TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2004
NEWS
---
Wheel Dr.
Ginny Weatherman/KANSAN
Footprints, located on the third floor of the Kansas Union, is offering students discounts on merchandise before the store's closing, probably in December. Pat Beard, director of building services for the KU Memorial Unions, said he didn't know what would replace it but that a mail copy service or an ice cream parlor were possibilities.
Union Footprints to close
Downtown store profits, discount store misses bottom line
BY AUSTIN CASTER
acaster@kansan.com
KANSAH STATE UNIVERSITY
The Footprints store in the Kansas Union wasn't quite the easy sell owner Mick Ranney originally thought.
"The Union store probably wasn't the best idea I've ever had." Rannev said.
The downtown location at 1339 Massachusetts St. will remain open.
Because of insufficient profits, the Footprints store on the third floor of the Kansas Union is going out of business.
The Union store will close the last day of classes this semester, Pat Beard, director of building services for the KU Memorial Unions, said.
He didn't know if there would be a new business already in place when students returned for classes in the spring.
Since the store in the Kansas Union opened a year ago, there had been about three or four sales each day. Ranney said.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
His lease will expire on Dec 31, Ranney said, but the store might close earlier, depending
on inventory.
He said because the store sold discount footwear — already 25 to 75 percent off — he would take an additional 10 percent off to move the stock.
"We're practically giving the stuff away." Ranney said.
Though sales in the Kansas Union store have been slow, the employees will all transfer back to the Footprints store on Massachusetts Street.
Business on the whole is still about $1 million each year, Rannev said.
Footprints hired Amanda Morley about a year ago, around the time the store in the Union opened, she said. Morley is the Union Footprints supervisor.
"It's just been slow from the beginning." Morley, former KU student, said. "We hoped it would pick up but it didn't."
She said she and other employees alternated between working at the store on Massachusetts Street and the store in the Kansas Union.
resources into our business store."
Footprints has a good relationship with the KU Memorial Unions, but it could not achieve the income level it needed, Beard said.
Each business in the Union has a weekly meeting with him to discuss what's going on, he said.
"It's a debate every day where we're going to work," Morley said. "We're putting our
"We try to make it a partnership, not just a landlord-tenant relationship." Beard said.
Beard didn't know what type of business would replace Footprints, but ideas include a mail copy service or an ice cream parlor. he said.
Each tenant at the Union pays a monthly rent, which varies business to business, Beard said.
Beard said the Union had been checking Listservs and asking unions at other universities what businesses had been successful for them.
To get a store in the Union, tenants make bids, competing against each other. The highest bidder will get the space, Beard said.
— Edited by Johanna M. Maska
Bush and Kerry trade barbs
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Both candidates step up harshness in criticisms of one another
PHILADELPHIA — Sen. John Kerry cited the war in Iraq yesterday as proof President Bush has "failed the test of being commander in chief." The Republican slammed his rival as "consistently and dangerously wrong" on national security matters.
In a race of ever-escalating rhetoric, the president also accused the Democratic challenger of "the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking" on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he fell silent on the disappearance of 377 tons of high explosives in Iraq, leaving it to aides to explain.
Polls in the major battleground states were so close that both camps had cause for optimism — and room for doubt. And with only eight days to go, there were signs that the field of competition might be widening.
Democrats fretted about
Hawaii and made plans to advertise to voters in the state that has never backed a Republican for president.
ly put it to use.
Polls showed a tightening race in Arkansas, a state the president won four years ago and the Democrats had virtually given up for lost this time. The president's high command was concerned about New Hampshire trending Kerry's way in the race's final days.
Supreme Court officials announced that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, 80, is undergoing treatment for thyroid cancer and is expected to return to work next week. The statement served as a reminder that the next president is likely to have more than one appointment to an aging court that is divided on abortion, gay rights and more.
Failure to secure the material was "one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration," the fourteen Massachusetts senator said in New Hampshire, his first campaign stop of the day.
Word of the disappearance of explosives from a military installation in Iraq was like a campaign gift to Kerry, and he quick-
Bush gave as good as he got. "On Iraq, my opponent has a strategy of pessimism and retreat," he said in Greeley, Colo. That was mere warmup, though.
He accused Kerry of "throwing out the wild claim that he knows where Osama bin Laden was in the fall of 2001 — and that our military had a chance to get him in Tora Bora."
That was a reference to Kerry's frequent assertion that the administration "outsourced" the job of hunting down bin Laden to Afghan warlords.
"This is an unjustified and harsh criticism of our military commanders in the field," Bush said.
Crime continues to drop, FBI says
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — Every type of violent crime fell last year with one notable exception: Murders were up for the fourth straight year, according to an annual FBI report released yesterday.
After reaching a low point in 1999 of about 15,500 homicides, the number has crept up steadily since then to more than 16,500 in 2003.
there were 819 juvenile gang killings last year, compared with 580 in 1999.
That was a 1.7 percent increase from 2002 and a jump of more than 6 percent since 1999. Still, the latest figure was 29 percent lower than the homicides in 1994.
James Alan Fox, criminal justice professor at Northeastern University, said the recent rise in murders is partly traceable to an upsurge in urban youth gang violence. The FBI report indicates
"It's quite clear that at least in terms of homicide, the great 1990s crime drop is officially over and has been for some time," Fox said. "While this does not signal any epidemic of homicide in this country, we cannot ignore what has happened in the past few years."
Democrats, however, said the uptick in murders and the increase in juvenile gang slayings over the past four years show that much more needs to be done. Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards said more money is needed for gang prevention, the COPS program that provides grants for new police officers and other anticrime initiatives.
federal prosecution of gun crimes, arrest of more drug offenders and longer prison sentencing policies for repeat offenders.
The 1.4 million total violent crimes reported to law enforcement agencies in 2003 marked a 3 percent drop from the year before.
The Bush administration seized on the more positive numbers overall violent crime is down 3.1 percent since 1999 as evidence that its law enforcement policies are working.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said factors in the reduction include stepped-up
Despite the criticism, crime is no longer a hot political issue thanks to the long-term decrease. President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry rarely mention it in their campaign speeches and polls indicate few voters rank crime as a top concern facing the country.