New Hampshire Business Review - February 4 2005

Beginning with this issue, New Hampshire Business Review will present the New Hampshire Business Review/Chartworth Stock Index, the quarterly and trailing 12 months’ stock performance of New Hampshire-based publicly traded companies. The list of companies has been sorted on the…

The price of that doggy in the window — or at the kennel — may be going up this year. On Jan. 1, the annual licensing fee for retail pet shops went from $50 to $200. The same fee also…

Revelation that the state budget deficit has grown by another $70 million should put businesses around the state on red alert. The additional $70 million - “discovered” late last month due to bungled bookkeeping in the Department of Health and…

Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have written, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” This perspective is largely absent from the debate over President Bush’s proposal to reform Social…

Once more, a Base Realignment and Closure Commission round is before us. And, the employees of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Seacoast communities, the bipartisan New Hampshire-Maine-Massachusetts congressional delegation and other friends of the yard are again educating decision-makers at the…

New Hampshire public policy forbids part-time workers from collecting unemployment unless they agree to seek full-time work. For those who need to work part-time, this policy is unbalanced and unfair. Ignoring the reality of part-time workers dates back to when…

Q. My firm, a distributor to small businesses of a wide range of industrial products, launched a comprehensive, well-designed — and expensive — Web site several years ago in the hopes that both customer service and sales would be improved.…

If you’re operating a business in today’s marketplace, you can feel like you’re walking through a minefield. Markets are splintering into niches, customers are foregoing brand loyalty and the Web is expanding traditional boundaries, making it easier than ever for…

Now that the world’s worst-kept secret is out - New York attorney General Elliot Spitzer is running for governor of that state — regulators nationwide are starting to comb through reams of documents filed in response to their request for…

It was a defining moment in my career. We had been asked by the vice president of manufacturing how late he could accept orders for shipment this quarter without any degradation in quality. This guy had 34 plants and over…