The World Trade Center Tacoma has hired James McMahan, of Gordon, Thomas, Honeywell Governmental Affairs Division, as its new executive director.

McMahan remains employed by Gordon Thomas and will work for the World Trade on contract. He has ten years of contract lobbying experience with clients in economic development, local government and transportation.

The News Tribune was unable to reach McMahan today.

He replaces Andreas Udbye, who left the trade center last fall.

As executive director, McMahan is charged with conducting community outreach, increasing the Tacoma-Pierce County community’s accessibility to information regarding international trade, and program and event management, according to a news release from the trade center.

His position at the trade center starts immediately.

If record high gas prices were strawberries, we’d all be eating shortcake.

It happened again today in Tacoma, with the average price of a gallon of regular floating up to a new peak – the highest ever – at $3.868 per gallon.

I’ve been watching for the magic (or tragic, depending on what you’re driving) $4 mark. First it came with premium (today $4.206 in Tacoma), then mid-grade (today it’s $4.007).

Maybe we should start a pool. I say regular hits $4 by next Thursday, just in time for the Memorial Day weekend.

The news is not much better in other Washington cities. Bellingham hit $3.926 for regular today, a record and the state’s highest price; Bremerton was $3.827, a record, Seattle was $388.2, a record; and if other cities didn’t make records today, then they did yesterday.

And speaking of yesterday, it seems like only then that gas in Tacoma was $3.861. A year ago it was $3.453.

Oh, for those good old days.

Weyerhaeuser doesn't know exactly when it will start exporting logs out of the Port of Olympia, but it does plan to start making its lease payments to the the port this month, The Olympian reports.

The export facility was supposed to move from the Port of Tacoma to Olympia two years ago.

From the story:

The Weyerhaeuser Co. is scheduled this week to make its first lease payment to the Port of Olympia for a controversial log-export business whose start has been delayed two years because of court challenges.

A Weyerhaeuser spokesman last week was unable to make a specific prediction about when the Federal Way-based timber company would start exporting logs, as planned, to Japan.

Still, Weyerhaeuser’s first payment to the port is significant, spokesman Frank Mendizabal said.

“It is a milestone in the sense that we are moving forward with the project,” he said. “This is just another step on that path.”

The company signed a five-year lease with the port in 2005. At that time, Weyerhaeuser expected to begin export operations after relocating from Tacoma by summer 2006.

Activists concerned about the environmental effects of the business challenged the plan. They sued for records maintained by Weyerhaeuser and the port before the lease was signed, challenged the use of port peninsula land for the export operation and argued that insufficient environmental study of the project had been done by the port.

=> Read more!

If you bought Amazon.com shares on Friday, you could have made money today.

Shares in the Seattle-based retailer jumped $5.83 after Goldman Sachs Group Inc. recommended buying the stock and said the company may increase sales at least 20 percent annually over the next 5 to 10 years.

Goldman raised its price estimate on the shares by 31 percent to $98, according to Bloomberg News.

Amazon.com increased 7.6 percent, to $82.29 on the Nasdaq Stock Market, the biggest gain since April 18.

Amazon.com shares have underperformed the S&P 500 in the past six months, according to Goldman, because of “slight” declines in gross margin, or the percentage of sales left after subtracting the cost of goods sold. The stock has declined 11 percent this year, compared with a 2.8 percent drop in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, Bloomberg reports.

This “period of poor performance renders Amazon stock attractive, especially as we view Amazon as executing on-plan despite gross margin trends,” Goldman analyst James Mitchell wrote in a report issued Sunday. He put Amazon.com on the firm’s “conviction buy” list.

The new grocery concept from UK-based Tesco is finding success without cashiers, according to trade blog StorefrtongBacktalk. One of its Fresh & Easy stores in the U.S. offers only self-checkout and customers say that's OK with them. (The Fresh & Easy concept has yet to make it to the Northwest, but given Tesco’s expension plans, it could. The stores are small and aim to be a neighborhood stop, where merchandise is supposed to be a step up from typical convenience fare.)

From the blog:
Internal Tesco customer surveys for its Fresh & Easy stores are finding some 90 percent of its customers saying they were either “satisfied or very satisfied’ with the checkout experience with another 27 percent saying that “it doesn’t matter” what format the checkouts take.

Last week when I was at Nordstrom an employee handed me a card promoting the company's half yearly sale. Why was I getting it so early? The sale is usually mid-June – timed perfectly to my mid-June birthday.

But this year, amid a sluggish economy and first quarter profits that dropped more than 20 percent, Nordstrom is moving its sale up a month. The sale for women and kids will start on Wednesday.

Nordstrom hopes the earlier start date will let shoppers take advantage of sale prices during Memorial Day weekend. Which means Nordstrom is hoping that while you are at the mall snapping up deals at other stores, you will pop into the company's shop.

"Because Nordstrom has so few sale events, our customers have come to know they are meaningful," Erik Nordstrom, president of stores for Nordstrom, said in a news release. "We recognize the Memorial Day weekend is a popular time for sale shopping and it’s important to let customers know about the Half-Yearly Sale date change and the great values we will be offering."

The sale will last until June 1.

The Half-Yearly Sale for Men starts June 13

More dates for your calendar: Nordstrom Anniversary Sale starts July 18.

Boeing has abandoned for now efforts to design to its workhorse 737 twin-jet, a leading aviation magazine says.

Aviation Week and Space Technology says the company's design efforts so far failed to yield the kinds of efficiency and maintenance and performance enhancements Boeing had sought in a 737 successor.

The company will shift its efforts to more fundamental research designed to find breakthrough technologies that could make the new plane attractive to airlines.

Boeing had sought to improve the economics of the new plane by at least 20 percent over the 737, but present day technology would yield only about a 10 percent improvement, not sufficient to invest billions in a new design.

That delay decision probably translates to the Boeing 737 being built at Renton through at least 2017 if not later.

The 737 is the world's best selling jetliner with more than 7,000 ordered.

Boeing rival Airbus is unlikely to try to make a leap forward with a new version of its A320, the European company's rival to the 737. Airbus is facing design, production and engineering issues with at least three planes now, the A380 super jumbo, the new A350XWB mid-sized twin jet and the A400 military transport.

Aviation Partners, a Seattle-based company that supplies fuel-saving winglets to Boeing for its 737, will test a new set of winglets for Airbus's A320.

Winglets are vertical extensions at the end of a plane's wings that have become popular on the 737 and other Boeing aircraft since the price of jet fuel has gone moonward.

Airbus tried out winglets it designed itself and in partnership with another company two years ago, but found the fuel savings weren't worth the extra weight.

The A320's wings have to be strengthened adding weight to the aircraft to accomodate the winglets.

The test of the Aviation Partners'-designed winglets is scheduled for July.

An effort to overturn the leadership of The Boeing Co.'s largest union, District Local 751 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, has failed.

A dissident alliance trying to remove the present leadership of the IAM led by president Tom Wroblewski, didn't receive enough votes to defeat the present administration's candidate in all but 31 races last week.

The group calling itself the Unity Coalition.

The Machinists are facing a critical renegoatiation of its contract with Boeing. Those formal negoatiations began May 9. The IAM contract expires in early September.

The union has vowed to get a bigger slice of the growing profits Boeing has generated in the last few years with record orders and profitable airliner production.

Relocate America, a real estate and relocation Web site, has named Charlotte, N.C., the best place to live in America in 2008.

The Pacific Northwest wasn't completely snubbed in Relocate America's list of the top 10 places to live. The site ranked Seattle tenth in a list dominated by cities in the Southeast.

Here's the site's best places in order:

1. Charlotte
2. San Antonio, Tex.
3. Chattanogo, Tenn.
4. Greenville, S.C.
5. Tulsa, Okla.
6. Stevens Point, Wisc.
7. Asheville, N.C.
8. Albuquerque, New Mexico
9. Huntsville, Ala.
10.Seattle

Relocate America wasn't terribly specific about the standards it measured to create its list, though looking at the top 10, housing costs had to play a large role in some of that decision-making. Only Seattle is what could be called a high-cost city.

Strangely, or perhaps not strangely, Forbes magazine ranked Charlotte ninth on its list of the most miserable cities in the country. Detroit was at the top of that ranking.

The North Carolina metropolis ranked in the bottom half of the six categories that contributed to Forbes' ranking:
commute times, income tax rates, Superfund sites, unemployment, violent crimes and weather.