Moving and Storage Business News

The News Review:

- At Home in a New Storage Niche
- California tries to curb greenhouse gases
- Constanza Macras/Dorky Park – Dance – Review – New York Times

At Home in a New Storage Niche
Washington Post – Sep 23, 2006
We figured we could build 50 or 100 boxes and bring them to people’s houses, and we’ll have an adjunct to fixed-base storage. "It was 1998, and the idea for PODS — Portable On Demand Storage — was born. Warhurst now runs a company that had $200 million in gross revenue last year and whose name has become a generic descriptor for mobile container storage, like Kleenex is for facial tissues and Xerox for photocopies. Still privately owned, PODS is now franchised in 45 states, logs 2,500 pickups and deliveries a day, and has grown into the 800-pound gorilla in an expanding segment of the moving and storage market. Franchises will open soon in Canada and Australia. The concept is simple. PODS brings an 8-by-12 or 8-by-16-foot container to your house and leaves it… "It was 1998, and the idea for PODS — Portable On Demand Storage — was born. Warhurst now runs a company that had $200 million in gross revenue last year and whose name has become a generic descriptor for mobile container storage, like Kleenex is for facial tissues and Xerox for photocopies. Still privately owned, PODS is now franchised in 45 states, logs 2,500 pickups and deliveries a day, and has grown into the 800-pound gorilla in an expanding segment of the moving and storage market. Franchises will open soon in Canada and Australia. The concept is simple. PODS brings an 8-by-12 or 8-by-16-foot container to your house and leaves it. You pack it at your own pace and lock it up, then the truck takes it to your new house or to a warehouse for storage.

California tries to curb greenhouse gases
Pakistan Dawn – Sep 23, 2006
The Democratic-controlled legislature and the Republican governor also agreed at that time on legislation to reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions by 25 per cent by 2020, a measure that affects not only power plants but also other large producers of carbon dioxide, including oil refineries and cement plants. The state’s aim is to reduce emissions of climate-changing gases produced by burning coal, oil and gas. Other states, particularly New York, are moving in some of the same directions, but no state is moving as aggressively on as many fronts. No state has been at it longer. No state is putting more at risk. Whether all this is visionary or deluded depends on one’s perspective. This is the state that in the early ’70s jump-started the worldwide adoption of catalytic converters, the devices that neutralise most smog-forming chemicals emitted by tailpipes… Schmale, Sempra’s president, said the ruling had had a negligible impact on the decision. High natural gas prices prompted the company to invest in gas storage and terminals instead, Mr Schmale said. Among California environmentalists, however, the “for sale” sign on Granite Fox was taken as a victory for a pioneering policy that reaches beyond the state’s borders. John White, an environmental lobbyist in Sacramento, compares building a Southwestern power plant to building a mall: California is a desirable anchor tenant. But California is also the state where electricity deregulation foundered in 2000; bills soared and an economic crisis ensued.

Constanza Macras/Dorky Park – Dance – Review – New York Times
New York Times – Sep 23, 2006
Macras comes from Buenos Aires and was trained, among other places, in New York. In 1995 she gravitated to Berlin, like the 12 dancers in her wildly international company. Before that she had another group, Tamagotchi Y2K, and she has worked extensively with the various Berlin theaters that subsidize dance. Dorky Park’s first show was a nearly four-hour version of “Back to the Present,” performed in a rambling, derelict Berlin department store. The piece was retooled for the stage in 2004 and lasts two and a half hours (with one intermission) at Dance Theater Workshop. The three performances here are part of the citywide European Dream festival… All, it should be reiterated, with terrific, almost childlike sweetness. In this kind of dance a viewer seeks themes binding the sketches together, some overall shape that lifts the performance above its isolated moments. Macras has spoken of memory and “storage,” yet at times you had to wonder where she was heading with all this material. But the animals and the props and the songs and, above all, the cast, which emerged more and more into strongly defined individual personalities, made the whole apparatus cohere. That, and nice self-satire. (“I can’t believe this is where the city of Berlin puts its money.