Office Depot plans to close 112 underperforming stores in the next three months, the company announced today.

The office supplies giant has five stores in the South Sound area, central Tacoma, Lakewood, Federal Way, Lake Tapps and Gig Harbor.

The Delray Beach, Fla.-based company said stores in Burien and Vancouver are the only ones closing in Washington. The nationwide closures represent about 10 percent of the company's outlets.

The company said it will be closing 45 stores in the central part of the country, 40 in the Northeast and Canada, 19 in the West and eight in the South.

In addition, Office Depot will close six of its 33 distribution centers. Some 2,200 of its employees will be laid off.

Fourteen more stores will close as their leases expire in 2009, the office products company said.

The company said it is closing the underperforming stores to improve its profit picture.

Matthew Erlich, intrepid flack at Tacoma Goodwill, read the story in today’s paper about Washington’s free electronics recycling program that starts Jan. 1 and wanted to clarify a point.

The story notes that the E-Cycling program applies only to computers, monitors, television sets and laptops and warns: “ Some sites may charge a fee for products not covered by the program – including mice, printers, cell phones, scanners and other electrical devices and appliances.”

Tacoma Goodwill is not one of the sites that will charge, Erlich says.

He goes on:

“Tacoma Goodwill is, in fact, accepting mice, printers, cell phones, scanners and other electrical devices and appliances for free – as in, without charge. We sell some of those items in our retail stores – apparently there are people who need a mouse and we happen to have them at a great value. Some of the items, specifically cell phones, we collect and send to a company that recycles many of them and returns them to local police agencies – where the phones are given to crime victims who need a way to contact people in an emergency.
As a practical matter, we will separate items destined to be a part of the E-Cycling program from these other items that we will use.”

Sea-Tac is one of 14 U.S. airports where United Airlines passengers can pay to get to the front of the security line under a new program announced this week.

Under United's "Premier Line" program, passengers willing to pay $25 or more can use priority lines at check-in, security and at boarding.

The service will be offered to customers on the airline's Web site under the "Travel Options" tab when booking a ticket, at check-in online and at any time in the "My Itineraries" section of the online page.

A limited number of Premier Line passes will be offered depending on the time of day and the expected number of passengers at the airport.

At Sea-Tac in recent weeks as traffic has declined between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, security and check-in lines have been moving fairly quickly especially at non-peak hours of the day.

Paying extra, however, could yield a significant time savings during the holiday rush are during the early morning and early evening high traffic hours.

Typically first class passengers and travelers who've reached the higher levels of most airlines' frequent flier programs already get priority treatment at check-in, security and boarding.

Maersk Line, the Danish containership company that is leaving Tacoma next May for Seattle, is laying up eight of its 6,500-unit containerships.

The vessel mothballings are being driven by falling demand for containership services between Asia and Europe and the United States.

Maersk's decision to leave Tacoma and consolidate its trans-Pacific services with French line CMA-CGM in Seattle was driven by those same trends.

"We make these changes to reduce capacity and save costs, while we at the same time seek to maintain or expand our service level and coverage," said Michel Deleuran, head of network and product at Maersk.

Southwest Airlines is adding three flights to its Seattle schedule beginning next May 9.

The flights will include a return of the Seattle-Nashville non-stop, an additional flight to Albuquerque for a total of two and an additional flight to Chicago's Midway Airport that ups the schedule to four daily.

Sea-Tac Airport also loses one flight in the spring and summer shuffle, a second daily non-stop to Reno.

Southwest, which usually publishes its schedules only a few months in advance is jumping ahead a little more than usual this year with the spring and summer schedule.

The airlien said it plans to add and subtract more flights this year based on seasonal demand, eliminating some flights to wintertime beach destinations and replacing them with popular summertime routes.

The Seattle-Nashville route, for instance, is likely to go away again next fall so the plane used on that route can be redeployed to someplace like Florida for the winter.