Word: main
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even in those days, GM was spending $2 million to $3 million a year to fight trademark-infringement cases on the periphery of its main line of business, trying to rid the market of unauthorized Chevy baseball caps and Corvette T shirts that were obviously striking a chord with consumers. That's when it hit Enborg that it would be easier--and more profitable--for the automaker to meet the obvious market demand for those goods itself by licensing its brand names to handpicked manufacturers. Today, GM has more than 1,200 licensing agreements generating annual revenues of $1.1 billion...
...shops: seedy, if not downright sinister; XXX signs plastered on blacked-out windows in shady neighborhoods; frequented mainly by men. When it comes to the flesh industry, Europe, for all its sophistication, wasn't much different from the U.S. Then along came Ann Summers, a British chain of sex emporiums, and things began to change. The 23 Ann Summers stores scattered across Britain are on main shopping streets and geared specifically to women. Brightly lighted and decorated in pastels, the shops manage to make the selling of erotic lingerie and sex aids seem more naughty than nasty...
...Summers is not the only European sex chain with international ambitions. Germany's Beate Uhse--which also takes an upmarket, Main Street approach to marketing erotic paraphernalia--stunned local financial markets in May when its initial public offering of 8.4 million shares was 63 times oversubscribed. It is now one of Germany's hottest stocks, trading in the $19 range. Beate Uhse is likewise expanding operations elsewhere in Europe and beyond. In September the company acquired a chain of 44 "erotic discount centers," plus a Dutch mail-order company that offers a full range of sex toys, videos and publications...
...local sensibilities by going the franchise route. "It helps us to have someone who understands the local culture," she says. So far, Ann Summers' Dublin store is the only one that has drawn opposition. Downtown merchants--saying a sex shop, no matter how posh, doesn't belong on a main shopping avenue--tried to get it moved to a side street. But the opposing retailers could not find any legal reason to keep the shop off O'Connell Street, and the company turned a deaf ear to their appeals to leave...
...mass killing like the one at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., could happen at their school, but only 9% say the biggest problem facing them is violence, down from 22% in 1994, according to a New York Times/CBS News study released last week. Thirty-one percent say the main concern facing teenagers is drugs, and 21% say it is peer pressure. The study indicates that perceptions of teen violence are finally conforming to the drop in such crimes in recent years...