Business

What’s a Georgia Summer Without Peaches? Not So Sweet.

Published

2 years ago

July 7, 2023

What’s a Georgia Summer Without Peaches? Not So Sweet.

A darkness has fallen across the cobbler belt. You can barely find a peach.

A winter that was a touch warm, followed by a series of hard freezes in March, devastated the Georgia peach crop. Some hopeful state officials estimate that only 10 percent of the crop survived. But out in the field, the prospects appear even worse.

“If we made 2 percent of a crop, I would be surprised,” said Jeff Cook, a University of Georgia cooperative extension coordinator who helped put together an application for federal relief. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture granted it, declaring 18 Georgia counties natural-disaster areas and making an additional 38 counties eligible for federal loans. The cost to the state, including lost jobs and peach sales, Mr. Cook said, could reach $200 million.

In a state where eating a peach over the kitchen sink is a birthright, cobbler recipes are passed down through the generations and a baffling number of streets in Atlanta are named Peachtree, a summer without peaches is unfathomable.

There is little relief to be found in the orchards of neighboring South Carolina, which grows more than twice as many peaches as Georgia but has lost 75 percent or more of this year’s crop.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Lanier Pearson, whose family grows peaches on about 1,400 acres in Fort Valley, Ga. “We’ve never seen anything like this. Even my father-in-law, who is in his 70s and farmed his whole life, can’t remember a year this bad.”

The few peaches available at Atlanta-area farmers’ markets cost nearly double what they did last year. Organic peaches sell for almost $2 apiece. The local fruit are in such short supply that some Georgia grocery stores offer only peaches from California, which is like playing “Sweet Caroline” at Yankee Stadium.

Although California and South Carolina grow far more peaches, loyalty to the Georgia peach is strong. Steven Satterfield, the chef at Miller Union in Atlanta, is not about to supplement his precious allotment of just two cases of a week with peaches from any other state.

Instead, he is building recipes around the deficit. Claudia V. Martínez, the restaurant’s pastry chef, slices peaches extra thin before assembling them with cornmeal cake and buttermilk ice cream. Tomatoes and cucumbers play supporting roles in a peach salad with lemon ricotta, herbs and crunchy granola. The bartender is pondering how to use peach pits for no-alcohol cocktails.

There is one bright spot in an otherwise tough year for Southern peaches. “I will say the little bit that are available are really shining,” Mr. Satterfield said.

Some chefs are simply giving up. Erika Council, who runs a breakfast spot in Atlanta called Bomb Biscuits, grew up eating and cooking with Southern peaches. Her grandmother is Mildred Council, better known as Mama Dip, who opened a popular restaurant in Chapel Hill, N.C., and went on to write two cookbooks.

Ms. Council is making jam with pineapples or cantaloupe instead of peaches, and customers will have to wait until next year for her peach reaper sauce, made with Georgia peaches and Carolina reaper peppers.

Peach prices, she said, “are so freaking high I would have to use canned or frozen, and I’m not going to do that.”

In a pinch, some Georgia peach purists will turn to South Carolina, which is second only to California in peach production. (For the record, in 2022 California grew 475,000 tons of peaches, dwarfing South Carolina’s 67,400 tons and Georgia’s 24,800.)

In the two Southern states, a similar terroir and long, hot summer days produce complex, sweet and perfumey fruit. Many of the varieties grown are the same, too. Sometimes even the most practiced peach-eating Southerner can’t tell the difference.

Despite a rivalry over whose taste better, the states stand united when it comes to fending off the peaches from up north or out west. “We have some friendly competition, but we want people to buy Southeastern peaches,” said Eva Moore, communications director for the South Carolina Department of Agriculture.

The South’s pain is also being felt in New England, where trees have endured weather fluctuations that included a blossom-killing February cold snap that took temperatures below zero.

“I don’t think there is a peach in New England,” said Joe Czajkowski, who has a few acres of fruit trees on his farm in Hadley, Mass.

Between there and the South, though, lies a success story: New Jersey, where this summer’s peach crop is terrific. The weather has been perfect, without excessive rain that can render peaches mushy, said Pegi Adam of the New Jersey Peach Promotion Council.

“But,” she said, “you shouldn’t say the South’s loss is Jersey’s gain.”

California is also enjoying a particularly good year. “We’ve lucked out,” said Chelsea Ketelsen, whose family runs HMC Farms, south of Fresno. “We’ve had a cooler summer than normal, so we have higher sugars than we normally do.”

Like other farms in California, HMC is doing its best to fill in the national gaps left by the poor Southern supply. And while Ms. Ketelsen has nothing but respect for partisans of the Georgia peach, she urges them to take a chance.

“If you have to settle for California,” she said, “this is the year to do it.”

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Business

Albania Gives Jared Kushner Hotel Project a Nod as Trump Returns

Published

3 hours ago

January 16, 2025

Press Room

Albania Gives Jared Kushner Hotel Project a Nod as Trump Returns

The government of Albania has given preliminary approval to a plan proposed by Jared Kushner, Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law, to build a $1.4 billion luxury hotel complex on a small abandoned military base off the coast of Albania.

The project is one of several involving Mr. Trump and his extended family that directly involve foreign government entities that will be moving ahead even while Mr. Trump will be in charge of foreign policy related to these same nations.

The approval by Albania’s Strategic Investment Committee — which is led by Prime Minister Edi Rama — gives Mr. Kushner and his business partners the right to move ahead with accelerated negotiations to build the luxury resort on a 111-acre section of the 2.2-square-mile island of Sazan that will be connected by ferry to the mainland.

Mr. Kushner and the Albanian government did not respond Wednesday to requests for comment. But when previously asked about this project, both have said that the evaluation is not being influenced by Mr. Kushner’s ties to Mr. Trump or any effort to try to seek favors from the U.S. government.

“The fact that such a renowned American entrepreneur shows his interest on investing in Albania makes us very proud and happy,” a spokesman for Mr. Rama said last year in a statement to The New York Times when asked about the projects.

Mr. Kushner’s Affinity Partners, a private equity company backed with about $4.6 billion in money mostly from Saudi Arabia and other Middle East sovereign wealth funds, is pursuing the Albania project along with Asher Abehsera, a real-estate executive that Mr. Kushner has previously teamed up with to build projects in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The Albanian government, according to an official document recently posted online, will now work with their American partners to clear the proposed hotel site of any potential buried munitions and to examine any other environmental or legal concerns that need to be resolved before the project can move ahead.

The document, dated Dec. 30, notes that the government “has the right to revoke the decision,” depending on the final project negotiations.

Mr. Kushner’s firm has said the plan is to build a five-star “eco-resort community” on the island by turning a “former military base into a vibrant international destination for hospitality and wellness.”

Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter, has said she is helping with the project as well. “We will execute on it,” she said about the project, during a podcast last year.

This project is just one of two major real-estate deals that Mr. Kushner is pursuing along with Mr. Abehsera that involve foreign governments.

Separately, the partnership received preliminary approval last year to build a luxury hotel complex in Belgrade, Serbia, in the former ministry of defense building, which has sat empty for decades after it was bombed by NATO in 1999 during a war there.

Serbia and Albania have foreign policy matters pending with the United States, as both countries seek continued U.S. support for their long-stalled efforts to join the European Union, and officials in Washington are trying to convince Serbia to tighten ties with the United States, instead of Russia.

Virginia Canter, who served as White House ethics lawyer during the Obama and Clinton administrations and also an ethics adviser to the International Monetary Fund, said even if there was no attempt to gain influence with Mr. Trump, any government deal involving his family creates that impression.

“It all looks like favoritism, like they are providing access to Kushner because they want to be on the good side of Trump,” Ms. Canter said, now with State Democracy Defenders Fund, a group that tracks federal government corruption and ethics issues.

Business

Craft supplies retailer Joann declares bankruptcy for the second time in a year

Published

4 hours ago

January 16, 2025

Press Room

Craft supplies retailer Joann declares bankruptcy for the second time in a year

The craft supplies and fabric retailer Joann filed for bankruptcy for the second time in less than a year, as the chain wrestles with declining sales and inventory shortages, the company said Wednesday.

The retailer emerged from a previous Chapter 11 bankruptcy process last April after eliminating $505 million in debt. Now, with $615 million in liabilities, the company will begin a court-supervised sale of its assets to repay creditors. The company owes an additional $133 million to its suppliers.

“We hope that this process enables us to find a path that would allow Joann to continue operating,” said interim Chief Executive Michael Prendergast in a statement. “The last several years have presented significant and lasting challenges in the retail environment, which, coupled with our current financial position and constrained inventory levels, forced us to take this step.”

Joann’s more than 800 stores and websites will remain open throughout the bankruptcy process, the company said, and employees will continue to receive pay and benefits. The Hudson, Ohio-based company was founded in 1943 and has stores in 49 states, including several in Southern California.

According to court documents, Joann began receiving unpredictable and inconsistent deliveries of yarn and sewing items from its suppliers, making it difficult to keep its shelves stocked. Joann’s suppliers also discontinued certain items the retailer relied on.

Along with the “unanticipated inventory challenges,” Joann and other retailers face pressure from inflation-wary consumers and interest rates that were for a time the highest in decades. The crafts supplier has also been hindered by competition from others in the space, including Michael’s, Etsy and Hobby Lobby, said Retail Wire Chief Executive Dominick Miserandino.

“It did not necessarily learn to evolve like its nearby competitors,” Miserandino said of Joann. “Not many people have heard of Joann in the way they’ve heard of Michael’s.”

Joann is not the first retailer to continue to struggle after going through bankruptcy. The party supply chain Party City announced last month it would be shutting down operations, after filing for and emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2023.

Over the last two years, more than 60 companies have filed for bankruptcy for a second or third time, Bloomberg reported, based on information from BankruptcyData. That’s the most over a comparable period since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic kept shoppers home.

Discount chain Big Lots filed for bankruptcy last September, and the Container Store, a retailer offering storage and organization products, declared bankruptcy last month. Companies that rely heavily on brick-and-mortar locations are scrambling to keep up with online retailers and big-box chains. Fast-casual restaurants such as Red Lobster and Rubio’s Coastal Grill have also struggled.

High prices have prompted consumers to pull back on discretionary spending, while rising operating and labor costs put additional pressure on businesses, experts said. The U.S. annual inflation rate for 2024 was 2.9%, down from 3.4% in 2023. But inflation has been on the rise since September and remains above the Federal Reserve’s goal of 2%.

If a sale process for Joann is approved, Gordon Brothers Retail Partners would serve as the stalking-horse bidder and set the floor for the auction.

Business

U.S. Sues Southwest Airlines Over Chronic Delays

Published

11 hours ago

January 15, 2025

Press Room

U.S. Sues Southwest Airlines Over Chronic Delays

The federal government sued Southwest Airlines on Wednesday, accusing the airline of harming passengers who flew on two routes that were plagued by consistent delays in 2022.

In a lawsuit, the Transportation Department said it was seeking more than $2.1 million in civil penalties over the flights between airports in Chicago and Oakland, Calif., as well as Baltimore and Cleveland, that were chronically delayed over five months that year.

“Airlines have a legal obligation to ensure that their flight schedules provide travelers with realistic departure and arrival times,” the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, said in a statement. “Today’s action sends a message to all airlines that the department is prepared to go to court in order to enforce passenger protections.”

Carriers are barred from operating unrealistic flight schedules, which the Transportation Department considers an unfair, deceptive and anticompetitive practice. A “chronically delayed” flight is defined as one that operates at least 10 times a month and is late by at least 30 minutes more than half the time.

In a statement, Southwest said it was “disappointed” that the department chose to sue over the flights that took place more than two years ago. The airline said it had operated 20 million flights since the Transportation Department enacted its policy against chronically delayed flights more than a decade ago, with no other violations.

“Any claim that these two flights represent an unrealistic schedule is simply not credible when compared with our performance over the past 15 years,” Southwest said.

Last year, Southwest canceled fewer than 1 percent of its flights, but more than 22 percent arrived at least 15 minutes later than scheduled, according to Cirium, an aviation data provider. Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Alaska Airlines and American Airlines all had fewer such delays.

The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. In it, the government said that a Southwest flight from Chicago to Oakland arrived late 19 out of 25 trips in April 2022, with delays averaging more than an hour. The consistent delays continued through August of that year, averaging an hour or more. On another flight, between Baltimore and Cleveland, average delay times reached as high as 96 minutes per month during the same period. In a statement, the department said that Southwest, rather than poor weather or air traffic control, was responsible for more than 90 percent of the delays.

“Holding out these chronically delayed flights disregarded consumers’ need to have reliable information about the real arrival time of a flight and harmed thousands of passengers traveling on these Southwest flights by causing disruptions to travel plans or other plans,” the department said in the lawsuit.

The government said Southwest had violated federal rules 58 times in August 2022 after four months of consistent delays. Each violation faces a civil penalty of up to $37,377, or more than $2.1 million in total, according to the lawsuit.

The Transportation Department on Wednesday also said that it had penalized Frontier Airlines for chronically delayed flights, fining the airline $650,000. Half that amount was paid to the Treasury and the rest is slated to be forgiven if the airline has no more chronically delayed flights over the next three years.

This month, the department ordered JetBlue Airways to pay a $2 million fine for failing to address similarly delayed flights over a span of more than a year ending in November 2023, with half the money going to passengers affected by the delays.