Tacoma Goodwill Industries plans a grand opening next week for its new Puyallup store just off River Road in a remodeled former cinema.

The new 17,000-square-foot store will open with ceremonies beginning Oct. 29 at 8:45 a.m. Puyallup Mayor Don Malloy, Goodwill Board President Bob Bruback and Goodwill Chief Executive Officer Terry Hayes will officiate at the event.

The new store at 1200 Fourth St. NW next to KMart will employ about 35 workers and have a payroll of $500,000 including benefits, said Hayes.

During the Oct. 29 through Nov. 1 grand opening, shoppers will have an opportunity to win a DVD player, an iPod Nano and $50 gas cards.

On the opening day only, Goodwill will have a mattress truckload sale. Mattress and box spring sets will be priced at $199 for twins, $249 for fulls, $299 for queen-sized and $399 for king-sized. A frame will be included with the purchase free.

The store is the 24th for Tacoma Goodwill, the 10th in Pierce County.

Bellingham's Haggen Inc. has named its Lake Tapps TOP Food & Drug store as the winner of its best store award for 2009. The Lake Tapps store shared that honor with the company's Woodinville store.

Haggen operates 33 supermarkets under the TOP and Haggen names in Washington and Oregon.

Four of the Lake Tapps store's department managers, Angela Moore, Lynette Barth, James Chapin and Mike Heath, were tops in their categories in the internal contest.

In a case where mildly bad news is actually seen by the investment community as good news, Nordstrom stock continued its ascent today after reporting dropping sales last week.

The company reported a September decline in sales of 2.4 percent in stores open a year or more, but a .3 percent overall sales increase including newly-opened stores.

But that 2.4 percent dip was less than half what analysts had predicted, 6 percent.

The Seattle-based luxury retailer's stock closed Monday at $33.61 a share, up 36 cents or 1.08 percent.

Compared with competitors such as Neiman-Marcus, the Nordstrom results were encouraging. The Dallas-based high-end store said its sales fell 17.6 percent compared with September 2008.

Nordstrom's stock has been on a rocket ride since it hit a low of $6.61 a share last November.

Analysts say Nordstrom's tight inventory control and adjustments to fit the leaner market have insulated the company from the roughest downturns.

Just in time for the ski and snowboarding season (but maybe a bit late for wakeboarding), Sturtevant’s Ski Mart will open a new store in Tacoma tomorrow morning.

“This new Tacoma Sturtevant’s Ski Mart location allows us to better serve the needs of the South Sound community by being centrally located,” said Sturtevant’s owner Tracy Gibbons in a press release.

The company closed a Puyallup outlet in April – and the nine-year manager of that store, Keith Rollins, will map the piste in Tacoma.

The new outlet is located at 2220 S. 37th St. and features “a combination of new, in-season product and discount, close-out product from previous seasons,” according to the release.

Another Ski Mart is located in Bellevue and another is planned for Alderwood. The company also operates a Sturtevant’s – exclusive of Ski Mart – in Bellevue, and sponsors the annual SkiBonkers sale.

Attorney General Rob McKenna is warning state residents to beware of some door-to-door magazine sales people claiming to work for a charity.

The attorney general's office says Fresh Start Opportunities, subject of an earlier warning last March, appears to be active again in Washington.

Fresh Start's youthful magazine sellers say they're working on earning money for college or to get a better job or to win points for a free trip, but their magazine sales work appears to be a scam, the attorney general's office said.

McKenna's office has received complaints from residents contacted door-to-door by Fresh Start sales workers. Those magazine customers say they paid from $50 to $784 for subscriptions to magazines that never were delivered.

Complaints to the organization's mailing address elicited no response and calls to the Fresh Start's toll-free number listed its "temporarily unavailable."

Julia Ellen, the upscale boutique that's called Proctor home for 15 years, is closing its doors.

"I've done this for 32 years total, 20 years of owning my own, and you hit the point where you are done," owner Julie Schmidtke said today. "We decided this was the best time of year to have a big closing sale."

It started Thursday, and the store will close when everything's gone, she said.

Schmidtke said that she started about 18 months ago to try to find a buyer for the store but that all of them fell through.

To get into business "you have to have more faith than fear," she said, and in this economic climate fear is a hot commodity despite the fact that Julia Ellen's annual revenues are between $500,000 and $1 million.

Julia Ellen, which is Schmidtke's first and middle names, opened 20 years ago in Old Town, then moved to the Proctor District five years later. Schmidtke briefly opened a store in Tacoma mall six years ago, but it closed after three years.

Schmidtke, who put her age at "almost 50," said she didn't have any specific plans after Julia Ellen closes, but that she has been approached by other people who want her advice on opening their own business.

"We really wanted to close with the same integrity and special-ness that we opened with," Schmidtke said. "I didn't want to be one of those stores that people thought, 'she should have closed a few years earlier.' "

Jim Donald, former Starbucks president, has been named president and chief executive officer at Northwest grocery chain Haggen Inc.

Haggen owns 33 TOP Food & Drug and Haggen Food & Pharmacy stores. The chain is headquaretered in Bellingham.

Before joining Starbucks, Donald served as president and CEO of Pathmark stores, a 143-store regional supermarket chain on the East Coast. He was also president of Safeway's Eastern Division and as vice president of food merchandising at Wal-Mart Stores.

Donald, who grew Starbucks to more than 15,000 stores in 43 countries, left his job when the coffee chain rain into difficulties in 2008. Starbucks, now under the leadership of Howard Schultz radically downsized itself and cut costs to cope with the recession.

Work begins Wednesday on Stadium Thriftway's expansion, owner Mike Hargreaves said today.

"Everybody's in moving mode," he said, describing how the adjacent auto body shop is moving most of its operation across Division Avenue.

Hargreaves has said he's investing between $1 million and $2 million into the expansion of his store at 618 N. First St., sandwiched between Wright Park and Stadium High School. The store will go from 15,000 square feet to more than 21,000 square feet.

Hargreaves initially believed construction would begin Sept. 1, but getting all the ducks in a row - the lease, a Small Business Administration loan and permitting - proved to take a little longer.

He has a meeting today for the final building permit from the city. The work that starts on Wednesday is electrical, he said.

"You really won't see a lot for the first week or two," Hargreaves said.

The first section of the new store is schedule to open right before Thanksgiving, he said. It'll have the new meat, produce, wine and frozen food departments. The construction is planned so customers can shop without trouble.

"When we move some of our commodities into the new section, that frees up space for the next phase," Hargreaves said. "Everywhere we're working we'll be out of the customer's way."

Stadium Thriftway plans a construction celebration for Friday from noon-7 p.m., where customers can see the expansion plans.

Tacoma gas prices appear to be settling in for the fall with prices hovering just below $3 a gallon.

Those prices have been moving within a fairly narrow range for more than a month in contrast to the roller coaster ride prices took for much of last year and earlier this year.

According to Tacomagasprices.com, the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular in Tacoma Friday was $2.929. That compares to 2.923 a week ago. and $2.847 a month ago.

In September 2008, the price of gas was in a free fall from a high of $4.35 a gallon in late July to $3.678 at this time last year.

The price fell to below $2.00 a gallon in mid-December before moving upward again over the next several months.

Several ARCO and Costcc stations are selling regular for $2.75 a gallon, considerably below the average price.

Experts expect gas prices may settle somewhat lower as demand drops as the weather worsens, but not as far as it did last year.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz Monday reaped a paper profit about $14 million on stock options he exercised in the coffee retailer.

Schultz reportedly purchased 982,792 shares of Starbucks stock using options that set his price for the shares at $5.81 a share. Starbucks closing price Monday for shares on the open market was $20.08 million.

Schultz returned to Starbucks in 2007 after the retailer began seeing its profits erode as a result of overexpansion and a declining economy.

Under his leadership, the company has closed more than 800 underperforming stores and trimmed its costs and staff.

One sign that the auto industry is still alive and perhaps recovering came this week at Tacoma's Titus-Will Ford.

Ford was there with its rolling road show for its new Taurus, its 21st century effort to revive the nameplate that was once the nation's most popular.

The car that bears the Taurus name now bears little resemblance the rental car staple that the revolutionary Taurus had become in its waning days.

The new Taurus hopes to compete with and beat such domestic and foreign marque best-sellers as Chryler's 300, Toyota's Avalon, Audi's A6 and Lexus' GS 350.

Brad Hughes, Ford's Global Product Design controller, was among the team at Titus-Will for the local roll-out celebration.

Hughes, who like his company has weathered the storms that struck the auto industry in the last year, said he thinks cars like the new Taurus represent a reinvigorated Ford.

Ford was the only one of the Big Three domestic automakers that didn't enter bankruptcy.

The car itself is as much an electronics showpiece as an automotive one. It features a special key parents can give to their driving age kids that limits the car's top speed and audio volume.

The special key triggers a persistent seat belt reminder that chimes for six seconds at a time for five minutes. The key tells the car to alert the teen driver 75 miles before the gas is exhausted and prohibits disablement of the traction control.

Other electronic features include alerts for cross traffic when you're backing from a parking space, a blind spot alert, an adaptive cruise control and collision warning system.

The car itself, a muscular-looking design, in its top-of-the-line iteration, the SHO, can reach 60 mph in five seconds. Inside at speed, it's as silent as a refrigerator and as comfortable as the parlor at a men's club.

Not coincidentally, Ford announced today that Titus-Will had won the company's President's Award, an honor awarded to less than 10 percent of the 4,000 Ford dealers nationwide for superior service and customer relations.

A company that left town a decade ago, Bruegger's, is now talking about reestablishing itself in the Puget Sound area with two dozen or so of its bakery cafes.

Chris Cheek, vice president of franchise development for the Burlington, Vt., company, was in town recently to scout out the prospects of re-entering the Northwest market.

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