Home Care In Bear, DE

There's Love, Spice, Hilarity and Nice in the Lineup Designed Exclusively for Adult Gifting in the Online Bear Cave

ST. LOUIS, Jan. 16, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Build-A-Bear is calling on all ages 18+ this Valentine's Day as the heat is dialed up in the Bear Cave with the release of the new After Dark Collection. These Valentine gifts are designed to delight a partner with a playfully romantic gesture. This new assortment of furry friends, as well as themed outfits and accessories, is now available online and serves as a fun twist on the traditional Valentine's fare, sure to bring devilish grins to faces well beyond February 14.

Valentine's Day is a perfect time to consider Build-A-Bear for a surprising, unique statement to make your recipient blush over a plush. Start your Valentine's Day shopping early and further customise a gift for your "someone special" by including your own personalised voice message with the Record Your Voice sound chip when building your one-of-a-kind furry friend. Explore After Dark, including these popular items and many more, but warning: there are bears behaving adorably!

The Build-A-Bear After Dark collection is found exclusively online in the Bear Cave microsite, an online shopping destination for guests ages 18+. First launched in 2019, Build-A-Bear After Dark continues to gain popularity with its offerings of hilariously unique gifts to celebrate life's special moments for adults. The increased popularity of Build-A-Bear among adults is part of the "kidulting" trend in which adults lean into childhood memories and search for collectibles that appeal to the playful nature of this older consumer through rekindling their youth with nostalgic gifts.

Build-A-Bear offers many ways for your new furry friends to be delivered! Do all your shopping at home and have it shipped anywhere. Or, if you're in a hurry to get your new furry friend, select Click & Collect to pick up at your local Build-A-Bear Workshop. To shop the After Dark Collection, visit https://www.buildabear.co.uk/the-bear-cave/after-dark.

More information about Build-A-Bear Valentine's Day furry friends, gifts, events and deals can be found at https://www.buildabear.co.uk or at @buildabear on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

About Build-A-BearBuild-A-Bear is a multi-generational global brand focused on its mission to "add a little more heart to life" appealing to a wide array of consumer groups who enjoy the personal expression in making their own "furry friends" to celebrate and commemorate life moments. Nearly 500 interactive brick-and mortar experience locations operated through a variety of formats provide guests of all ages a hands-on entertaining experience, which often fosters a lasting and emotional brand connection. The company also offers engaging e-commerce/digital purchasing experiences on buildabear.com including its online "Bear-Builder", the animated "Bear Builder 3D Workshop" and its age-gated, adult-focused "Bear Cave". In addition, extending its brand power beyond retail, Build-A-Bear Entertainment, a subsidiary of Build-A-Bear Workshop, Inc., is dedicated to creating engaging content for kids and adults that fulfills the company's mission, while the company also offers products at wholesale and in non-plush consumer categories via licensing agreements with leading manufacturers. Build-A-Bear Workshop, Inc. posted total revenue of $467.9 million in fiscal 2022. For more information, visit the Investor Relations section of buildabear.com.

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Suddenly, there’s a whole lot of something happening at the long-empty former Kmart at Governors Square in Bear.

If two proposals with New Castle County come to pass, “something” will mean trampolines, laser tag, arcade games, bumper cars, virtual reality games, fast food … and also maybe some farm and garden supplies.

The Kmart in Governors Square along Route 40 has been vacant since it closed in 2019. All of Delaware's Kmart stores closed by February 2020, but slowly the plots and shells have been filling up with plans for fitness centers, Walmarts, Aldis and Coat Factories.

Well, add trampoline park to that list.

In March, an indoor amusement park chain named Fun City Adventure Park filed an application to see if current zoning would permit a trampoline park in the former Kmart location. (It does.)

At the end of September, Fun City received a permit to begin interior construction. And by November, signs went up above the doors of the former Kmart: “Fun City Adventure Park, coming soon.”

So what’s Fun City? And will part of the Kmart still become a Tractor Supply store, as proposed in 2021? Here’s what we know.

Fun City Adventure Park has expanded quickly all over the Mid-Atlantic

Fun City has quickly become a big player across the Northeast by taking over the empty shells of former big box retailers. Large retail centers and big-box spaces have increasingly turned to experiential concepts, as online shopping disrupts traditional in-person retailing.

"Experiential concepts" is another way to say "fun."

As of the end of 2022, Fun City had at least 20 locations in seven states extending from Maine to New Jersey, but the locations keep coming fast.

Syracuse, New York, saw a new location in September. Another filed into York, Pennsylvania in November. Blackwood, New Jersey, has a location, while another Fun City is slated to move into a former Dick’s Sporting Goods in South Jersey’s Millville.

The Bear location, at the former Kmart, would be the first in Delaware.

Previous Fun City locations have included everything from rope courses to bumper cars to laser tag

The zoning application with New Castle County called for “trampolines, laser tag, arcade games, bumper cars, virtual reality games and fast food.”

Fun City’s management has not responded to emails about the proposed Bear location in the building that once housed a 90,000-square-foot Kmart. Employees at the Blackwood location said they'd "just heard" about a planned Delaware opening.

Previous Fun City locations have contained everything from rope swings above ball pits to climbing walls and gyms, “ninja” courses, slides, fields of trampolines so dense they look like tic-tac-toe boards, dodgeball, ropes courses, bumper cars, and something called an “airbag.”

Name a large recreational item that might show up at a birthday or block party, and there’s a pretty good chance that one or another location of Fun City has a brightly colored and foam-padded version of it.

Tractor Supply Co. plans at the Governors Square Kmart may also be revived

Fun City may not be the only tenant in the former Kmart space.

Back in 2021, Tennessee-based farm, garden and animal goods retailer Tractor Supply Co. indicated they’d hoped to open a store at Governors Square in late 2022. At that time, plans called for the store to occupy about 15,000 square feet of the former Kmart.

Previous plans:Tractor Supply Co. proposes store in Kmart building in Bear's Governors Square

Tractor Supply Co. withdrew those proposals in early 2022, saying their plans for the site were now uncertain.

There are some indications, however, that plans for a Tractor Supply location are being resuscitated at Governors Square at the same Kmart location.

At the beginning of November, Newark firm Landmark Science and Engineering filed an exploratory application for construction at the site, on behalf of a new project called “Governors Square Tractor Supply.”

Neither Tractor Supply nor landlord Delle Donne have been able to confirm that plans for a Tractor Supply location have been revived.

While we're at it: There are also new cheesesteaks in Governors Square

Embedded content: https://www.instagram.com/p/Czbb3FUOQPJ/

A little shop called Milan’s Real Philly Cheesesteaks and Hoagies also quietly opened in early November at 813 Governors Place between the former Kmart and the ShopRite.

Or maybe not so quietly: One of the shop's very first customers, it turned out, was hip-hop impresario and unofficial Philadelphia ambassador Charlie Mack.

Mack's visit was captured in a number of videos on the restaurant’s Instagram page. Mack ordered a fish hoagie, a North and West Philly specialty at Muslim-owned restaurants in particular.

He declared the rendition at Milan’s to be “spot on.”

Matthew Korfhage is business and development reporter in the Delaware region covering all the things that touch land and money: openings and closings, construction, and the many corporations who call the First State home. A longtime food writer, he also tends to turn up with stories about tacos, oysters and beer. Send tips and insults to [email protected].

President Joe Biden, like many presidents before him, stood in front of Delaware workers on Monday and promised jobs.

“I got about 60 billion dollars for you,” he said, leaning in with a conspiratorial smile as he shook the hand of a worker outside the Amtrak heavy maintenance facility in Bear.

The president had arrived at the trainyard a bit after noon to tout $16 billion in new funding for train projects along the Northeast Corridor from Washington, D.C., to Boston. More than $66 billion in passenger rail investments were pledged as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Law.

The new funding includes $3.8 billion to help expand the Hudson River Tunnel between New Jersey and New York, and $4.7 billion to replace the train tunnel passing under parts of Baltimore, smoothing passage through what White House officials called the busy Northeast Corridor’s largest bottleneck.

Those projects would account for 100,000 union jobs, according to the White House.

Outside the facility, the president took a moment instead to marvel at the previous night’s Philadelphia Eagles victory over the Dallas Cowboys.

“They say it’s a game of inches,” the President said. “But I never believed it until last night. It was all inches.”

Biden then launched into a jocular story whose punchline was the millions of miles he has traveled on Amtrak trains. The president repeated this story minutes later inside the facility, addressing a wall of reporters and cameras who seemed almost to outnumber the more than 70 Amtrak workers taking a day out to hear the president speak.

Though Amtrak's Northeast corridor passes through Wilmington, the largest projects outlined by the President will not take place in Delaware. The president cited his long connection to Amtrak in Delaware as the reason for announcing the train infrastructure funding in his home state.

“Delaware, trains and Joe Biden go together, plain and simple,” said Delaware Gov. John Carney, speaking before Biden at the event.

Delaware Democratic Senators Chris Coons and Tom Carper also spoke in support of Biden’s infrastructure plan.

Bear Amtrak worker Sterling Rapposelli Jr. introduced the president, arriving onstage with his brother and nephew, also Amtrak employees. Rapposelli said workers at the Bear Amtrak plant had known the president for so long they called him, simply, “Uncle Joe.”

Biden's long connection to Amtrak forged by personal tragedy

Perhaps no president in recent memory has been more closely associated with Amtrak than Joe Biden, a connection hard-forged by grief.

”Folks here in Delaware know that as a senator I rode the train back and forth between Washington and Wilmington virtually every day for 36 years when I got elected,” Biden said at the event. “Amtrak wasn’t just a way to get home to my family. The conductors and engineers became my family.”

After Biden lost his wife and daughter to a tragic car crash in 1972, Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor was the tether connecting Biden to his two young sons, injured in the crash and left without a mother.

As a Delaware senator, he logged more than 2 million miles on those tracks— riding 90 minutes each way between Wilmington and Washington to spend evenings with his family.

When Biden first took the oath as Vice President in 2009, it was a train that took him and then President-elect Barack Obama there — after an hourlong whistle-stop in Wilmington at the station that now bears his name.

And when Obama's presidency ended eight years later, it was a train that took him home.

Biden seemed to be roused by that long experience while bemoaning the delays that Amtrak passengers have come to take for granted while traveling through the 150-year-old Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel, whose tight curves require trains to slow to 30 miles an hour to pass through safely.

Its planned $6 billion replacement, the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, would allow speeds of 110 miles an hour when completed.

“I've traveled through that tunnel literally thousands of times,” Biden said of the Baltimore and Potomac tunnel. “Trust me, I know:... The roof of that tunnel is leaking. The floor is literally sinking. This is the United States of America, for God's sake. The United States of America. We know we're better than that.”

Outline of $16 billion infrastructure investments

The largest construction projects among the $16 billion in new passenger rail funding include the following:

Matthew Korfhage is business and development reporter in the Delaware region covering all the things that touch land and money: openings and closings, construction, and the many corporations who call the First State home. Send tips and insults to [email protected].

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President Joe Biden announced a multi-billion dollar investment aimed at rejuvenating Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor with improvements from Boston to Washington DC.

“We’re announcing historic investment in America’s railroads,” Biden said Monday afternoon at an Amtrak maintenance facility in Bear, Delaware. “Finally we’re getting it done: more than $16 billion, here in the Northeast Corridor. Twenty-five different projects, all to build the Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington. It’s part of my agenda to invest in Americans.”

During Biden’s political career before the White House, he was known for riding Amtrak back and forth between Wilmington and Washington. “You don’t need to tell me, I’ve lived it,” Biden said of the need for rail infrastructure upgrades. “I know what it feels like to be stuck on the tracks when you’re trying to get home to see your family.”

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Biden pointed to pressing concerns along the corridor with tunnels and bridges that have aged over a century. He warned that the failure to maintain and upgrade these critical pathways could result in substantial financial losses for the nation’s economy.

“This region represents 20% of the gross domestic product of the entire United States of America,” he said. “If this line were to shut down, in just one day, it would cost our economy, the American economy, $100 million a day.

While making improvements to the rail infrastructure will help keep the nation’s economy moving, Biden said it will also help support machinists, electricians, pipefitters, facility workers, boilermakers, and other workers.

“Over 800 people keep trains in the entire Northeast Corridor working in good order and it’s not been easy because some are pretty old trains,” he said. “I’ve met with the workers in these shops, and I made them a promise. I said, ‘I’ll do all I [can], all my power to fight to keep their jobs and to make our rail system better, and to work on the Northeast Corridor.”

That includes workers like Scott Fleming, who’s been a train car repairman for more than two decades at the Amtrak shop in Bear. “This is everything,” he said of the continued support for his work. “This feeds my family.”

Fleming specializes in high-speed trains, handling critical tasks such as air brake valve maintenance, wheel replacement, brake system upgrades, as well as interior improvements like installing seat cushions. While improvements to bridges and tunnels get a lot of attention, he said it’s also important to prioritize having the proper tools and equipment mechanics rely on for their work.

“Priorities are tooling, equipment to make things more efficient, to make our job easier so we could work more toward our capability,” Fleming said. “All the money they put into the tunnels, the bridges, the rails helps out. As far as the shop, it’s all about tooling and investing for people to be working safer [and] more efficient.”

More than 2,200 trains operate on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor every day, serving 800,000 passengers. It’s the busiest rail corridor in the U.S., and one of the busiest in the world.

After the completion of these investments, the anticipated results include a reduction in delays and improved travel times, making it faster for passengers to reach their destinations.

Delaware Gov. John Carney was on hand for Biden’s remarks and pointed to other upgrades beyond the rails that are included in this funding, including $50 million in improvements at the Port of Wilmington in Edgemoor.

“We’ve been trying to do that for several years now to get a new container terminal there,”Carney said. “That will create and secure hundreds of really good paying jobs for longshoremen at work in those ports and provide a good living for their families.”

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Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (SQM - Free Report) produces and distributes specialty plant nutrients and fertilizers, lithium derivatives, and industrial chemicals. The company provides potassium chloride and sulfate for crops such as corn, rice, wheat, and sugar. It also provides iodine for use in medical, industrial, and pharmaceutical applications.

In addition, SQM offers lithium carbonates for various applications such as materials for batteries, air-conditioning chemicals, and heat-resistant glass. Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile was incorporated in 1968 and is headquartered in Santiago, Chile.

The Zacks Rundown

SQM stock is a Zacks Rank #5 (Strong Sell) and is a component of the Zacks Fertilizers industry group, which ranks in the bottom 30% out of more than 250 Zacks Ranked Industries. As such, we expect this industry group as a whole to underperform the market over the next 3 to 6 months, just as it has over the course of the year:

Candidates in the bottom tiers of industries can often be potential short candidates. While individual stocks have the ability to outperform even when included in a poorly-performing industry group, the inclusion in a weaker group serves as a headwind for any potential rallies and the journey forward is that much more difficult.

Adding to the underperformance this year, stocks in this group are experiencing negative earnings growth:

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

As a part of this group, SQM stock has experienced considerable volatility in 2023; shares recently touched a 52-week low.

Recent Earnings Misses and Deteriorating Outlook

SQM has fallen short of earnings estimates in each of the last two quarters. The company most recently reported second-quarter earnings back in August of $2.03/share, missing the $2.62/share consensus EPS estimate by 22.5%. Earnings plunged 32.6% from the same quarter in the prior year.

The fertilizer company has missed earnings estimates by an average of 4.74% over the past four quarters. Consistently falling short of earnings estimates is a recipe for underperformance, and SQM is no exception.

Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile has been on the receiving end of negative earnings estimate revisions as of late. For the third quarter, analysts have decreased estimates by 12.82% in the past 60 days. The Q3 Zacks Consensus EPS Estimate now stands at $2.38/share, translating to negative growth of -38.2% relative to last year.

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

Falling earnings estimates are a huge red flag and need to be respected. Negative growth year-over-year is the type of trend that bears like to see.

Technical Outlook

As illustrated below, SQM stock is in a sustained downtrend. Notice how shares have plunged below both the 50-day and 200-day moving averages signaled by the blue and red lines, respectively. The stock is making a series of lower lows, with no respite from the selling in sight. Also note how both moving averages have rolled over and are sloping down – another good sign for the bears.

While not the most accurate indicator, SQM stock has also experienced what is known as a ‘death cross’, wherein the stock’s 50-day moving average crosses below its 200-day moving average. SQM would have to make a stern move to the upside and show increasing earnings estimate revisions to warrant taking any long positions in the stock. Shares have fallen more than 45% in the past year alone.

Final Thoughts

A deteriorating fundamental and technical backdrop show that this stock is not set to hit new highs anytime soon. The fact that SQM is included in one of the worst-performing industry groups provides yet another headwind to a long list of concerns. A history of earnings misses will likely serve as a ceiling to any potential rallies, nurturing the stock’s downtrend.

SQM shares continue to experience substantial volatility and have widely underperformed this year. With negative earnings estimate revisions continuing to pile up, this stock should be avoided as there are plenty of better alternatives in the current market environment.

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