Two Northland Center Mall employees were married at the center where they worked together and started their relationship.

But for one couple, Ernst Stevenson and Sheryl Berry, there wasn’t a place more perfect to tie the knot.

Stevenson and Berry were married Saturday, March 24 in the performance court of Northland Center Mall.

Both are mall employees. Stevenson has been a sergeant on the Northland Center Police for 17 years, and Berry has been the office administrator for five years.

“When I found out (they were engaged), I made a joke about the idea of them getting married here,” said Denise Murray, marketing director for Northland Center Mall. “But the general manager got excited about the idea, and we decided to go with it.”

The Ridgeland Police and Fire departments, the Jackson Bomb Squad, FBI, and Homeland Security were among 18 agencies that conducted a training scenario involving a mock terror attack at the Northpark Mall in Ridgeland, Miss., on Sunday night and Monday morning.

The training exercise centered on a nerve agent that was released and contaminated the air and every one inside.

“It’s very realistic. We have 50 role players inside playing the parts of victims. We gave assignments of symptoms,” said Allan McCluer, training officer for the Ridgeland Fire Department.

The exercise started Sunday night when the mall closed and ended early Monday morning, authorities said.

While responders knew about the exercise, they didn’t know the specific details surrounding the fake nerve gas scenario. They had to respond as if it were a real crisis. All the agencies involved planned the exercise over the past several months, authorities said.

“That’s what we’re training for. If we reach the point where we can work together and communicate with each other then we’re going to be able to better do our jobs, get out here quicker and protect the people here,” McCluer said.

More here.

Mall management cooperated with the drill.

“Training like this is important. It’s a necessary thing and unfortunately it has become more necessary in recent year so we’re just happy to participate,” said Audrie Thompson, Northpark Mall General Manager.

It’s encouraging to see some positive activity occurring in preparing for a worst-case scenario.

Wal-Mart to New York: fuhgeddaboudit.

Frustrated by a bruising, and so far unsuccessful battle to open its first discount store in the nation’s largest city, Wal-Mart’s chief executive said yesterday, “I don’t care if we are ever here.”

H. Lee Scott Jr., the chief executive of the nation’s largest retailer, said that trying to conduct business in New York was so expensive — and exasperating — that “I don’t think it’s worth the effort.”

Mr. Scott’s remarks, delivered at a meeting with editors and reporters of The New York Times, amounted to a surprising admission of defeat, given the company’s vigorous efforts to crack into urban markets and expand beyond its suburban base in much of the country. In recent years, Wal-Mart has encountered stout resistance to its plans to enter America’s bigger cities, which stand as its last domestic frontier.

Much of the opposition to Wal-Mart in cities like New York is led by unions. Organized labor, fearing that the retailer’s low prices and modest wages will undercut unionized stores, have built anti-Wal-Mart alliances with Democratic members of city councils.

More here.

I doubt this piece in the New Yorker had anything to do with it the company’s decision.

The New York Times did a lengthy write-up on the case of a woman in China holding out against a major development.

Still, the “nail house,” as many here have called it because of the homeowner’s tenacity, like a nail that cannot be pulled out, remains the most popular current topic among bloggers in China.

It has a universal resonance in a country where rich developers are seen to be in cahoots with politicians and where both enjoy unchallenged sway. Each year, China is roiled by tens of thousands of riots and demonstrations, and few issues pack as much emotional force as the discontent of people who are suddenly uprooted, told they must make way for a new skyscraper or golf course or industrial zone.

What drove interest in the Chongqing case was the uncanny ability of the homeowner to hold out for so long. Stories are legion in Chinese cities of the arrest or even beating of people who protest too vigorously against their eviction and relocation. In one often-heard twist, holdouts are summoned to the local police station, and return home only to find their house already demolished. How had this owner, a woman no less, managed? Millions wondered.

We previously blogged the story here.

How the value of its real estate is playing into a potential sale of Carrefour, the world’s second largest retailer.

Caldor Rainbow has constructed a fairly thorough and entertaining account of Toys ‘R’ Us various design iterations between 1978 and 1989.

My passion for finding these stores; ones which are brown roofed and rainbow-striped existing today has been a goal for over a year now as there are a good handful still out there. Each year, as the company catches up to these stores, facing a heavy pressure to conform to the decidedly boring looks of today, those special stores, still largely untouched by time (or any hapless repaint or remodel jobs), must be documented and preserved.

Since there’s much information to cover, this entry will be dealing with Part I which encapsules the store history from 1978 to 1989; the last year of the brown/rainbow era. Many pictures shown here are mostly recent, from 2006 and 2007, from a few remaining, older looking locations visited including Woburn; Massachusetts, Clay; New York and Horseheads; New York. We hope to visit more in the future, and expand our travel scope.

Thomas Flatley, an Irish immigrant who turned a single home into a real estate empire worth $1.3 billion, is near a deal to sell his entire portfolio of shopping centers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

The eleven properties for sale are worth $500 million, and include Dedham Mall in addition to shopping centers in Braintree, Canton, Falmouth, Barnstable, Medfield, and an unfinished site in Southborough in Massachusetts, as well as shopping centers in Belmont, Nashua, Portsmouth and Rochester, N.H.

The Boston Globe has a good profile of Flatley.

Claire Stores is being bought by Apollo Management LP.

Claire’s Stores Inc., the Pembroke Pines-based costume jewelry retailer for teens, said Tuesday it has agreed to sell the company for $3.1 billion to New York-based private equity firm Apollo Management LP.

Under terms of the agreement, Claire’s shareholders will receive $33 in cash per share. The purchase price represents a 7.3 percent premium to the stock’s Monday closing price on the New York Stock Exchange.

Claire’s, which operates about 3,000 stores in the U.S. and around the world under the names Claire’s and Icing by Claire’s, sells low-cost costume jewelry and accessories to tweens, teens and young adults.

Georgia’s top court threw out a lawsuit involving Simon Property Group and it’s gift card practices.

Georgia’s top court on Monday threw out a lawsuit challenging the fees charged on gift cards sold at a mall owned by Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group.

The court didn’t give Simon a pass.
In its unanimous decision, the justices ruled that the Georgia law overseeing the use of unclaimed state property doesn’t apply to the unused gift cards.
But the court noted it didn’t consider the “fairness or even the legality of the dormancy fees or expiration dates” in upholding a lower court’s ruling to dismiss the case.

After years of jockeying to get approval to open a bank, Wal-Mart Stores has suddenly dropped those plans.

“Since the approval process is now likely to take years rather than months, we decided to withdraw our application to better focus on other ways to serve customers,” said Wal-Mart Financial Services President Jane Thompson in a statement.

“We fully intend to continue to introduce new products and services that champion those who deserve convenient, lower priced financial services,” she added.

The announcement comes one day after Congressman Paul Gilmor of Ohio

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