Shopping

ATLANTIC CITY — The stabbing deaths of two Canadian tourists outside a casino hotel left tourism officials stunned and dismayed Monday, casting a shadow over the formal opening on Memorial Day weekend of the newest gambling palace and tripping up a $30 million-a-year campaign to rebrand and revive the sagging resort town. The two victims, women ages 80 and 47, were stabbed and killed during a robbery Monday morning outside Bally's Atlantic City casino hotel, just steps from where a police officer was sitting in a patrol car. Police declined to provide the names of the victims, or precisely where they were from, pending notification of family.

The housing market's continuing struggles have upset the retirement plans of millions of Americans, keeping more of them in their current homes, waiting for diminished equity to reappear. Others plan to move, but they appear to be demanding something much different from what they wanted before the real estate boom turned to bust: smaller, less expensive retirement houses they can afford with their reduced means. At the start of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008, economists weren't anticipating that the long-term trend toward retirement living would be derailed.

WHEN I travel, I go to supermarkets. Unlike most touring shoppers, I never pause at store windows displaying jewelry and haute couture. But whether I'm in Aix or Antwerp New Orleans or Naples, I make a beeline for the local grocery store to peruse aisles of preserves, inhale the scent of coffee and pick up toothpaste sporting foreign labels. More than one pal at home has benefited from my wanderings, gifted with a tub of New Zealand clover honey or a pound of chicory-laced coffee from Rouses on Royal Street.

In a post-Thanksgiving ritual, throngs of people crowded stores yesterday in the first binge of holiday shopping. At Strawbridge & Clothier's Center City store, Danielle Tippy, 3, of the Northeast, came eye to eye with a display-case doll, above. Santa Claus was handing out reindeer hats at the Gallery; Linda Mrak's niece refused to wear hers, so the Northeast woman donned it herself, at right. But it was Santa himself who held children fascinated, parents in lines and, in his red-suited arms, Jesse Miller, 4, below.

Salt. Pepper. Grass. Green. University City. Shopping. Shopping? Given the West Philadelphia neighborhood's rash of highly publicized crime in recent months - capped by the Halloween stabbing death of Vladimir Sled, a University of Pennsylvania research scientist - shopping may not be the first thing folks think of when they think about University City. But the neighborhood surrounding the Penn campus is full of shops and restaurants. With the holidays coming, Penn and area merchants have announced "Steppin' Out Nites.

Enter the glass doors and the shopping hormones start bubbling, the heart beat quickens, the thoughts practically scream through slacken jaws and drooling mouths. I want. I want. I want everything I ever wanted. And then some. Welcome to the King of Prussia shopping mall, where just about everything that can be bought in life is sold. All the big name stores are here. Macy's. Bloomies. Wanamaker's. Ann Taylor. Stern's. Brooks Brothers. Conran's. J.C. Penney.

There are few things the Guerrilla Gourmet likes better than dining, and one of them is shopping. So when the new Shops at Liberty Place opened, with its heady array of retail and a food court called the Buffet to boot, the lure was irresistible. Choosing among the 14 stands was not easy. The vendors include Bain's Deli, Bassett's Original Turkey, Chick-fil-A, Everything Yogurt and Sbarro, plus purveyors of sushi, Mexican, gyros, Chinese and cheesesteaks. The best thing to do is wander and pick what looks freshest, which can vary depending on the time of day. Late one weekday afternoon - 4:10 p.m. to be exact - the pizza at Montesini Pizza and Ristorante still looked inviting, even though lunchtime was long past.

The TV weather map shows smiling raindrops and a cheery sun peeking out from behind thunderbolts, but that's not what's outside my door. Here at the Shore, it's cloudy and cool; the sun is on vacation. No one is eager to get to the beach, and because the food level in my house drops as fast as the barometric pressure, I use the morning hours to get groceries. Two hundred dollars later, the pantry is stocked, and the lousy weather shows no signs of disappearing. We eat lunch and snack our way through a puzzle, two games of Pictionary, and a 007 movie.

It was an exclusive shopping party of sorts at area Clover stores on Sunday evening. Only senior citizens and people with disabilities were invited. In the Feasterville store, Girl Scouts caroled through the aisles, and singer Dean Garofolo, 27, belted out Christmas tunes over a microphone at the store entrance. Shoppers picked up free cookies, brownies and coffee along with the bargains they put in their carts. The 25 area Clover stores offered a storewide discount of 10 percent to its senior and disabled shoppers and gave them a coupon book with deeper discounts on such items as clothes, watches, jewelry and perfume.

Even though the shop-'til-you-drop lifestyle is rampant in a consumer society, few people would regard shopping for an electricity supplier as their idea of retail therapy. But lately, the state's top utility regulator has been talking about forcing every Pennsylvania electricity customer to do just that: pick from among a possibly bewildering number of power suppliers. Concerned that only about one in five customers in the Philadelphia region has broken away from the Peco Energy Co. mother ship as his or her power supplier, state Public Utility Commission Chairman Robert F. Powelson has suggested the state revamp the rules to make shopping mandatory.

The residential mortgage-foreclosure crisis was good for business at Ahome Affordable Homes in Millville. Make that too good: After several years of growth, the respected nonprofit agency, which had assisted at least 2,100 people facing foreclosure since 2009, laid off four counselors and several other staff members last month because its funding couldn't keep up with the demand for services. A change in how it was reimbursed by the state, new options for homeowners in trouble, and longer waits to resolve cases left Ahome — founded 20 years ago — unable to make payroll, says executive director Donna W. Turner, one of two remaining employees.

A Camden man who authorities say fatally shot a bystander at a fast-food eatery last month was arraigned Wednesday on a charge of aggravated manslaughter. David Porrata, 33, was found by the U.S. Marshals Service on Tuesday night hiding in a Camden apartment, where a relative had been bringing him food. He had ignored calls from family members to turn himself in, Assistant Prosecutor Christine Shah told Superior Court Judge Irvin J. Snyder. Porrata allegedly shot Franklin Parker, 36, also of Camden, at a Crown Fried Chicken on the 200 block of South Broadway around 5 a.m. on April 27. The shooting began as an altercation between Porrata, a friend and a group of other men. Parker and a woman, who had been sitting together in a booth, tried to escape the restaurant when violence broke out, but Parker was hit by a stray bullet.

WHEN I travel, I go to supermarkets. Unlike most touring shoppers, I never pause at store windows displaying jewelry and haute couture. But whether I'm in Aix or Antwerp New Orleans or Naples, I make a beeline for the local grocery store to peruse aisles of preserves, inhale the scent of coffee and pick up toothpaste sporting foreign labels. More than one pal at home has benefited from my wanderings, gifted with a tub of New Zealand clover honey or a pound of chicory-laced coffee from Rouses on Royal Street.

Minutes before the Fresh Donuts shop on Lancaster Avenue closed Saturday, Tamara Harris and her daughter, Tanjanique, 16, stopped in. They wanted to give a get-well card to shop employee Sokchea Luy, 27. "I couldn't believe someone would do something like that," said Tamara Harris, who is a crossing guard at a nearby school and stops by daily for coffee and something to eat. "These are really nice people. " People have been dropping in with cards, good wishes, and even money since Tuesday morning, when a well-dressed man, a regular customer, lost his temper in the store and threw a cup of hot coffee at Luy. He badly burned her upper arm, but it might have been worse if she hadn't used the arm to shield her face.

A water ice shop owner who had just closed his store, was approached by two men early this morning as he entered the front door of his Philadelphia home, then robbed after being forced inside, police said. The 31-year-old victim, whose business is on West Chester Pike in Upper Darby, initially gave the bandits $420. But they forced him to a safe, which he apparently opened and gave them additional money. Police would not verify that amount, but initial reports put it in the thousands of dollars.

It's hard to imagine that the graceful, understated jewelry that Anna Bario and Page Neal fabricate was once produced in a tiny, grimy studio at Ninth and Spring Garden. "When we see customers who knew us then, it's like seeing your family?…," says Bario. "?‘I was 25 and working in a dirty studio across from a pistol range, and somehow you believed in us.'?" Now, the duo craft their wares in a sunny Queen Village shop with gray-painted hardwood floors and a pressed-tin ceiling — more apropos of their personal and professional aesthetic.

When Michael Vogel was studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, he would spend a lot of his free time building things in the school's furniture-grade wood shop. Ten years as an investment banker, first in New York and then in Philadelphia, did not dull the Elkins Park native's interest in woodworking. "I tried to get access to woodshops regularly, but always found closed doors," Vogel said. The shops he approached would cite wear and tear on the machines, or insurance concerns, or that Vogel would be getting in the way as reasons to shut him out. The alternative was signing up for classes at a woodworking school, thus having regular access to a shop, but his schedule would not allow him to commit to, for example, certain set hours every Monday night.

A recent New Yorker article by James Surowiecki examined the ascent of Uniqlo, a Japanese fashion retailer whose fortunes have skyrocketed over the last decade, culminating in last fall's opening of an enormous flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Surowiecki concludes that the secret to Uniqlo's dizzying success is its practice of hiring lots of workers, training them extensively, and paying them a comparatively higher wage. In an era when lean and mean is the prevailing mantra of big business, Uniqlo's more-is-more approach has led to bigger sales and profits, and happier, prouder workers less likely to leave their jobs.

Harold's fork truck is rated for 4,000 pounds. He has to move and stack 10 skids (pallets) of paper, each weighing 1,500 pounds. What is the maximum number of skids he can lift at one time? If someone wants a job at Case Paper Co. , that person had better know how to calculate the answer. Even more basic: Can the person use a tape measure? "You'd be amazed at how many people can't read a ruler to one-sixteenth of an inch," said Lee Cohn, who directs production at the Philadelphia company.

The University City Science Center is designed to serve as a business incubator, sometimes serving as a landing spot for small foreign firms starting in America. But the incubation can work the other way, as it did Thursday, when officials from the Wallonia region of Belgium explained to a small gathering of executives the basics of how they might one day expand their health-care businesses to that slice of Europe. "When you enter the European Union market, it is very important to know where to start," Franck Toussaint, a partner with Biologistics Consulting, told the group.