Hershey sales up at Halloween
Hershey says its Halloween candy sales were up slightly this year despite a lower turnout of trick-or-treaters amid the pandemic.
Michele Buck, chairman, president and CEO of Hershey Co., said Friday that earlier shipments of Halloween candy to stores helped boost sales. So did marketing messages that suggested safe ways to celebrate and even included maps showing community coronavirus risk levels.
“We made that decision to lean in and drive and build a Halloween season versus back away from it,” Buck said.
Buck said investments in online sales capacity also helped move more candy. Hershey’s e-commerce sales grew 80% in the third quarter.
Sotheby’s accused of aiding tax dodger
Sotheby’s helped an art collector dodge millions of dollars in New York sales taxes, the state attorney general said in a lawsuit filed Friday, accusing the prominent auction house of accepting bogus documentation to spare a top client a tax bill.
The case involves $27 million worth of purchases of pieces by such artists as painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and sculptor Anish Kapoor, and it portrays Sotheby’s as so eager to keep a top client’s business that staffers enabled him to pass himself off as an art dealer for tax purposes.
“Sotheby’s violated the law and fleeced New York taxpayers out of millions just to boost its own sales,” Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement.
The lawsuit comes after the collector’s art holding company, a British Virgin Islands-based concern called Porsal Equities Ltd., settled with the attorney general’s office in 2018. Porsal agreed to pay $10.75 million in taxes, damages and penalties over allegations that it skirted sales tax on more than $50 million in art buys from various entities in New York.
Sotheby’s said it “vigorously refutes” the allegations, calling them unfounded and “unsupported by both fact and law.”
Consumer borrowing up during September
U.S. consumers increased their borrowing in September, helped by the first gain in the category that covers credit cards in seven months.
The Federal Reserve reported that total borrowing rose by $16.2 billion in September, rebounding after a drop of $6.9 billion in August. The increase included a $3.98 billion increase in the category that includes credit cars, the first advance since February.
Credit card use had fallen for six straight months as households cut back on use of credit cards once the pandemic hit and millions of people lost their jobs. The category that covers auto loans and student loans increased by $12.2 billion in September. This category has been rising steadily since a $6.9 billion drop in April.
GoPuff acquires BevMo delivery
GoPuff delivery service, whose 200 neighborhood delivery centers across the Northeast, Midwest, and South have seen sales rocket since last spring’s coronavirus shutdowns, has agreed to buy Concord, Calif., liquor delivery service BevMo and its 161 stores in three Western states for $350 million.
The deal marks seven-year-old GoPuff’s first acquisition. It would boost the company’s workforce to more than 5,000 warehouse workers, tech, retail, and office staff – plus drivers – and increase its value, as calculated from investment and acquisition costs, to more than $4 billion.
BevMo’s seller is TowerBrook Capital Partners, a New York- and London-based firm that has owned BevMo since 2007, according to Bloomberg LP.
– Compiled by Dave Flessner