Smaller restaurants were whacked particularly hard by the pandemic lockdowns. Some still haven’t recovered. So, the California Restaurant Foundation, by way of its Restaurants Care Resilience Fund, has provided some financial help to nearly 1,000 independent restaurants across California over the last three years. Earlier this month it announced it had given $5,000 each to 89 small restaurants – those with $3 million or less in annual revenue – in Central and Southern California.
“This grant has raised our team’s morale and helped us for the best,” Valeria Loera, owner of Lichis Mex in Tujunga, was quoted as saying in the announcement.
Alycia Harshfield, the executive director of the restaurant foundation, said, “It’s apparent that there is still a significant need for restaurant assistance, as we received 25% more applications this year than last.”
The resilience fund seeks donations, and Southern California Gas Co. stepped up with a $1 million contribution.
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Stefan Pollack is accustomed to running a two-location shop with 16 employees, but suddenly he’s on top of an organization whose members have 143 offices with 2,000 employees in six continents.
That’s because Pollack last week was named global chair of Worldcom Public Relations Group, an international partnership of independently owned public relations firms. Pollack said it is a group of complementary agencies, offering each other international presence, industry expertise, and best practices.
His PR firm, the Pollack Group, which operates in Los Angeles and New York, has been a member since 1999, and Pollack has served on various committees, working his way up. Membership has broadened his company’s vision, Pollack said, “allowing us to learn from international markets.”
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Philip M. Hawley died a few weeks ago at age 97, and his passing is a reminder of how department stores were once huge business.
Hawley was the president and later chief executive of the Carter Hawley Hale Stores for 21 years before he retired in 1993. It and its predecessor company, called the Broadway-Hale Stores, bought the then-small Neiman Marcus department stores, the Walden Book Co., and the Bergdorf Goodman stores in New York, among others. Hawley presided over the biggest department store chain in the western United States.
Hawley was so important he was tapped to serve on the boards of huge companies including AT&T, Bank of America Corp., the Walt Disney Co. and Weyerhaeuser Co.
But alas, the company took on $1.3 billion in debt to fend off hostile takeover attempts by The Limited Inc. and, coupled with the slow downturn experienced by so many department stores, it eventually had to sell itself. Its remnants kind of dissipated away as smaller specialty retailers, not to mention Amazon.com Inc., took command.
The Insider is compiled by Editor-in-Chief Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].
