Word: profiteered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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California's freewheeling real estate developers, even more than their colleagues to the east, have long been accustomed to building just about anything that would turn a profit. When their plans are good-at the vacation community of Sea Ranch, for example, or the "new town" of Valencia-they set a standard of originality and excellence for the nation. When the plans are bad, which is all too often, they result in garish commercial strips, sleazy subdivisions and industrial parks that have already turned much of the once bright land into a gray blur...
They cannot be run for quick profit, either. Ted Johnson, onetime manager of a ski lodge at Alta, Utah, last year opened Snowbird not many miles away. Johnson and his principal backer, Texas Oilman Dick Bass, have dumped $17 million into Snowbird, including $2,250,000 for a Swiss-built aerial tram that carries 125 people at a time up an 11,000-ft. incline to the main peak. The tram, most capacious of its kind in the world, is started and stopped by a computer. Johnson and Bass do not expect to be in the black for another...
...executives) because they can offer employees free skiing and sometimes free room and board. Still, they have payrolls the size of small telephone books-and for every job there are ten eager applicants, many of them temporary college dropouts looking for a fling on the slopes. The average pretax profit margin for the nation's ski areas last year was about 4% on revenues, or less than their owners would enjoy if they put their money in savings accounts...
Upsurge. For their part, businessmen are urging the Administration to change or chuck out the profit-margin test, which disallows price increases to firms that are making a bigger rate of return on their sales than during a base period. In the present economic upsurge, quite a few big companies are hitting their profit-margin ceiling. Arthur Okun, a member of TIME'S Board of Economists and a Democrat, agrees that the test "is counterproductive as far as efficiency is concerned." Overly profitable firms can always lower their earnings through heavy spending. Some economists, notably Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur...
...Broadway's 34 theaters were dark last week. Of the 18 in business, only a handful-including those housing the musicals Pippin and Two Gentlemen of Verona and the plays Butley and That Championship Season -were taking in enough at the box office to make a profit for the shows and for themselves. (Broadway theaters do not charge rent from producers, but take 25% of the box office gross.) Just to rub things in, some 23 national touring companies of past seasons' hits like Jesus Christ Superstar and No, No, Nanette are outdrawing Broadway productions for the first...