A combination of pizza, doughnuts and gasoline have been known to jump-start me on occasion. Now, the trio may do the same for a planned west Lawrence shopping center. Casey’s General Store has filed plans to build its third store in Lawrence, this one near the Bob Billings Parkway ...
Douglas County’s unemployment rate is now estimated to be at about 16%, which makes it more than 2.5 times higher than at any point in the modern era. KU economist and researcher Donna Ginther continues to use state data to make weekly estimates of unemployment rates for every county in the ...
Lawrence restaurants aren’t fully open yet, but already some of you have been asking whether their employees will be required to wear masks when they do start serving dine-in customers again. Formal guidelines haven’t yet been announced by local public health officials, but if a group of ...
At downtown Lawrence’s Rally House, the hoped-for outcome is right there in its name: a rally. But shoppers for the most part didn’t even stir, let alone rally, on the first day that many “nonessential retailers” were allowed to reopen following an easing of Douglas County’s ...
I know what the prominent style changes have been in my quarantine-era home: claw marks on the inside of the front door and the elimination of all full-length mirrors. (Wear pants, people.) Normally, though, I’m getting up to date on new housing styles at the Lawrence Spring Parade of Homes. ...
The downtown Lawrence boutique Striped Cow is getting much bigger. (Join the club. As the saying goes these days, I’ve social distanced from everything but the refrigerator door.) But owner David Jess is betting this is an expansion to get excited about, hopefully even showing how ...
Story updated 5:50 p.m. Thursday Douglas County’s estimated unemployment rate is now up to 14.8%, but the number of county residents making new unemployment filings has hit its lowest level since mid-March, when the pandemic began shuttering businesses across the state. The estimated ...
The items that Barb Gruber sells through her Lawrence-based promotional products business — key chains, T-shirts and other company giveaways — ordinarily won’t do much to improve a person’s health. But as Gruber and quite a few other people have noticed, these aren’t ordinary times. ...
We now have more detailed data on who is dying from COVID-19 in Kansas. As many suspected, the elderly are suffering the highest number of deaths, but that doesn’t mean you have to be old to get the virus. People between the ages of 35 and 44 have been the most likely to get the disease. As ...
We kind of are in a Road Runner cartoon moment. It is that point of the episode where Wile E. Coyote is running toward the cliff. We all know he is going to drop off the cliff, and, surely after all these episodes, he does, too. That’s where Lawrence and the state are when it comes to sales ...
News and notes from around town, with a heavy dose of COVID-19 numbers, and information on a furlough policy that has some Hallmark employees upset. — The unemployment numbers are still grim for Douglas County, but now we have more company. The latest estimate compiled by researchers at ...
Someday, we will shop again, and developers are still hopeful that it will be at a new shopping center just south of the South Lawrence Trafficway and U.S. Highway 59 interchange. Another set of plans have been filed for the long-debated shopping center, and this time they have a major twist ...
Look up to the Lawrence skies tomorrow to see a little bit of thanks for the frontline workers battling COVID-19. More specifically, brush that Sasquatch hairdo out of your eyes and you’ll see an old-fashioned flyover. A pair of aviation teams from Kansas City plan to take to the Lawrence ...
There are no shortages of industries to feel sorry for during this pandemic, but new figures suggest employees in the arts, entertainment and recreation sector may be the hardest hit in Kansas thus far. More than one out of every three workers in that industry are now likely unemployed in ...
In the old days — i.e. two months ago — a T-shirt with a message on its back warning people to stay at least 6 feet away would have seemed crass. Somebody surely would have made a joke that it was a public health message. Now, of course, it actually is, and a Lawrence neighborhood is making ...
Another 1,200 Douglas County residents filed for unemployment insurance last week, as nearly 60,000 Kansans received unemployment payments of some kind. In its weekly report, the Kansas Department of Labor says 30,786 people last week made initial claims for unemployment benefits. Those are ...
It is already clear that the math on the job loss front is going to get pretty painful as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. But researchers at the University of Kansas have done some calculations that show that the pain may be higher in Douglas County than in many parts of the state. Using ...
Updated at 5:45 p.m. Monday Kansans seeking to file unemployment claims are now facing even larger hurdles as the state’s website became all but inoperable over the weekend. On Monday morning, a leader with the Kansas Department of Labor — which oversees the unemployment system — was ...
Updated 7:40 p.m. Thursday I don’t know much about peaks, other than I reached my one for growth in the sixth grade and, some say, the one for intellect a year earlier. The one everybody is trying to measure now, of course, is when COVID-19 will peak so that I can get more than a peek ...
Millions of additional unemployment dollars did start flowing to Kansans last week, according to the latest numbers from state officials, but technology problems are still stopping many from applying for the benefits. Kansas paid $14.8 million in unemployment benefits for the week ending ...