Warehouses

Lincoln Distribution Center, a $9-million joint venture of Aetna Life & Casualty and Lincoln Property Co., is under construction on a 22.95-acre site at 8th Street and Rochester Avenue, Rancho Cucamonga. Two single-story buildings will offer 164,975 and 143,524 square feet, respectively, with 1% of the space for offices and the balance for warehousing. The concrete tilt-up structures are both rail served and dock high.

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.

Beverly Hills-based Cardis Corp., the largest automotive parts distributor in California, said Wednesday that it has reached an agreement in principle to buy San Diego Pacific, a wholesale distributor of car parts with 33 outlets and warehouses in Southern California and Arizona. The purchase, for an undisclosed amount of cash and notes, is expected to be completed by Sept. 20, according to John Carlson, chairman of San Diego Pacific, which operates under the names of Mr.

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.

The Teamsters' support for striking grocery clerks created a delivery-truck bottleneck at warehouses in Southern California on Tuesday, but supermarket chains said they continued to ship goods to stores without major interruption. The Teamsters' action also didn't appear to have an immediate effect on shoppers buying groceries for Thanksgiving, though supplies varied from store to store. The three supermarket companies -- Safeway Inc., which owns Vons and Pavilions, Kroger Co.

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.

Let's get a few things clear. Hostess didn't fail for any of the reasons you've been fed. It didn't fail because Americans demanded more healthful food than its Twinkies and Ho-Hos snack cakes. It didn't fail because its unions wanted it to die. It failed because the people that ran it had no idea what they were doing. Every other excuse is just an attempt by the guilty to blame someone else. Take the notion that Hostess was out of step with America's healthful-food craze. You'd almost think that Hostess failed because it didn't convert its product line into one based on green vegetables.

Retail giantWal-Martsaid that it has parted ways with a public relations firm whose employee was found to have posed as a reporter at an event staged byWal-Martcritics. Wal-Martspokesman Steven Restivo said in a statement Friday that his company and Mercury Public Affairs had mutually decided to end their "business relationship. " Mercury had received $60,000 to lobby officials at Los Angeles City Hall over a proposed Wal-Mart grocery in Chinatown, according to city records. "We take this matter seriously and have taken the appropriate steps to ensure this type of activity is not repeated," Restivo said.

Bergen Brunswig Corp. said it has completed its acquisition of Los Angeles Drug Co., a major West Coast pharmaceuticals distributor, for about $40 million in cash. The exact purchase price is dependent on a still-to-be-completed valuation of the company. The acquisition is Orange-based Bergen Brunswig's sixth in the past two years and adds four California warehouses to the medical supplies and consumer electronic equipment company's network of more than 100 national distribution centers.

Riot police fired tear gas at stone-throwing squatters and broke through blazing barricades to close down six squatter compounds around the capital, Amsterdam. Thirteen officers were injured in one confrontation, and more than 15 squatters were arrested through the day. Police were enforcing a court eviction order for three 17th century warehouses.

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.

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.

You can look at one thing only so long before your mental compass starts to spin, so I wasn't too surprised a few days ago when I started visualizing a huge explosion at a warehouse full of "I Love My Carpet" carpet freshener. There was this bunch of guys in ninja outfits sneaking into the place at night, dropping down on ropes through a skylight while the "Mission: Impossible" theme played in the background. The bomb was in a box marked "ceramic tile."

The United Nations' World Food Program said it would cut food rations by half for up to 3 million people in Sudan's Darfur region starting next month because attacks on its trucks had reduced stocks. The agency said 60 of its contracted trucks had been hijacked since the start of the year, with 39 still missing, 26 drivers unaccounted for and a driver killed last month. The U.N. program said trucks should be delivering nearly 2,000 tons of food daily to supply warehouses.

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.

Some former temporary workers from Amazon's warehouses in Pennsylvania are having a hard time, the Lehigh Valley's newspaper the Morning Call reports . Those who have filed for unemployment benefits -- sums of $100 to $200 per week -- often find their claims challenged. If approved, they are often challenged again. These workers, with few resources, face delays in receiving unemployment compensation. Those who aren't capable of navigating the official steps required to fight the challenges may never receive unemployment.