Jason Griest is brewing up a little protest movement.
The co-owner of Old Soul Co. found out Friday his local coffee company was left off a list of eateries recommended for retail spots at the new Sac International terminal that’s opening next year.
Now he and partner Tim Jordan are mounting a campaign to get the county Board of Supervisors to put Old Soul back in the mix when it approves a final list of concessionaires on Oct. 5.
“We’re going to make as big a stink as possible,” he says.
Griest is happy that numerous local restaurants were selected for the terminal slots. But disappointed that a selection process aimed at showcasing local companies at the airport ended up with only chain coffee shops.
“You can get Starbucks and Peet’s in Boise,” he says, “but you can only get Old Soul in Sacramento.“
Airport spokeswoman Cheryl Marcell says a selection panel did its best “to accommodate as many (local) people as possible,” adding, “Not everybody can win, unfortunately.”
Griest says he’s mobilizing supporters to send e-mails to the supes and is contemplating an “e-petition” drive.
Also planned: a rally Friday night at his company’s newest location, a former Starbucks in Oak Park.
That site is “symbolic,” Griest says.
“Starbucks abandoned the community” when it closed its store there, he says, “and we came in and rescued it.”
Paint the town
Speaking of protests, artist Stephanie Taylor is planning a visual one – on the back wall of Willie’s Burgers in midtown Sacramento.
She’ll be painting a 50-foot-long mural in the tradition of Diego Rivera.
But without the legendary Mexican artist’s leftist slant.
“I’m going to be standing up for the middle class,” says Taylor, who is married to Willie’s owner Bill Taylor. Her aim: Call attention to the plight of small-business people and others “being squeezed between the needy and the greedy.”
The exact elements in the piece aren’t determined yet.
Taylor, who has painted more than a dozen local murals, says she mulls over a planned piece of art until she comes up with an “epiphany.”
“I’ll go to bed,” she says, “and wake up with the whole mural in my head.”
Sweet spot
Are cupcake sales countercyclical?
Christee Owens doesn’t know about that. But her business – Icing on the Cupcake – keeps growing during tough times.
A first shop opened in Rocklin in 2007. A second location, in Folsom, started up in July.
A third site – at 1121 Alhambra Blvd. in east Sacramento – opens next month.
“It wasn’t our plan to open (another store) quite so quickly,” says Owens, who founded the business and now has two partners. “But the (location) was ready and so were we.”
At $3 apiece, Icing’s confections aren’t cheap. But, Owners says, customers are willing to pay a little extra for cupcakes made from scratch.
“Once people have a taste,” she says, “they keep coming back for more.”
Local angle A boutique Sacramento law firm was a key player in the recent sale of a Sausalito business to Scholastic Corp., the big publisher of educational books.
The Bay Area company, Math Solutions, received an unsolicited acquisition offer from Scholastic and needed legal advice. The attorneys handling its labor issues recommended Business Law Ventures of Sacramento.
Brent Lawrence, BLV’s founder, says the deal wasn’t huge; the sales price was about $10.7 million.
But he says he and new partner Douglas Bosley liked the challenge of negotiating deal points across the table from a Scholastic team that included international law firm Baker & McKenzie and accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“We wanted to make sure,” he says, “that the big boys didn’t take advantage of our little client.”
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/09/28/3061295/bob-shallit-sacramento-coffee.html#ixzz10stVR332
