Sam's Club restores $4 curbside pickup
Sam's Club will soon charge most of its members a $4 fee for curbside pickup, a service that has been free to all members for the past two years.
Starting June 28, shoppers with a $45-a-year standard membership will pay the fee that was waived in June 2020 as the pandemic sent people looking for contact-free alternatives to entering stores. According to the Sam's Club website, the service was made available to standard members "for a limited time."
A division of Bentonville-based Walmart Inc., Sam's Club will continue to offer free, unlimited curbside pickup to its Plus members, who pay $100 a year for this and other perks.
Many other retailers offer curbside pickup, though their requirements differ.
Walmart and Target Corp. offer the service for free with no minimum purchase.
Kroger and its family of stores offer free curbside pickup on grocery orders of $35 or more, according to its website.
-- Serenah McKay
12 entrepreneurs in state start program
Twelve Arkansas entrepreneurs today begin a three-month national accelerator program dedicated to putting ideas into action. Ten are in Northwest Arkansas and two others are in Helena and Pine Bluff.
The program -- a partnership between Heartland Forward of Bentonville and Builders + Backers -- is an effort to support 1,000 entrepreneurs across the heartland region by 2023.
Business concepts being tested by the Arkansas group include an animated baserunning tool for youth baseball training; an app to help women track and manage in vitro fertilization treatments; a synthetic juice for cocktail drinks and software to improve farming processes.
The Arkansas participants join entrepreneurs from Iowa, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas.
"Thriving small businesses and an entrepreneurial spirit are key to developing local economics and spurring economic revitalization in cities and towns across the heartland," said Ross DeVol, president and chief executive officer of Heartland Forward.
Participants get a $5,000 grant to test their ideas and take part in workshops to introduce their concepts to the public.
-- Andrew Moreau
Arkansas Index ends session down 32.45
The Arkansas Index, a price-weighted index that tracks the largest public companies based in the state, closed Thursday at 718.41, down 32.45.
"Equities resumed their march lower [Thursday] as efforts by the Federal Reserve to restrain inflation through monetary policy raised investor fears of recessionary risk following the report of falling housing data early in the session," said Leon Lants, managing director at Stephens Inc.
The index was developed by Bloomberg News and the Democrat-Gazette with a base value of 100 as of Dec. 30, 1997.