Page 4
The Behrend Beacon
r 1
March 19th
Junker Center, |
Penn State Behrend |
College I
Tickets go on sale I
Feb. 20th I
at the RUB Desk I
7:15 am. for Behrend ■
students - $2O. J
Tickets go on sale Feb. J
21st at Dig Dios and RUB J
Desk for the public .
8 am. - $24. ■
Sales declines force
reassessment at Gap
by DinaElßogh^ady*
The Washington Post
Shannon Hartnett used to shop at the Gap at
least once a month, figuring it was a pretty reli
able stop for basic turtlenecks, T-shirts and a good
looking pair of jeans.
Until two years ago, that is, when the jeans
became too low-slung for her taste and the sweat
ers, cropped to expose the midriff, started appear
ing in “hideous colors.”
“1 bypass the store now,” the 33-year-oid Al
exandria, Va., resident said. ‘They’re trying to
be too hip.”
The San Francisco-based chain is the first to
admit it has lost its way. And it has the numbers
to prove it.
This week, Gap Inc. reported a 16 percent drop
in January sales, marking the 21st consecutive
monthly decline for stores open at least a year,
including those in sister chains Old Navy and the
Falling at the Gap
Plummeting seles have sent Gap Inc. into the worst financial spiral in its 32-year history.
-25%
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SOURCE: Company reports
more upscale Banana Republic. The company
also said it expects to post a loss for last year’s
fourth quarter when it reports earnings later this
month.
Gap’s stock has lost more than half its value
over the past year. And the company has amassed
$2 billion in debt.
After two years of soul-searching, Gap offi
cials say they’ve pinpointed the problem: just
about everything.
The mix of clothes. The clothes themselves.
The layout of stores. The size of stores. And the
company's spending habits.
“We need to fix it,” said Stacy Mac Lean, a Gap
spokeswoman.
How did this happen? The company’s simple
style was such a hit that it inspired copycats. That
University of Kansas,
fraternity sued in fatal
auto crash
by Tbny Rizzo
Knight Ridder Newspapers
The family of a Lawrence, Kan., woman
killed by an intoxicated teen-age driver sued the
University of Kansas and a fraternity house
where he allegedly drank.
The lawsuit, filed this week, also names as
defendants the teen-ager and his mother and
stepfather, who allegedly provided him with al
cohol.
Felicia A. Bland, 39, was killed Sept, 16,2000,
when a car driven by Sean M. Scott, 16, col
lided with her car in western Johnson County,
Kan.
In March 2001, Scott pleaded no contest in
Johnson County District Court to a charge of
involuntary manslaughter. He served about five
months in custody and is now on probation.,
His stepfather, Lawrence Rieke, was recently
charged by Douglas County, Kan., prosecutors
with supplying alcohol to a minor on the night
of the crash.
According to the lawsuit, Rieke and Scott’s
mother, Dana Rieke, allegedly provided beer and
shots of tequila to Scott and other minors at a
Lawrence bar.
Daniel Church, the lawyer representing
Bland’s family, said there was no information
to show that the bar’s owners knew minors were
being served alcohol.
At his mother’s instruction, Scott, who was
'causfed f (jip’td'Veer in a different direction with
its fashions. Ultimately,-it drove away its core
customers.
Exacerbating matters was the soft economy,
which prompted consumers to pinch pennies.
The fix starts with the Gap’s spring line, which
brings back the classics (think khakis and oxford
shirts) that made the brand famous, Mac Lean
said.
“But we’re going to update it,” she said. “We’re
going to bring a new flair.”
Some industry watchers are skeptical. Doubts
about an imminent recovery prompted Moody’s
Investors Service to downgrade Gap's unsecured
debt last month to a notch above junk level, mak
ing it tough to renegotiate a $1.3 billion credit
line that comes due in June.
The company’s weakest link is its low-end Old
Navy unit, launched in 1994 as a cheaper ver
sion of the Gap with fun clothes for moms, teens
and kids.
The chain was meant to build on Gap’s stellar
success as a purveyor of classic styles cool enough
for the college crowd and smart enough for
thirtysomething professionals.
Already in the Gap family was Banana Re
public, a safari and travel clothing company pur
chased in 1983. The brand was transformed into
Gap’s higher-end clothing line, aimed at slightly
older shoppers.
The three-tiered approach worked for a while,
especially in the more casual workplace of the
last decade.
But through the boom times, the company ex
panded aggressively into some of the highest
rent locations in the highest-cost cities, includ
ing prime space on Madison Avenue and Broad
way in New York, said Burt Flickinger 111, man-
NATIONAL
CAMPUS NEWS
Friday, February 15, 2002
“visibly intoxicated,” turned his car keys over
to another person before leaving thebar;thelaw
suit contends. But fiat person also wai athidbr
who had been served alcohol bytheßiekesand
was “not in proper condition to safeguard” the
keys, the lawsuit alleges.
After drinking at the bar, Scott and other mi
nors allegedly drank more alcohol at the Phi
Gamma Delta fraternity house in Lam^mce.
“Members of the fraternity ridiculed Sean
Scott for not drinking enough and taunted him
to drink more of foe alcoholic beveragfes they
were providing,” according to the iatfsttk
Scott was able to get ids car keys hade arid
Chevrolet Camaro at of 90 Id lOOmph,
the lawsuit alleges. Eventually he lost corarol
of the car and swerved into the path of Bland’s
vehicle, thelawsuit contends. , .
AIIIIPOIXX^
ered sports car; Sean Scoewasadanger to any
motorist in his genaai A
large,” according® the lawsuiL '*
The lawsuit does notseefc a specific amount
of money in damages.
Spokesmen for the university and the frater
suit. The university spokesman said the school’s
policy was to not comment ori pending litiga
tion. The Riekes, of Shawnee, didtiot respond
to a telephone message asking for comment.
aging director of Reach Marketing, a Connecti
cut research firm.
Sustaining the higher rents at some of the
4,100-plus stores became challenging when sales
at all three chains began sliding simultaneously
over the past two years, Flickinger said.
Particularly hard hit was Old Navy, which ex
perienced a 20 percent decline in same-store sales
in the fourth quarter, compared with al2 percent
drop the previous year.
One reason is that Old Navy faces too many
thriving competitors. When the chain was con
ceived, Kohl’s Department Stores was a little
known midwestem brand. Today, the superstar
retailer has expanded and cut into Old Navy’s
bid for the value-and-quality-conscious family,
Flickinger said. So has Target.
Meantime, Wet Seal and American Eagle Out
fitters, both teen-oriented, cut into Old Navy’s
appeal to young America.
“A lot of younger people are telling us Old
J JASONDJ
’O2
THE WASHINGTON
Navy is expensive for them,” said Irma Zandl,
president of Zandl Group, a New York trend re
search firm. “There are a lot of places now where
they can get things similar to what Old Navy is
selling at vastly reduced prices.”
Yet Old Navy, and even the Gap division, pur
sued teens with a fervor. Gap fashions, in par
ticular, failed to excite the fickle younger set and
downright alienated older, more loyal custom
ers.
Also, there were so many stores that they
started to cannibalize one another’s sales, said
Lori Wilking, an analyst with H&R Block Fi
nancial Advisors.
By November, all these troubles came to a head
when the company reported a 25 percent drop in
same-store sales, its biggest falloff ever.
Some students’
history exams
score comic relief
by Marja Mills
Chicago Tribune
Never underestimate what college stu
dents hazy on the facts can come up with
when faced with the exam-time panic of an
empty blue book and a ticking clock.
Anders Henriksson, dean of history at
Shepherd College in Shepherdstown,
W.Va., has made a sport of compiling his
favorite bloopers from what he swears are
real history exams and term papers, such
“Hitler’s instrumentality of terror was the
Gespacho.”
“The Civil Rights movement in the
U.S.A. turned around the corner with Mar
tin Luther Junior's famous ‘lf I had a ham
mer speech.’”
More recently, during the Carter admin
istration, according to another student, the
U.S. faced the “Iran Hostess Crisis.”
“It must have been the squiggle on the
cupcake,” Henriksson said dryly. A special
ist on czarist Russia, Henriksson is a vet
eran teacher of freshman survey courses.
He gets a kick out of another gem sure to
send educators around the bend: “Joan of
Arc was famous as Noah’s wife.”
And: “Christianity was just another mys
tery cult until Jesus was born.”
“You talk to anyone who has taught and
they have read this kind of prose,”
Henriksson said. He stitched hundreds of
such gaffes into a slim volume, “Non Cam
pus Mentis: World History According to
College Students,” which has sold briskly
in the few months it has been out. In De
cember, the book made the top ten on the
New York Times Advice, How To and Mis
cellaneous bestseller list.
Despite students who write that “The air
plane was invented and first flown by the
Marx brothers” or that “Judyism has one
big God named Yahoo,” Henricksson, 53,
does not conclude that this illustrates a de
cline in education.
“I don’t really see a difference over time
...,” Henriksson said. “I would be so bold
as to say you could go back to the 1930 s
and find stuff like this.”
Moreover, Henriksson said, his collection
of absurdities is no snapshot of the typical
university student’s knowledge of history.
“This is not a scientific sample of what
the students know. This is a harvest of the
most creative bits of inane writing,” he said.
“You’re talking tens of thousands of papers
and we got 600-odd funnies out of them.”
“We” is Henriksson and the professors
he tapped at another two dozen universi
ties across the United States and Canada.
Some are friends and former colleagues.
Others are professors who learned of
Henriksson’s blooper collection and offered
favorites from their classrooms.
So how does he make sure all the gaffes
sent to him are authentic?
Henriksson said he personally records
some of the sentences straight from blue
books and term papers submitted at his own
college. “I have a lot on the computer.
When I grade exams, I sit with a yellow
legal pad next to me and write them down.
Sometimes, if they’re really classics, I’ll
Xerox them.
“Many (others) come from people I know
and trust. I don’t ask to see the originals
but you develop an eye for these things. I
have a sense of what students do write.”
Such as:
“Dim el Sum ruled as ‘Head Coucho’ of
North Korea. China has so many Chinese
that forced birth patrol became required.
This is where people are allowed to repro
duce no more than one half of themelves.”
Henriksson doesn’t attach students’
names to the gaffes. For the most part, he
is sympathetic with students who uninten
tionally provide their professors with rea
son to laugh, or moan.
“These are mostly blue book excerpts and
we all can remember that time when we
were staring at that blue book and didn’t
know how to fill it and you write something
like ‘During the Dark Ages it was mostly
dark’ or you write about ‘Chairman Moo’
because you can’t quite remember.”
Other historic figures that surface in the
collection of bloopers: “Franklin Eleanor
Roosevelt” and “India Gandy.”
One generational change Henriksson
does see is an increase in the numbers of
student whose gaffes indicate they have not
read enough to realize that they have mis
heard common expressions.
“I don’t know how many students said
‘took it for granite.’ It’s what they’ve heard.
“Or they’ll take a common catch phrase
and do the wrong thing: ‘the final straw in
the camel’s pack.’ Society was ‘turn to
thunder’ instead of ‘tom asunder.’”
Computer spell checkers don’t pick up
those mistakes anymore than they spot
“their” mistakenly being used for “they’re.”
The main purpose of his book,
Henriksson said, is simply to give people a
laugh.
But one warning for those history stu
dents who will be winging it come next
exam time; Henriksson is considering a se
quel.