was $2.84 at most stations.