Warehouse

Your choices in San Francisco hotels are overwhelming. The prices can be too. So during our staff visit to the City by the Bay, we looked for reasonably priced hotels that had charm, location or both. We came back with 14 ideas on places to bed down. It's not a complete list, but it is eclectic, like the city itself. Mystic Hotel. This property, which opened in April, stands on a tunnel-adjacent block of Stockton Street that you'll never see on a picture postcard, yet it has style, as do the Burritt Tavern bar and restaurant downstairs.

Federal agents searched the homes of Moreno Valley's mayor and City Council members and the offices of a major warehouse developer Tuesday as part of a broad public corruption investigation in a Riverside County town already singed by scandal. Agents with the FBI, Internal Revenue Service and local prosecutors served search warrants at the homes of Mayor Tom Owings and the four other council members and at the corporate offices of Highland Fairview, the company that has proposed a 41-million-square-foot warehouse center on the city's eastside.

Second of two parts Phil Richards used to like his job driving a forklift in a produce and meat warehouse. He took pride in steering a case of beef with precision. Now, he says, he has to speed through the warehouse to meet quotas, tracked by bosses each step of the way. Through a headset, a voice tells him what to do and how much time he has to do it. It makes the Unified Grocers warehouse in Santa Fe Springs operate smoothly with fewer employees, but it also makes Richards' work stressful.

Nestled on the windy plains at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, once austere stretches of agricultural land have morphed into the country's most desirable industrial real estate market, and it is growing faster than any other industrial region in the U.S. Among the many merchants running large-scale operations now are such household names as Amazon.com Inc., Kohl's Corp., Skechers USA Inc., Mattel Inc. and Stater Bros. Markets. They come for vast warehouses - some are bigger than 30 football fields under one roof - where they can store, process and ship merchandise such as clothes, books and toys to ever more online shoppers and handle the rising flood of goods passing through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

L ogistics, the art of bringing socks and TVs and carrots from where they're made to a store near you, is a trillion-dollar industry in the U.S., and continuing to grow. The industry grew 10% in the middle of a deep recession, according to a report last year , and helps companies such as Wal-Mart, Target and Amazon get goods to you in increasingly cheap ways. But the logistics industry may also be driving down standards of living, according to a report out today by Jason Rowe of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, in partnership with New Labor, a workers rights group.

Lawyers for Inland Empire warehouse workers are raising the stakes in a legal battle with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. over hours, pay and other conditions at a giant distribution complex in Riverside County. On Friday, they unveiled an amended complaint filed in U.S. District Court alleging that Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, ultimately is responsible for pressuring a contractor and subcontractors to work more quickly. Wal-Mart said it would contest the allegation at an initial Jan. 7 court hearing.

As many as three dozen workers at a warehouse in Mira Loma walked off the job Wednesday to protest what they called poor working conditions. A spokeswoman for a group that is supporting the workers said they were suffering from poorly ventilated workspaces, high heat, and faulty and unsafe equipment. The protest took place at a warehouse operated by NFI Industries, which employs about 300 workers. NFI is a New Jersey logistics, storage and distribution services company that operates warehouses in several Southern California locations for major retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. “These workers have exhausted all options,” said Guadalupe Palma, a director of Warehouse Workers United, an organization that receives funding from the Change to Win labor federation and has been working to try to organize Inland Empire warehouse workers.

Trebor/Nevets, the furniture store and interior design studio on Long Beach's Retro Row, is opening its warehouse for a one-day sale Sept 16. Home furnishings -- vintage and new, including sofas from the store's made-in-L.A. T/N Studio Collection -- will sell at deep discounts, sometimes less than half their original prices. The Sebastian sofa (see related photo gallery) that normally retails for $3,450 will be on sale for $1,600. The Penelope Tete a Tete covered in a fabric flecked with metallic threads originally sold for $1,850 but will be marked down to $1,200.

Reporting from San Francisco -- For an organization that wants us all to live more lightly on Mother Earth, Greenpeace sure has a lot of stuff. Cases of humpback whale costumes and a forest-green ambulance marked "Climate Emergency Response. " Inflatable boats and a two-man airship. Handcuffs, 70 purple umbrellas and a climbing wall where protesters train before rappelling down the headquarters of corporate America. Decades worth of props are housed in a fading yellow warehouse half the size of a football field in San Francisco's Dogpatch, an industrial neighborhood squeezed between a freeway and a shipyard.

SEATTLE — Amazon.com Inc., addressing issues that have drawn heavy criticism of the company, told shareholders that it planned to improve warehouse conditions and drop its membership in a conservative public-policy organization. More than 100 protesters rallied outside the company's annual shareholders meeting Thursday at the Seattle Art Museum, calling on the Internet retailer to pay more taxes, treat its workers better and drop its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Second of two parts Phil Richards used to like his job driving a forklift in a produce and meat warehouse. He took pride in steering a case of beef with precision. Now, he says, he has to speed through the warehouse to meet quotas, tracked by bosses each step of the way. Through a headset, a voice tells him what to do and how much time he has to do it. It makes the Unified Grocers warehouse in Santa Fe Springs operate smoothly with fewer employees, but it also makes Richards' work stressful.

SACRAMENTO - Almost three decades ago, as heavy rain threatened to breach the levees protecting the Sacramento area, the state parks department urgently dispatched workers to warehouses holding some of California's most important heirlooms - gold-mining tools, pioneer pottery, antique rifles. They were prepared to load the objects onto trucks and drive them to safety if disaster struck. As luck would have it, the levees held. But despite that scare, the state left much of its collection in those aging warehouses in the West Sacramento flood plain, where it has languished without adequate protection from heat and humidity.

A showplace of the early automotive age in downtown Los Angeles a century ago is set to be revived by new owners who have ambitious plans to turn it into offices, a restaurant and a nightclub near L.A. Live. Long vacant, the stocky five-story building at 11th and Hope streets was a warehouse for the now-defunct local department store chain Desmond's. It still has the company's name affixed to the top. But its glory days began in 1916, when it opened as a full-service outpost of Ohio automaker Willys-Overland Motor Co., which sold luxurious Willys-Knight cars to the city's well-to-do.

A showplace of the early automotive age in downtown Los Angeles a century ago is set to be revived by new owners who have ambitious plans to turn it into offices, a restaurant and a nightclub near L.A. Live. Long vacant, the stocky five-story building at 11th and Hope streets was a warehouse for the now-defunct local department store chain Desmond's. It still has the company's name affixed to the top. But its glory days date to 1916 when it opened as a full-service outpost of Ohio automaker Willys Overland Co. and once sold luxurious Willys-Knight cars to the city's well-to-do.

Booking Justin Timberlake for South by Southwest is like riding a limo to a garage sale. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.  Timberlake, in the middle of a multimillion-dollar media blitz to support his new record, “The 20/20 Experience,” landed in Austin on Saturday night to perform for an overflowing crowd new and old music in a sweaty little warehouse space. Replete with a full band -- horns, background singers, percussionists included -- he did so like a pro, hitting all his cues, pumping up a crowd drunk on free vodka and singing his sexy jams.

A California dockworkers union lodged an accusation for the second time in three months against APM Terminals for eavesdropping on workers to gain an edge in contract negotiations. The clerical workers' unit of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local No. 63 last week rejected contracts that were reached in December to end a strike at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and the new complaint is another sign that tension between the union and management persists. In its original complaint filed Nov. 14, the Long Beach-based ILWU accused APM of conducting "secret surveillance, eavesdropping and snooping" on workers during the weeks leading up to an eight-day strike that shut down most of the cargo terminals at the busiest seaport complex in the country.

If you'd asked Pop & Hiss three months ago which hallmark of the summer would still be with us come late October -- 90-degree days or Carly Rae Jepsen -- we'd definitely have picked the Canadian singer whose " Call Me Maybe " spent nine consecutive weeks atop the Hot 100. Not long into fall, though, Jepsen's chart dominance is already beginning to seem like a memory. " Kiss ," her American major-label debut, sits at No. 49 on Billboard's album chart (behind the "Rock of Ages" soundtrack -- yikes!

SACRAMENTO - State labor regulators have ordered an Inland Empire warehouse operator that handles goods for big-box retailers to pay $1.3 million in overtime, penalties and other compensation, accusing it of wage- and hour-law violations. State Labor Commissioner Julie A. Su issued citations Monday to Quetico, a warehouse and distribution company in Chino that receives and distributes shoes, apparel and electronic goods. The commissioner's investigation of two Quetico facilities, totaling half a million square feet, found that the company created restrictive procedures that shorted workers of their wages.

SACRAMENTO -- State labor regulators have ordered a Chino warehouse operator to pay more than $1 million in overtime plus $200,000 in penalties for hundreds of state labor law violations. State Labor Commissioner Julie Su issued citations Monday to Quetico, a warehouse and distribution company that handles shoes, apparel and electronic goods for Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other big-box retailers. The commissioner's investigation of two Quetico facilities, totaling a half-million square feet, found that the company created restrictive procedures which shorted 865 workers of their wages.