Sears Holdings Corp. now admits its totally foreseeable and totally preventable death may happen soon:
Sears Holdings Corp. acknowledged "substantial doubt" about its ability to keep operating, raising fresh concerns about a company that has lost more than $10 billion in recent years.
The retailer added so-called going-concern language to its latest annual report filing, suggesting that weak earnings have cast a pall on its future as a business.
How did this happen? Eddie Lampert killed it, possibly for sport.
Amazon is opening an actual brick-and-mortar bookstore right by the Southport Brown Line stop:
On Tuesday, it will open the doors of a brick-and-mortar store in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood, giving customers a chance to test the e-commerce giant's take on offline shopping.
It's just one 6,000-square-foot neighborhood bookstore. But it's also one of Amazon's first experiments with live customer service and cash registers, and a sign that one of the retail industry's biggest disrupters may not be content to stick to e-commerce.
Amazon is still in the early days of its bookstore experiment. The first location opened in Seattle in late 2015, and the Chicago store, in the 3400 block of North Southport Avenue, will be Amazon's fifth, and first outside a mall. It opened briefly on Saturday as a test and is expected to start regularly scheduled hours Tuesday.
The question, of course, is "why?" I'm going to watch this space.
The National Climate Prediction Center has released a batch of forecasts. Right now they're predicting increased chances of warm weather for Chicago through November:
The heart of summer shows Illinois with an increased chance of above-normal temperatures. But more interesting is that they have introduced a region of below-normal precipitation in the southern half of Illinois. The combination of warmer and drier than normal conditions during that time of year could lead to drought.
Map:
Right now it's a normal March day, and nearly all the snow from Tuesday is gone.
Because that's really the only way we can fix the budget impasse caused by the Governor—and he knows it:
As you probably know, the state hasn't had a “real” budget in a couple of years. A budget is basically just a collection of appropriations. The last legal appropriation for state employee payroll expired on June 30, 2015. Negotiations between the governor and legislative leaders stalled and shortly thereafter a judge in St. Clair County ordered the state to pay its workers anyway. Everybody back then figured this would probably be a temporary situation, so nobody squawked too much. It's been done before for a few weeks. No big deal.
Except, as we are all painfully aware, the governmental stalemate has continued for over 20 months. In January, Attorney General Madigan got tired of waiting for the governor and the General Assembly to cut a deal and filed a legal motion in St. Clair County to vacate that 2015 order. She lost. We're not sure exactly why because the judge didn't issue a formal opinion, but the governor's office was at that hearing and filed a brief opposing AG Madigan's motion.
The governor doesn't want AG Madigan to win because his bargaining position will be greatly weakened if the courts effectively shut down the state by ruling that money can't be spent without appropriations. Rauner is demanding some business-related reforms, a property tax freeze and a few other things before he'll agree to a tax hike to balance the state's infamously out of whack budget. So, the man who once bragged that he would use the crisis of the state not having a budget to force through his preferred legislative changes now wants to avoid a much worse crisis that would compel him to abandon his demands in order to prevent the catastrophe of an actual government shutdown.
Got all that?
Meanwhile, Governor Rauner's approval ratings have hit historical lows. Go figure.
The snow continues to fall:
The Chicago area remained under a lake-effect snow warning as the Tuesday morning rush slowed to an icy crawl on expressways and some Metra train lines.
The warning covers Cook, Lake and DuPage counties until 4 p.m. In Lake County, Ind., the warning has been extended to 1 a.m. Wednesday.
The dense snow was being carried by winds from the north to northeast over Lake Michigan. The snow bands were expected to slowly shift into northwest Indiana later in the morning and continue overnight into Wednesday.
I'm in my home office today watching alternating whiteout and sunny conditions as bands of lake-effect snow wash over the area. Later, I have to dig my car out to take Parker for a routine vet visit.
But, of course, it's March. The forecast calls for temperatures to warm up above freezing around noon Thursday and stay there until Saturday night, when they'll dip only briefly before spring begins in earnest.
Chicago's weather is weird.
Chicago had no measurable snowfall for almost three months—until last night:
Snow started Sunday. Snow in the Chicago area and elsewhere is leading to more than 500 cancellations at Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports.
The last time Chicago received any significant snowfall was in mid-December, when there was a little more than 5 inches of snow on Dec. 11 and 3.5 inches of snow days later.
Since the first of the year, what rare flurries the city has seen have added up to less than an inch of snow.
My co-workers who came from other climates are terribly confused. We native Chicagoans are not. Of course we're getting an early-spring snowfall. We haven't built up enough character from the first two months of the year.
Chicago is experiencing sustained 48 km/h winds with gusts up to 68 km/h, which has a noticeable effect on the building I work in. Sears Willis Tower was designed to sway in high winds. Over the years, however, material and building techniques have changed, so occasionally windows blow out of our upper floors. Fortunately this hasn't happened in almost 7 years, but these winds are high enough today that we may have to close the upper floors.
I may pop up to 66 today just to feel it. At that floor, the building can sway almost 3 m. I'm feeling a little dizzy and I'm only a third the way up.
A 2015 theft of a gun shipment from a railroad yard in Chicago continues to plague the city:
The guns had been en route from New Hampshire weapon maker Sturm, Ruger & Co. to Spokane, Washington. Instead, the .45-caliber Ruger revolvers and other firearms spread quickly into surrounding high-crime neighborhoods. Along with two other major gun thefts within three years, the robbery helped fuel a wave of violence on Chicago's streets.
The 2015 heist of the 111 guns, as well as one in 2014 and another last September from the same 63rd Street Rail Yard highlight a tragic confluence. Chicago's biggest rail yards are on the gang- and homicide-plagued South and West sides where most of the city's 762 killings happened last year.
Chicago's leaders regularly blame lax gun laws in Illinois and nearby states that enable a flow of illegal weapons to the city's gangs and criminals. But community leaders and security experts say no one seems to be taking responsibility for train-yard gun thefts.
But the number of guns produced in this country has nothing at all to do with crime, according to the NRA. Right.
It's official: for the first time in recorded history, Chicago had no snow on the ground during the last two months of meterological winter (January and February):
Because the snow measurement is taken at 6 a.m. at O'Hare International Airport, small amounts of snow that may have fallen later in the day and melted were not recorded, said Amy Seeley, meteorologist with the National Weather Service. This occurred Feb. 25 when there was a trace of snow and Jan. 30 when there was 2 mm. The weather service has been keeping data on snow on the ground for 146 years.
WGN-TV meteorologist Tom Skilling said he believes the 146-year streak in Chicago is part of climate change and emphasized that it does not occur linearly, meaning that there is potential for cold winters in the future.
And Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel officially declared February the warmest-ever:
All those days with 60- and 70-degree [Fahrenheit] weather paid off – this February was the warmest February on record for Illinois. The statewide average temperature for February was 4.7°C, 5.3°C above normal. It beat the old record of 4.4°C set back in 1998.
Yes. This is climate change. I've long predicted Chicago would benefit, even though on balance the world won't.