| Watsco, Incorporated Earnings Conference Call (Q4 2007)
Watsco, Inc., along with its subsidiaries, distributes air conditioning, heating, refrigeration equipment, and related parts and supplies in the United States. Its products primarily comprise residential central air conditioners; light commercial air conditioners; gas, electric, and oil furnaces; commercial air conditioning and heating equipment and systems; and other specialized equipment. The company also offers various parts, including replacement compressors, evaporator coils, motors, and other component parts; and supplies consisting of thermostats, insulation material, refrigerants, ductwork, grills, registers, sheet metal, tools, copper tubing, concrete pads, tape, adhesives, and other ancillary supplies. Watsco operates through approximately 380 locations in 32 states. It distributes its products to contractors and dealers who service the replacement and new construction markets.
Flick Picks: Movies for this weekend
Keitel lends his trademark intensity to his hard-boiled role as a cheated thief out for justice and revenge in director John Irvin's flavorful L.A.-set caper. Thesps Famke Janssen and Timothy Hutton, in a rare bad-guy role, lend solid support. Saturday 3:45 p.m. (TCM) "The African Queen" (1951). Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn. Prim spinster Hepburn and vulgar boatman Bogie brave the African backwaters, enemy Germans and each other in John Huston's witty, ageless adventure classic. 8:00 (ENC) "Independence Day" (1996). Will Smith, Bill Pullman. Ace pilot Smith, hacker Jeff Goldblum and high-flying U.S. Prez Pullman look to save the planet from a particularly nasty batch of aggressive extraterrestrials in Roland Emmerich's gleefully pulpy, over-the-top alien-invasion epic.
Now at Hotels: The $250 Cigarette
Dan Cole checked out of his Connecticut hotel early on a Saturday morning last month and found an unwelcome surprise. The Courtyard Marriott Hartford-Farmington had slapped him with a $250 charge for smoking in his nonsmoking room. Mr. Cole is a smoker but insists he didn't light up in the room. He got busted, he thinks, for throwing a few cigarette butts he had stowed in his pants pocket into the room's trash. He pleaded his case to the front desk, but the clerk refused to take off the charge. The next day, Mr. Cole fired off a series of increasingly exasperated emails to customer service and the general manager. "Would you like me to take a polygraph to prove to you that I am not a liar?" he emailed Chris O'Donnell, the hotel's general manager. Mr. Cole is among the growing crowd of smokers ensnared by hotels' new and more stringent no-smoking policies.
'Social business' the next big idea
Muhammad Yunus won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for popularizing microcredit, loans as small as $5 that help people -- almost all women -- start businesses and escape poverty.
Now, Yunus, whose Grameen Bank has lent more than $6 billion to nearly 8 million people in his native Bangladesh alone, is putting forward a new idea: "social business." In his new book, "The End of Poverty," he argues that instead of measuring financial profits, social businesses would measure success by their positive social impact and, ultimately, help wipe out poverty.
In an interview with the Tribune, Yunus put forward his ideas. An edited transcript follows.
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Republican scramble turns to S.C.
GREENVILLE, S.C. - It's been just a little more than two weeks since Mike Huckabee's breakthrough victory in the Iowa caucuses. But the way the Republican presidential race has been going, it seems a lifetime ago. So he is eager to pick up win number two in today's South Carolina primary. And with polls showing him closing in on John McCain, Huckabee sounds increasingly confident he will be able to do it, weather permitting. While a daylong rain is predicted for most of the state, ice and snow are in the forecast for up-country South Carolina. The region is home to many of the evangelical Christians whose support is vital to Huckabee, people like the Hoyt family. "No matter the weather, I'll be voting," said Mark Hoyt, who came to hear the candidate at the technical college in Greenville, accompanied by wife Leslie and daughter Alyssa, 13, for whom seeing Huckabee was her home-school history lesson of the day.
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