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.

A warm, dry September followed by similar weather thus far in October bodes well for Washington's wine industry, the Washington Wine Commission reports.

The weather is creating what the commission called, "beautiful quality" fruit and an early start to harvesting.

"It looks outstanding. The weather has given us both plenty of sugar and good acidity," said Dick Boushey of Boushey Vineyards. "Also, the color in the reds is great. Cabernet and Syrah has some of the earliest veraison that I've ever seen." Veraison is the telltale color changing that indicates grapes are ripening.

Jim McFerran of Mibrandt Vineyards said Cabernet should the be the vintage's star performer. "When Caberent is the star, all other varieties tend to be great as well," he said.

Seventy-five years of Chevrolet sales at North First Street and Division Avenue end today with the closure of Bruce Titus Chevrolet.

The dealership was among 1,100 General Motors told last spring that it wouldn't renew their franchises in October 2010.

"Our lease was up in March, so I just decided we should take an opportunity to get out when we had a good chance," said dealership owner Bruce Titus.

Titus sold the car repair business to his cousin Jamie Will. Will plans to open a service and tire repair business today in the former Chevrolet garage Thursday.

The former Bruce Titus lots across North First Street from the dealership are expected to become independent used car dealers.

The federal government's "Cash for Clunkers" program helped Titus pare down his inventory before the closure. The remaining new Chevrolets he sold to his cousin for his Titus-Will Chevrolet dealership in Olympia.

"I think it will be a good deal for the neighborhood," said Titus. "They'll still have a place to get their cars serviced in the North End, and it will save the jobs of a number of my former employees."

Meanwhile on the building's ground floor, Stadium Thriftway is expanding its footprint into part of a bodyshop.

The demise of Bruce Titus Chevrolet ends some 75 years of new car sales in the building. Titus had owned the Chevy franchise there for five years. Friendly Chevrolet had occupied the building for half-a-dozen years before that.

Walker Chevrolet, Friendly's predecessor, had been in the building since 1934, said Rick Fields, service manager at the new repair business.

Titus said that absent General Motors' notice that his franchise would be ended, he would still be in business at 633 Division Avenue.

"We did a nice business there," he said. "The facility was getting a little old, but it fit in well in the North End."

General Motors is reducing its dealer network to match it better its reduced car sales market share and overall new car sales declines.

The nation's largest car maker reorganized its operations under bankruptcy. In the process, in addition to closing dealerships, the company announced it was ditching its Pontiac brand and shuttering plants throughout the U.S.

Today the company announced it was shut down its Saturn operations after negotiations to sell it to the Penske Automotive Group collapsed.

Bruce Titus won't be out of the car business with the Chevrolet dealership closure. He has seven other new car stores in his automotive group.

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.

The Washington Attorney General's office has reached a settlement with a Seattle-based window installer that the attorney general says will protect consumers from deceptive sales practices.

The settlement, filed today in King County Superior Court, sets limits on marketing practices of Evans Glass.

The attorney general's office contended in its complaint against Evans that the company's sales people deceived consumers that they were getting bargain prices and that they were at their homes not to sell replacement windows but to perform an energy audit.

The attorney general's office contended that Evans sales representatives used high pressure sales tactics and remained in the consumers' homes for as long as four hours making their pitch.

The attorney general's office suspended $25,000 in fines against the company provided the company abides by the terms of the agreement.

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.

SeaTac's Alaska and Horizon airlines are offering a new take on airline ticket pricing with "mystery discounts" today, Tuesday and Wednesday.

The daily discount tickets are available only for 24 hours from 12:01 a.m. to midnight the day they're announced.

Today, the airlines is offering 30-percent-off discount codes for flights to Austin, Texas from Seattle and to Maui and Kona in Hawaii from Oakland.

New discounts for Tuesday will be revealed tonight as the Austin and Hawaiian discounts expire. The airfares available through those "mystery prices" are available for a range of dates detailed in the fine print of the offers.

Check out the discount fares are the airlines' Web site, www.alaskaair.com

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.