A5
B USINESS
THE BULLETIN • SATURDAY, MARCH 27, 2021
BRIEFING
Jobless claims at
fewest since COVID
The number of people
seeking unemployment
benefits fell sharply last
week to 684,000, the few-
est since the pandemic
erupted a year ago and a
sign that the economy is
improving.
Thursday’s report from
the Labor Department
showed that jobless
claims fell from 781,000
the week before. It is the
first time that weekly ap-
plications for jobless aid
have fallen below 700,000
since mid-March of last
year. Before the pandemic
tore through the econ-
omy, applications had
never topped that level.
The number of peo-
ple seeking benefits un-
der a federal program
for self-employed and
contract workers also
dropped, to 241,000,
from 284,000 a week ear-
lier. All told, the number
of applicants fell below 1
million for the first time
since the pandemic.
Economists are grow-
ing more optimistic that
the pace of layoffs, which
has been chronically high
for a full year, is finally
easing.
bendbulletin.com/business
Travel Oregon plans grants for
projects to spur tourism industry
BY JAMIE GOLDBERG
The Oregonian
Travel Oregon, the state’s
tourism office, is provid-
ing $2.3 million in grants to
fund projects across the state
to help spur tourism as Ore-
gon tries to recover from the
COVID-19 pandemic.
Local governments, port
districts, federally recognized
tribes, nonprofits and Or-
egon-based tour operators
and guides can apply for up
to $100,000 in funding to
support projects focused on
improving infrastructure to
safely welcome back tourists
as the pandemic continues.
The agency will fund proj-
ects that support outdoor rec-
reation, help guides and tour
companies operate, enable paid
events and attractions to safely
move forward, and improve
business districts, including
funding projects that create
new outdoor spaces for visitors.
The application process will
remain open until March 31.
Projects must be completed by
the end of November.
“The grants that we’re pro-
Suit claims Amazon
fixed book prices
A proposed class-action
lawsuit from a Seattle firm
has added to the swarm of
antitrust scrutiny gather-
ing around Amazon.
The suit, filed Thursday
in federal court in New
York on behalf of Chica-
go-area bookseller Book-
ends and Beginnings, al-
leges Amazon colluded to
fix prices on print books.
Amazon’s restrictive
contracts with major pub-
lishers has made it im-
possible for book retailers
to try to beat Amazon
on price, Seattle law firm
Hagens Berman alleges
in the suit. The contracts,
with publishers Hachette,
HarperCollins, Macmillan,
Penguin Random House
and Simon & Schuster —
known as the “Big Five”
— prohibit the publish-
ers from selling books
to other retailers for less
than the price they offer
Amazon, provisions Ha-
gens Berman has said are
“anticompetitive.” Ama-
zon did not respond to
questions about allega-
tions in the suit.
— Bulletin wire reports
See Tourism / A6
OREGON LEGISLATURE
Tinkerers fight for
their right to repair
Income growth
highest last year
Americans earned an
additional $1.1 trillion
last year — the most ever
in data dating back to
1930 — thanks entirely
to stimulus checks and
other government aid.
Total U.S. personal in-
come rose 6.1% last year
to $19.7 trillion as a surge
in pandemic-era aid out-
paced gains in wages,
property values and other
sources of wealth, accord-
ing to the U.S. Bureau of
Economic Analysis.
The dollar amount of
so-called transfer receipts,
which include COVID-19
relief payments, steered
income growth in 26
states while increases in
other types of personal
income led in 25 includ-
ing the District of Colum-
bia, the preliminary esti-
mates show.
The report illustrates
how important govern-
ment relief programs have
been in helping to shore
up Americans’ finances as
the world’s largest econ-
omy recovers from the
pandemic. On top of stim-
ulus checks, an additional
$498 billion was doled out
in state unemployment
benefits last year, accord-
ing to the data.
viding today are going to aid
communities and aid busi-
nesses in being well-posi-
tioned to be able to offer these
great Oregon experiences in
a very safe way,” Travel Ore-
gon CEO Todd Davidson said.
“That’s what we’re focused on,
making sure folks know they
can travel in Oregon safely.”
Hilary Shohoney, the executive director of Free
Geek, stands in front of a wall of older Mac laptops.
She thinks computer manufacturers don’t want old
products repaired. They want people to buy new.
In some newer computers, technicians say the batteries have been
glued down, making it just about impossible to replace them and
keep the computer running.
Photos by Kristian Foden-Vencil/Oregon Public Broadcasting
BY KRISTIAN FODEN-VENCIL • Oregon Public Broadcasting
B
lake Swensen remembers the
day he fell in love with tinker-
ing.
This was 50 years ago in Alaska,
and the small plane his father was fly-
ing crashed. Swensen, 6 at the time,
doesn’t know whether it was an unex-
pected gust or the plane was too full
of caribou meat, but either way, they
were now in the middle of nowhere, it
was snowing, and cell phones had yet
to be invented.
Still, Swensen’s dad found a way.
“ I just remember it being so inter-
esting in how he accomplished this
feat of getting that plane back to-
gether and working, and we were able
eventually to fly it home.”
Swensen now runs the Tinker
Camp in Portland, a program that
tries to teach kids that same lesson:
“The challenge of it, the acquisition of
knowledge. The thrill of doing some-
thing that not too many people do. …
Those kinds of things get you really
charged up.”
That’s why he’s supporting House
Bill 2698, a bill pushing the “Right to
Repair” and currently making its way
through the Oregon legislature. The
bill would require manufacturers to
sell the parts, tools and manuals nec-
essary to fix any household product
with a chip in it.
Anyone who has ever tried to re-
place a computer battery or fix a bro-
ken washing machine knows that man-
ufacturers don’t make it easy. They use
screws with special heads that are hard
to open, or they won’t sell the necessary
parts or provide the service manual.
An independent repair shop might
charge $200 to replace a battery, while
sending it back to the manufacturer
could cost three times as much.
“We need this to stay alive,” said
Hilary Shohoney, the executive direc-
tor of Free Geek, a Portland nonprofit
that takes secondhand computers and
refurbishes them to donate and sell.
Standing in a closet, packed wall-
to-wall with hundreds of Apple Macs,
she explains that none work.
“Apple will tell me all the time that
they’re making it possible to buy parts,
but there are limitations on that pur-
chase ability, like we have to be able to
sell an amount of new product every
year that is outside of what we’re actu-
ally able to do,” Shohoney said. “The
last time that we went to look to be-
come Apple-certified the only place
that we could find training was a dot
on the map in the Philippines where
there were no roads and no informa-
tion about how to contact them.”
After hearing of Shohoney’s prob-
lems, Apple provided OPB with a link
to its independent repair program,
which will give businesses the same
parts, training and repair manuals
used by authorized service providers.
Shohoney used the link to attempt
to register. Days later she was still
waiting. She said she’d be happy to
send a tech to get trained, but Apple
doesn’t say how long that might take
or where it might be. So she’s looking
at thousands of dollars in expenses,
and Apple can still turn her down at
any stage, for no reason.
“(They’re) trying to make it so that
we feel like it’s too complicated to
solve, and if we feel like it’s too com-
plicated to solve, maybe we’ll just
drop it,” she said.
Kyle Wiens is the CEO of iFixit, a
company that makes specialized tools
to open computers and phones. He
agrees with Shohoney: “They’ve put
together a program to pretend like it
means we that we don’t need legisla-
tion, where actually no one is getting
certified to Apple’s program because
they make it so difficult,” he said.
See Repair / A6
Olive
Garden
boosts pay
in sign of
recovery
BY DEE-ANN DURBIN
The Associated Press
The company that runs the
Olive Garden chain is raising
pay for its workers and hand-
ing out one-time bonuses, a
sign of optimism from the
kind of casual sit-down restau-
rant that has been devastated
by the pandemic.
Darden Restaurants said
Thursday that every hourly
restaurant worker will earn at
least $10 per hour including
tips as of Monday. That will
rise to $11 per hour in 2022
and $12 per hour in 2023.
Darden, which also runs
LongHorn Steakhouse, Ched-
dar’s Scratch Kitchen and other
chains, said it will spend an ad-
ditional $17 million one-time
bonuses for its nearly 90,000
hourly employees. Workers
will receive between $100 and
$300 depending on how many
hours they work each week.
The company on Thursday
reported a surprisingly strong
quarter, and the pay hikes sig-
nal both confidence about an
economic recovery and poten-
tially increased competition for
workers .
A year ago this month,
Darden closed all of its dining
rooms. Casual dining chains
were especially hard hit be-
cause unlike pizza places or fast
foot chains, they had neither
drive up windows nor well-es-
tablished delivery service .
At one point, same-store
sales at Darden, a key read-
ing in retail for the health of a
company, plunged 75%.
About 99% of Darden’s
dining rooms have since re-
opened with at least partial
capacity. For the week ending
March 21, same-store sales for
the Orlando, Florida, company
rose 5% compared with the
same period in 2019.
About a third of Darden’s
sales still come from carryout
orders, but the company ex-
pects that to shift back to the
dining room as more people
are vaccinated and the econ-
omy recovers.
“It’s getting to a point where,
you know, I think we’re cau-
tiously optimistic and excited
about what’s going to transpire
here over the next few months,
maybe few years,” said CEO
Eugene Lee during a call with
industry analysts Thursday.
In the fiscal third quarter,
which ended Feb. 28, Darden’s
sales fell 26% to $1.73 billion,
better than the $1.6 billion
Wall Street had expected, ac-
cording to FactSet.
The company’s net income
fell 44% to $128.7 million, or
98 cents per share. That easily
beat the 70 cents analysts had
forecast.
Darden said its average
hourly worker makes $17 per
hour. But some currently make
the federal minimum wage of
$7.25 per hour, so the raise will
ensure that all workers make at
least $10 per hour.
Fear, shootings drive sales spike for struggling Ruger
BY TODD C. FRANKEL
The Washington Post
In 2019, one of the nation’s
largest gunmakers, Sturm, Ru-
ger and Company, was in trou-
ble. Profits fell by half over three
years. It shuttered factories for
a few days here and there. No
reason to make so many guns.
A top competitor, Remington
Outdoor, went bankrupt. So did
a key Ruger distributor.
But everything changed for
Ruger — and the U.S. firearms
industry — in 2020. The pan-
demic hit. People got nervous.
Black Lives Matter protests and
civil unrest filled the summer.
And a presidential election
loomed over it all. U.S. gun
sales surged an estimated 60%
last year to an all-time high.
Ruger chief executive Chris
Killoy called the sales boom
“historic” and “ferocious” in
an earnings call with investors
on Feb. 18. Company profits
jumped nearly 40%. Killoy said
he saw a connection between
the year-long turmoil and the
sales explosion. But he’d never
seen it like this.
“In my 30 years plus in the
industry frankly, I think it’s
different than what we’ve seen
in some of the past demand
surges,” Killoy said.
One model he mentioned as
popular: the AR-556 pistol — a
smaller version of the AR-15
military-style rifle.
A month later, a Ruger AR-
556 pistol was sold at a gun
shop in Boulder, Colo rado,
bought by the alleged gunman
who killed 10 people Monday
at the King Soopers supermar-
ket. Authorities have not said
whether he used it. But he’d
purchased it six days earlier,
the same day as a mass shoot-
ing that killed eight people at
massage parlors in Atlanta.
Now, these two mass shoot-
ings are likely to spur even
stronger gun sales, as President
Joe Biden and some Democrats
push for new gun regulations
— launching a now-familiar
cycle of fear over violence and
the political reactions to it that
generates more demand for
guns, raising the potential for
even more shootings.
See Guns / A6