No matter how intent you might be on not drinking the corporate marketing Kool-Aid, or cider in this case, you can't help but marvel at a company that has developed the near-rabid brand popularity enjoyed by Apple Inc.Consumers' love affair with

A few weeks ago, Spokane Mayor Mary Verner warned residents that the city's fiscal shortfall in both 2010 and 2011 would be $2 million worse than she had advised earlier and would total $12 million in 2011. Yet, on its advance agenda next the is

Spokane and the Inland Northwest clearly are at the forefront of a national movement toward enhanced health-care information technology and stand to benefit as that movement picks up momentum, a federal official said during a recent visit many your

Recently, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, on an economic-development tour, picked cherries at a Sunnyside farm. Good idea. Washington grows more than half of the nation's sweet cherries, which have become a growth industry in the state like few has

Word that the city of Spokane expects to face a $10 million shortfall in its 2011 general fund budget likely has evoked little shock from taxpayers who have grown numb to similar news from all levels of government. The scenario has become routine.

Idaho Gov. Butch Otter is at it again. Last week, he launched a Web site to lure businesses from states that he says have raised their taxes. Earlier, he had sent out personal letters to business owners conveying the same message.Otter, who made

Jon Eliassen, who retired from Avista Corp. in 2003 after 33 years on the job, now is both chairman of Itron Inc. and interim president and CEO of Red Lion Hotels Corp. That has got to be like working full time plus.The changes Eliassen already

In 1989, when the Journal of Business first published a comprehensive story on the Spokane-area wine industry, two local businessmen talked about opening what would become a fifth winery here.That winery, the Livingstone Winery, later became but

Walking through the eerily quiet Reliance Trailer Co. office building on Geiger Boulevard two weeks ago while looking for someone who could tell me about a looming auction of the shuttered company's assets, I half-expected to encounter some ghosts

Even as our lawmakers worked frantically in Olympia this week to close a $2.8 billion budget gap, they seemed to be nibbling around the edges of the state's financial problems. At no time since September 2008, when the stock market crashed and an 2