B2B Stories

B2B Stories

Big business: The 25 top grossing Christmas films

Christmas vacation is a great time to download a movie or pop in a DVD (or, if you’re really behind the times, a VHS tape) – especially this year, as the weather makes staying inside seem prudent. It’s also often a good time for movie producers to lure people to the theaters. Christmas movies are big business, both at the box office when they’re released and later as they’re shown ad infinitum on cable channels. There are a number of lists online of the top-grossing Christmas movies, all with varying

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B2B Stories

Downtown businesses participate in decorations crawl, voting ends tonight

When Brandy Gibson relocated her business from Monte Sano Avenue to Broad Street last year, she fell in love with the new location’s storefront windows. Gibson, owner of Tiffinie Bleu Bridal Boutique (pictured above) located at 1251 Broad St., is one of 32 business owners participating in the fourth annual Making Spirits Bright Downtown Décor Crawl, a month-long event sponsored by the Downtown Development Authority of Augusta and Augusta & Co. “I decorate them every year, so when I found out about the crawl, it gave me another reason to

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B2B Stories

The business of Christmas: Americans spend billions each year

In the 1960s, both the Charlie Brown and the Grinch TV specials forewarned about the growing commercialization of Christmas. Despite their warnings, Christmas has become big business in the United States. Here are just a few facts about the business side of Christmas. • Christmas tree farms sell 25-30 million real trees each year – in 2018, it was 32 million, accounting for about $6.1 billion in sales. The states producing the most Christmas trees are Oregon, North Carolina and Michigan, but there are Christmas tree farms in every state.

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B2B Stories

Ebenezer Scrooge still provides lessons for modern-day business owners

Each year around this time, one of the world’s wealthiest fictional characters receives a lot of attention. That, of course, is Ebenezer Scrooge, the miserly and bitter character created by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol and retold in a number of movie versions. But just how wealthy was Scrooge and how did he earn all that money? Dickens’ novel, published in 1843, doesn’t say for certain, but obviously Scrooge was extraordinarily wealthy for the time period. Various people have ventured guesses at Scrooge’s wealth. Forbes listed him as the

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B2B Stories

Copper recycler doubles size of Augusta plant, creates more jobs

A new company in the Augusta area is already expanding its facilities before it has finished construction. Aurubis AG, a European copper recycler, has been working on a new facility in Augusta Corporate Park since June, as reported in ABD here. But on Tuesday, the company announced it will invest more money to double the size. Aurubis announced its plans to invest an additional 250 million Euros ($265.8 million U.S.) into the company, which will double its production from 90,000 tons of recycling to 180,000 tons and will hire 75

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B2B Stories

Expanding networks – the gift that keeps on giving

By the time you read this, there will be only four more shopping days until Christmas, only six days left in Hanukkah, and 10 days until the last day, the giving day, of Kwanzaa. Some of you may be considering giving a gift to someone in your business circle. However, there are often concerns about the appropriateness of giving a material gift to your boss, subordinate, colleague, or people you work with in other companies such as vendors/suppliers or distributors. In this season of giving and gratitude, why not give

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B2B Stories

Simon Says: Future trends: Transportation, healthcare support jobs to grow in next decade

In my annual economic forecast presentation a couple of weeks ago, I looked forward to 2023, which I covered in this column last week. I also took a longer timeline through 2031 to see what our economy would look like using Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) occupational projections. There are 22 major occupational groups tracked by the BLS and the charts below show the changes in the top 12 major groups that account for 85 percent of jobs locally. There are several things of interest. First, the top 12 major

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B2B Stories

Holidays bring out online scammers, teens increasingly vulnerable

CSRA residents, like millions of Americans, enjoy the ease of online shopping. But that trend also brings out criminals trying to capitalize on that appeal by running scams and, surprisingly, the fastest growing victim group is teenagers. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Department (SLED) said the end of the year is especially rife with scams and fraud. According to Social Catfish, in the past five years, the number of teenage victims of scams has increased by 1,125 percent and in 2021 resulted in a loss of $101.4 million. Those over

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