Becoming Intense

Winmark Corp.—which oversees 1,300 franchised resale stores like Plato’s Closet, Play It Again Sports and Once Upon A Child—has a long history of being profitable and keeping shareholders happy. Its buzzy online competitors can’t say the same. In a busy strip mall in Vero Beach, Florida, a little secondhand sporting goods store called Play It…

These companies found new paths to profitability during the pandemic. Here’s how. It’s been two years since the World Health Organization declared Covid a global pandemic, and since then nearly every facet of business has been upended. While hundreds of thousands of businesses did not make it, those that have survived have done so out of sheer…

Surprisingly, between winter weather and the difficulty of Monday deliveries, online flower and gift retailers say the holiday can turn out to be a ‘death sentence.’ For Farmgirl Flowers, what should have been the biggest profit-driving holiday of last year turned into a $5.5 million loss.  “Over 50 percent of our packages were not delivered on time,” says Christina Stembel,…