Women in Business - Hooray for (Kids) Books

Hooray for (Kids) Books
The cover of the New Yorker this month depicts a delivery man handing an Amazon.com package to a young woman standing in her apartment doorway. She looks sheepishly at her next-door neighbor who is unlocking the door to his small bookstore and witnessing the transaction. This illustration may capture the story of what’s happened to many independent book stores in the last few years as they’ve struggled against a wave of customers defecting to Amazon.com, other e-commerce sites and mega bookstores, so it’s heartening to report that a new children’s bookstore is opening in Alexandria this Saturday. Two former staffers of A Likely Story, a small bookstore that abruptly closed its doors last November, have taken over the store’s old space near the King Street metro in Old Town and opened Hooray for Books, an independent children’s bookstore. A Likely Story was in business for more than 20 years, but

Health Care Concerns Loom over Micro-Businesses
Improving the performance of America’s health care system is one the nation’s most important challenges, the chairman of the Federal Reserve said today, shortly before a micro-business advocacy group released data showing that health care’s high cost continues to be a significant barrier to growth. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said challenges fall into three main areas: improving access to health care for the 47 million uninsured Americans — which comprise about 16 percent of the population — bolstering the quality of care and controlling costs. He spoke on Capitol Hill during a summit on health care reform. The National Association for the Self-Employed released in a report today that the number of micro-businesses(pdf) that offered health plans to full-time employees dropped significantly from 46.2 percent in 2005 to 18.6 percent today. Meanwhile, more than 65 percent of the survey takers said cost was the most significant barrier to whether they