18 | January 2020
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BUSINESS Sanford Herald announces it will do away with Sunday paper, go to mail delivery The Sanford Herald will combine its Saturday and Sunday papers into one “weekend edition” and will do away with delivery drivers — instead relying on the Postal service to deliver papers on the same day — Publisher Jeff Ayers announced in December. The changes will take place beginning Jan. 7. According to Ayers, The Herald has struggled to find and maintain delivery drivers, citing low unemployment levels in the area. “Finding help has become a challenge,” he wrote, “and finding newspaper carriers to provide the level of service we expect has become impossible.” Instead, The Herald will place postal labels on its newspapers and deliver them directly to area post offices, “arriving early enough in the morning to enable the postal carriers to deliver that day’s edition … the same day.” One effect the new delivery system will have is the elimination of a Sunday newspaper. Ayers said The Herald will combine the Saturday and Sunday edition instead, and that issue will be delivered on Saturdays. That edition will continue to have comics, circulars and other Sunday paper features. Under the new structure, The Herald will go from six papers a week to five (The Herald does not publish on Mondays). Subscribers will also receive their paper whenever they usually receive their mail, instead of early in the morning. o Do The Herald and The Rant Monthly form a symbiotic relationship in Sanford? Read what we think about The Herald's big announcement on the Opinions page in this edition (page 10).
Hallmark leaving Riverbirch Kathryn’s Hallmark will leave Riverbirch Corner and set up shop in the nearby Spring Lane Galleria sometime sometime this month. The business announced the move on Facebook, and in response to one user comment, a representative of the store said “the plaza owner does no upkeep, so we eat that cost too.” Riverbirch Corner, built in 1985, has been the subject of complaints for some time now. It was sold in late 2017 and in 2019 faced civil penalties from the city of Sanford over a failure to perform upkeep on various items like potholes and street lights. The shopping
center’s JCPenney shut down in July. According to the North Carolina Secretary of State website, Igal Namdar of Great Neck, New York is Riverbirch Realty’s executive officer; a Reuters story from 2018 reveals Namdar and his company as one of two with “about 100 malls from New York to Utah now under their ownership” and that allegedly “invest as little as possible on many of their properties.” From the story: “Namdar and Mason typically spend 20 to 50 cents per square foot on maintenance. This compares to an average of about 60 cents per square foot that U.S. mall owners spent on mall upkeep in the first quarter of
2018 among malls that reported square feet for the period, according to National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries. Namdar and Mason have spent so little on the malls they have acquired, they often yield a 10 to 16 percent capitalization rate, a gauge of the investment’s rate of return, according to real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield’s head of capital markets Mark Gilbert. This tops last year’s average U.S. mall capitalization rate of 5.4 percent, and even the 9 percent rate mall owners enjoyed on average in their 1990s heyday, according to real estate research firm GreenStreet.”
Vandals smash windows at Riverbirch's Kringle & Kompany A seasonal storefront business in the Riverbirch Plaza shopping center that provides opportunities for families to create photos with Santa Claus at Christmas time had its plate glass windows broken out late on Dec. 17. Charlotte Johns, the owner of Kringle & Kompany, said she was called by Sanford Police early the following morning after an
officer discovered two windows at her shop broken out. Johns was unsure how the windows were broken, but speculated that a BB or pellet gun may have been used. In a Facebook Live video posted on Dec. 18, Johns said she wasn’t going to let the incident stop her and her daughter Kinsley Rae from opening up Wednesday and continuing to do business. Johns had the windows board-
ed up and said she was grateful for help she had cleaning up. She added that she doesn’t have any malice toward whoever is responsible. Sanford Police told The Rant that there have been an unusually high number of incidents recently involving windows at businesses being broken by apparent BB gun fire, although it’s unknown whether the cases are related.