When Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey appeared on Executive Suite recently, he said the best thing Rhode Island leaders could do to attract more entrepreneurs is to be hospitable to them.

“I think the biggest thing is stating that you want that, stating that you want small businesses, that you want more of them – and not just stating it but showing it,” the billionaire entrepreneur said.

Dorsey argued that “easy paths of starting something” are key. “It’s just taking on that attitude and really showing, not telling, more than anything else,” he said.

Unfortunately, by that standard it seems Rhode Island could hardly be doing worse.

Rhode Island receives a grade of F - the worst in the country – for its overall friendless toward small businesses in a new survey conducted by Thumbtack and the Kauffman Foundation. Only two other states – Hawaii and Maine – got a failing grade. By comparison, New Hampshire got an A+, Massachusetts got a C- and Connecticut got a D+. (Vermont’s sample size was too small to grade.)

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By Ted Nesi

WOONSOCKET, R.I. (WPRI) – CVS Caremark CEO Larry Merlo’s pay package jumped by a third to total more than $18 million in 2012, up from $12 million the previous year, according to an SEC filing.

Read the rest of this story »

• The Saturday Morning Post: CVS Caremark is on a hot streak (Feb. 23)

Rhode Island’s Future editor Bob Plain highlighted a new San Francisco Fed paper that argues “the decline in state-level employment is strongly correlated with the increase in the percentage of businesses complaining about lack of demand,” and “there is no evidence that job losses were larger in states where businesses were more worried about these factors” – important points about the relationship between taxes and job growth.

However, the paper includes a specific data point about Rhode Island that’s also worth highlighting. The number of Rhode Island businesses citing regulation and taxes as their top concern jumped by more than 30% between 2008 and 2011, significantly more than in any other state:

The Fed paper’s main conclusion – that state-level employment dropped during the recession mainly due to a lack of demand, not a new fear of taxes and regulations – is an important finding for the debate nationwide. But what the survey data shows – that Rhode Island’s business owners have grown more concerned about taxes and regulations than their counterparts anywhere else – is an important finding, as well.

It’s vital – and too rare – that outside research gets brought to bear on the policy debate in Rhode Island. But it’s just as important that Rhode Islanders try to figure out why their state’s economy keeps lagging behind those of neighboring states, not to mention the nation’s.

• Related: Josh Barro on why RI’s economic problems are so intractable (May 4)

By Dan McGowan

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – A Providence-based startup founded by one of the state’s most successful technology entrepreneurs has been named one of the “America’s Most Promising Companies” by Forbes Magazine.

Read the rest of this story »

• Related: Watch Angus Davis discuss Swipely on Executive Suite (Dec. 27)

The guest speakers at House Speaker Gordon Fox’s big economic conference next week are drawn heavily from the government and nonprofit sectors, with few representatives from private companies.

The agenda released late Friday lists 16 guest speakers, only five of them from private companies. And of those five, one is a former candidate for governor (​Ken Block) and two are government officials as members of the R.I. Economic Development Corporation board (Cheryl Snead and Karl Wadensten).

The two other speakers from private firms work for companies that are headquartered in Massachusetts: John Sheets Jr. from Natick-based Boston Scientific and Gary Ezovski, who sold his firm Lincoln Environmental to Woburn-based ATC Group Services back in 2007.

Speaker Fox said the summit is designed so lawmakers can “listen to key people in the trenches,” but the list doesn’t include any Rhode Island business owners or startup executives without ties to government. (Hopefully House members will supplement the summit by watching episodes of Executive Suite.) As for the Senate, Teresa Paiva Weed will lay out her recommendations for improving the economy in a report on Tuesday.

The full agenda for the House summit is posted after the jump. (more…)

By Ted Nesi and Tim White

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Gov. Lincoln Chafee faces a decidedly uphill battle if he opts to run for a second term in two years, according to an exclusive WPRI 12 poll released Wednesday night.

The survey of 601 likely voters also finds nearly two-thirds of Rhode Islanders think the state is unfriendly to business but three in five are satisfied with the quality of their local school district.

Read the rest of this story »

Coming up at 11 p.m.: Obama vs. Romney in Rhode Island

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse says activists should take a page from the playbooks of 1980s anti-apartheid campaigners to put pressure on corporations which use their cash to support shadowy political groups.

“I think we can work this a little bit the way we worked the apartheid issue years ago, in which states began to say, ‘Look, we’re just not going to invest our money in countries that invest in South Africa and that support apartheid,’” Whitehouse, D-R.I., said Tuesday on a conference call organized by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

He continued: “In the same way, state treasurers and pension funds and investor groups across the country could say, ‘We’re just not going to put our money into companies that support this kind of dark-money secret influence. If they need to get their work done this way they’re probably up to no good, and we’re not going to put public money behind them.’”

Rhode Island had a state law requiring divestment from companies that do business in South Africa until 1994, when it was repealed after Nelson Mandela won power. Another law, first enacted in 1987, regulates state investments in companies that operate in Northern Ireland; it remains on the books.

Whitehouse was discussing efforts to beef up campaign finance regulations in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Last month Republicans filibustered his proposed Disclose Act, which would require groups that spend more than $10,000 on swaying voters to disclose their donors.

Whitehouse suggested enacting the Disclose Act could indirectly help lower Rhode Island’s 10.9% unemployment rate, by reducing political support for lawmakers who oppose financing infrastructure spending with higher taxes on the wealthy. He also called for more IRS and SEC regulation of campaign finance.

(photo: Lingjing Bao/Talk Radio News Service, via Flickr)

There are only 17 publicly traded American companies bigger than Rhode Island’s own CVS Caremark.

That’s according to the 2012 edition of the Fortune 500, which the finance magazine published this morning. CVS came in No. 18, up three spots from No. 21 last year, after revenue rose 12% to $107.75 billion in 2011.

Rhode Island’s other Fortune 500 company – aerospace conglomerate Textron – went in the other direction, falling three spots to No. 236. Textron’s revenue rose 7% to $11.28 billion last year.

No other Rhode Island companies are large enough to crack the Fortune 500, though Hasbro is close. The Pawtucket toymaker was No. 511 on the longer Fortune 1,000 list in 2010, but fell to No. 538 last year.

Exxon Mobil topped the list this year, bumping two-time champ Wal-Mart Stores. Massachusetts placed 11 companies on the list, led by Liberal Mutual Insurance Group (No. 84) and Staples (No. 114).

As an astute commenter accurately noted, the revenue numbers are all “billions,” not millions. Mea culpa.

The city of Woonsocket sent forth some good news for a change this morning, with local drugstore giant CVS Caremark trumpeting a 9% spike in its first-quarter profit that has its stock price near a 52-week high at this writing. Here are some highlights from the coverage.

• John Kell, Dow Jones: “The drugstore-chain raised its full-year adjusted-earnings guidance for the second time this year on a greater-than-expected benefit from business being driven away from rival Walgreen Co., which left pharmacy-benefits manager Express Scripts Holding Co.’s network at the beginning of the year due to a contract rate dispute. … Same-store sales increased 8.4% over the prior-year period, with pharmacy same-store sales rising 9.8% as CVS outperformed all main competitors even more so than in prior quarters, according to Merlo. The overall 8.4% jump was the largest increase CVS has reported since late 2006, before it acquired Caremark. The increase contrasts with Walgreen, which has reported slumping same-store sales since the beginning of the year.”

• Tom Murphy, AP: “CVS Caremark Corp. gained millions of new prescriptions in the first quarter due to a contract impasse between two rivals, and now the drugstore chain wants to keep the growth going by ensuring that those customers stick around and use the rest of its store. … [T]he new customers CVS snared will likely stick around, analyst Dave Shove said in a research note. … ‘We suspect that sales will continue to benefit throughout the year, with or without a resolution by the companies,’ Shove wrote.”

• Bruce Japsen, Forbes: “While Walgreen Co. and Express Scripts remain at odds, rival CVS Caremark Corp. is taking their lunch money. … So far this year, the imbroglio in the market has been an unprecedented windfall to CVS. … But [CEO Larry] Merlo cautioned Wall Street analysts and investors this morning to take the financial benefit to CVS one quarter at a time.”

• Chris Burritt, Bloomberg: ”‘We didn’t know it was going to be this good,’ Judson Clark, an analyst with Edward Jones & Co. in Des Peres, Missouri, said today in a telephone interview. ‘The customers bringing over prescriptions from Walgreen are probably going to stay with CVS regardless of what happens between Express Scripts and Walgreen,’ said Clark, who recommends buying CVS shares.”

• Phil Wahba, Reuters: “CVS Chief Executive Larry Merlo told Reuters that the boost from his rivals’ fallout could be long lasting. ‘The longer the impasse lasts, the stickier that customer is going to be,’ Merlo said. ‘They’re going to have an opportunity to visit a CVS multiple times and begin to establish a relationship with the CVS pharmacists.’ … The only things that slowed down the company’s pharmacy sales were a weak flu season and new generic drugs, which carry lower prices than brand name drugs.”

(photo: CVS Caremark Corp.)

The health care system will still be in need of major changes even if the nation’s highest court throws out President Obama’s 2010 law, CVS Caremark CEO Larry Merlo told Barron’s magazine in a recent interview.

“No matter how Obamacare plays out, no matter how the Supreme Court rules, we have a health-care system that is weighed down by escalating costs, and that has to be addressed,” Merlo said. “Health-care represents about 18% of GDP. We are going to see some type of health-care reform that deals with three things: access, quality, and cost.”

Merlo’s comments were included in a glowing profile of the CVS CEO, who took the helm at Rhode Island’s largest company in March 2011. Barron’s reporter Lawrence C. Strauss, who’s written nice things about CVS and Hasbro before, describes CVS as “a $107 billion colossus” that’s now on an upswing and poised to keep growing.

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CVS Caremark gets a lot more attention than Textron, Rhode Island’s other Fortune 500 company. But the Providence-based industrial conglomerate is having a pretty good year, too.

Textron’s stock is up 50% so far in 2012, for the third-biggest gain year-to-date in the S&P 500 index, The Wall Street Journal reports. Sears Holdings is first with a 97% bump and Netflix is second with a 63% increase.

Textron was #233 on the Fortune 500 last year and has just over 300 workers in Rhode Island these days. The company is forecasting a bigger-than-expected profit this year.

Walgreen Co. and CVS Caremark are far and away the largest drugstore chains in the United States, with Rite Aid a distant third. Woonsocket-based CVS fills more prescriptions annually, while Walgreens has more stores (7,800 to CVS’s 7,300).

Most discussions of their rivalry focus on whether one should buy Pennsylvania-based Rite Aid to get a leg up on the other. But Morningstar analyst Matthew Coffina thinks the smartest move would be for the two leaders themselves to pair up – with CVS buying Walgreens to create “a retail powerhouse.”

“CVS Caremark and Walgreen would be better off together than apart,” Coffina wrote in a report issued Friday. They face the same “long-term threats” from pharmacy-benefit manager (PBM) consolidation, and by combining they’d gain bargaining power and make it harder for PBMs to exclude them from their networks, he said.

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The good news just keeps on coming for CVS Caremark, Rhode Island’s biggest private company.

Legendary investor Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought nearly 1.5 million more shares of Woonsocket-based CVS stock in the fourth quarter of 2011, bringing the company’s total position to about 7.1 million shares.

The market value of Berkshire’s CVS shares was $289.8 million on Dec. 31, up from $190.2 million Sept. 30, according to this Seeking Alpha breakdown. “American companies look very cheap compared to investment alternatives,” Buffett told CNBC in November.

While Berkshire’s stake in CVS makes up a tiny 0.5% of the company’s entire $66.2 billion U.S. stock portfolio, the increase is “significant as Buffett enlarged the stake by a sizable amount,” the Seeking Alpha post argues.

• Related: Woonsocket’s CVS Caremark set to finish 2011 on a high note (Dec. 30)

Costume jewelry supplier Crimzon Rose International, a subsidiary of Hong Kong’s Li & Fung, will move its headquarters to West Warwick and expand there thanks to a tax deal the Town Council approved Tuesday night. Read all about it.

With JetBlue Airways CEO Dave Barger strongly hinting the low-cost carrier may start flying out of T.F. Green this year, a story in today’s Wall Street Journal about the airline’s success in Boston makes for a timely read:

JetBlue, which caters primarily to vacation travelers, initially offered flights from Boston to sunny destinations in Florida, the Southwest and the Caribbean. But to counter the seasonal nature of demand for those routes, it started adding multiple daily flights from Logan to “business” destinations and started courting corporate travelers ….

As [larger] carriers pulled back, JetBlue’s increasing number of nonstop destinations began attracting business passengers. They were also drawn by its lower fares as the recession made them increasingly cost conscious. Partly as a result, JetBlue’s share of the Boston market swelled to nearly 23% last year from 14% in 2008.

Looks like CVS Caremark isn’t the only big local business that has high hopes for 2012. Bloomberg reports:

Textron Inc. climbed the most in more than two years after forecasting higher 2012 profit than analysts estimated amid growing demand for Cessna aircraft and Bell helicopters.

Textron jumped 15 percent to $24.85 at 10:48 a.m. in New York trading. Earlier the stock advanced as much as 16 percent, its biggest intraday gain since July 2009. Before today, the shares had lost 20 percent of their value in the past year. ….

Chief Executive Officer Scott Donnelly is working to leverage the company’s businesses with measures such as having Cessna and Bell share overseas service centers and sales forces. Textron is winding down its finance unit, which struggled during the recession.

“The 2012 guidance is a positive surprise,” since most investors expected a forecast slightly below estimates, Julian Mitchell, a New York-based analyst with Credit Suisse Group AG, said in a note to clients.

Textron may be #233 on the Fortune 500, but it isn’t a big employer in the state. The company has just over 300 workers here in Rhode Island these days.

Every year, the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition hands out more than $100,000 in prizes to the people with the best ideas for new firms, with one of the goals being to seed new Rhode Island companies.

The New York Times reported this week on one of the competition’s success stories: Runa, a startup selling drinks made from an Amazonian leaf. The team of Brown University students behind Runa got $45,300 in 2009 when they won the Business Plan Competition’s student track.

Runa’s revenue totaled $277,000 last year and is on track to top $1 million in 2012, The Times says, and the company now has five full-time employees. Unfortunately, they all work in Brooklyn.

“We’re a consumer packaged goods company and the opportunities in New York City are infinitely greater than Rhode Island when it coms to distribution opportunities, media, and business development,” Tyler Gage, Runa’s cofounder and president, told WPRI.com in an email.

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Only two Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in Rhode Island these days – CVS Caremark in Woonsocket (#21) and Textron in Providence (#233). I’ve written already that CVS is kicking off 2012 on a high note. Now comes word in a Reuters report that Textron is “conducting a strategic review that could include options such as spinning off parts of the aerospace and defense conglomerate.”

Despite its size, Textron’s actual presence in Rhode Island is quite small. While the company had about 32,000 employees worldwide as of last year, it isn’t even in the top 50 among Rhode Island employers, according to the EDC.

Update: ”Textron currently employees just over 300 people here in Rhode Island,” spokesman David Sylvestre told WPRI.com on Thursday.

Update #2: And speaking of CVS, the company settled a longstanding FTC investigation today for $5 million.

As I mentioned recently, Woonsocket’s CVS Caremark had plenty of reasons to celebrate as Rhode Island’s biggest public company finished 2011 and looked forward to the new year. Dow Jones Newswires’ John Kell offers more evidence:

A year after analysts were calling CVS Caremark Corp.’s (CVS) $27 billion acquisition of pharmacy-benefits manager Caremark a bust, Wall Street is changing its tune as the drugstore chain’s businesses jell.

CVS shares ended 2011 with a 17% gain, exceeding the broader market and far better than the 15% drop for peer Walgreen Co. (WAG). CVS is trading at a roughly 3 1/2-year high.

The Street’s tune change comes as analysts have praised the retailer’s annual presentation last month, when CVS gave a solid view for 2012 and the first quarter while boosting its quarterly dividend 30%. …

[William Blair analyst Mark Miller] conceded that just a year after William Blair and others were calling for a breakup of the company, “today, after what may be one of the largest turnarounds that we have ever seen for such a large company, CVS Caremark is now able to sell ‘quantifiable results,’ providing further validation of its integrated business model.”

Kell’s full article is here. CVS already employs 5,800 Rhode Islanders, sixth-most of any organization in Rhode Island, and the state could certainly use additional the jobs if the company’s renewed success gives it reason to add workers at its Woonsocket campus.

CVS Caremark executives will have plenty of reasons to raise a glass of champagne this New Year’s Eve.

Months of squabbling without resolution between Walgreen and pharmacy-benefits manager Express Scripts will put about 90 million prescriptions up for grabs next year, and CVS expects to swoop in and nab up to 23 million of them. Last week, CVS raised its dividend 30% and projected its profit will jump in 2012 even before accounting for any business it takes away from Walgreen.

The news boosted shares of CVS, Rhode Island’s biggest private company, above $40 a share for the first time since 2008. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway sank $190 million into the company earlier this year. Goldman Sachs and Barclays project the shares could reach $44, with the latter picking CVS as one of its top seven retail stocks for 2012. A Seeking Alpha contributor declared CVS “an investor’s dream.”

Barron’s has been arguing this fall that the 2007 merger of CVS and Caremark Rx is finally bearing fruit after a rocky first few years of integration; an analyst with Cohen & Steers Capital Management told the magazine the company “is turning the corner.” Going forward, medical experts have high hopes for CVS’s MinuteClinics and its competitors, and the company is also pushing mobile purchases.

It’s not all roses – this month CVS also agreed to pay $20 million to settle claims that it defrauded customers including California’s enormous pension fund, and a number of investigations into its business practices are still under way. Nevertheless, 2012 looks like it could be a promising year for the Woonsocket company that’s #21 on the Fortune 500 and employs 5,800 Rhode Islanders, sixth-most of any organization in the state.

Update: And the news just gets better for CVS. “Walgreen CEO Greg Wasson said Friday chances are probably ‘slim to none’ that the drugstore operator will reach an agreement with pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts before their current contract ends Saturday,” the AP reports.

• Related: 1.2 billion prescriptions, and more CVS by the numbers (Feb. 22)

Rhode Island is about to trade Snoopy for Edison. Sort of.

MetLife said Tuesday it will sell about $7.5 billion of its decade-old MetLife Bank unit’s deposits plus its online-banking system to General Electric’s GE Capital division. The transaction is expected to close by next June.

What may surprise Rhode Islanders is that the FDIC lists MetLife Bank as the third-largest financial institution it insures in the state. Bank of America is first with 48% of the market and Citizens Bank is second with 23%, while MetLife comes in third with $4.1 billion in deposits and 9.5%, the FDIC said as of June 30.

But those figures are a quirk of the FDIC’s measurement methods, not a sign of little-known local dominance by the insurer.

The call center where MetLife Bank employees take deposits is located in West Warwick, and therefore the FDIC counts all the money that flows through there as Rhode Island money, even though little of it belongs to Rhode Islanders.

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By Ted Nesi

ATTLEBORO, Mass. (WPRI) – Sensata Technologies, the former sensors-and-controls division of Texas Instruments spun off in 2006 by Mitt Romney’s old company, will freeze its pension plan and scale back 401k contributions next month, WPRI.com has learned.

Sensata employees will no longer get pension credit for additional years of work or future raises after Jan. 31, with exceptions for initial vesting and early retirement eligibility, Sensata CEO Tom Wroe told employees last week in an email obtained by WPRI.com.

Sensata was part of Texas Instruments until 2006, when it was taken private and renamed by a group led by the private-equity firm Bain Capital LLC, which was co-founded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The company went public last year. A spokeswoman for Sensata declined to comment beyond the letter.

Texas Instruments employed about 5,000 workers in Attleboro and Mansfield at its height before moving most of its manufacturing operations to Asia. Sensata now employs about 945 workers in the U.S., down from 1,585 in 2008, according to regulatory filings.

Read the rest of this story »

Hasbro won glowing praise from the business press for its movie-focused strategy back in March 2010, when Barron’s Magazine declared: “This isn’t your father’s Hasbro.” It was a proud moment for the 88-year-old Rhode Island company, which is No. 21 on the EDC’s list of the state’s largest employers (and No. 12 among businesses).

Less than two years later, Barron’s sister publication The Wall Street Journal is singing a different tune. In a story on the front page of its Marketplace section Thursday – headlined “Hasbro Falls Prey to ‘Angry Birds’” – reporter Ann Zimmerman explains why investors are concerned about the Pawtucket-based company

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The Wall Street Journal had it right last week. Friendly’s Ice Cream Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Wednesday, and announced plans to close locations in Warwick, Wakefield, Attleboro and Taunton, among other places.

Friendly’s employed 162 workers at five locations in Rhode Island as of March, according to R.I. Economic Development Corporation data, including 37 in Wakefield and 30 in Warwick. It shuttered the Attleboro restaurant on Pleasant Street (Route 123) near Norton but kept open its other location on Route 1.

Ironically, considering it was pushed into Chapter 11 by the Great Recession, Bloomberg notes Friendly’s first opened “at the height of the Great Depression.”

Meanwhile, the list of familiar brick-and-mortar retailers who’ve fallen victim to the Great Recession continues to grow: Circuit City, Borders, Linens and Things, Blockbuster, Bugaboo Creek, Tweeter, Sbarro.

Electricity continues to be the big headline in Rhode Island this week.

NextEra Energy Inc. may sell its 550-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant in Johnston, according to Dow Jones Newswires.

NextEra sold its stake in four gas-fired plants for $1.05 billion this week and ”is still exploring options” for the Johnson plant, “including a possible sale,” Dow Jones said.

The 550-meagwatt plant began operating in November 2002 and at full power can generate enough electricity for about 500,000 homes, according to NextEra.

Marra Restaurant Group founder Stephen P. Marra has died, WPRI.com has learned.

Marra’s passing was confirmed by the Rhode Island Hospitality and Tourism Association, where he was a former chairman and member of the executive committee. Dale Venturini, the association’s president and CEO, was not immediately available for comment.

Marra’s company, formerly the Pinelli Marra Restaurant Group, filed for receivership last December. Its stable of restaurants includes Twist on Angell and Waterplace in Providence, The Grille on Main in East Greenwich, Cucina Twist in South Kingstown, Cucina in North Smithfield and Twist in Warwick.

Marra’s father and brother are reportedly preparing to buy the company as it exits receivership.

Update: The Projo’s Tom Morgan has more details.

Maybe we’re doing something right.

Rhode Island jumped 25 spots in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s newest State Entrepreneurship Index, described as “a nationwide analysis and ranking system that compares how states stack up in terms of business formation and innovation.”

The Ocean State rose from No. 48 in 2008 to No. 23 in 2010 by UNL’s measure. Only Oregon, Delaware and Kentucky posted a bigger gain than Rhode Island. Texas also rose 25 spots.

Here’s how the school’s economists describe their methodology:

The SEI combines five key components — a state’s percentage growth and per capita growth in business establishments, its business formation rate, the number of patents per thousand residents and gross receipts of sole proprietorships and partnerships per capita — to build its state-by-state rankings.

A state index for each component is assigned based on how much each state’s performance is above or below the average of all state data, which has a value of 1.0. For example, a component one standard deviation above the average gets a value of 2.0, while a component one below is assigned a value of zero. A state’s overall SEI number is the average of the five index values.

Rhode Island scored a 1.16. Eric Thompson, an economics professor at UNL, told Bloomberg BusinessWeek why states in our neck of the woods tend to do better on these measures:

“The states where the traditional model of economic development has been starting companies — such as in the Northeast, such as California and other states in the Northwest — that tends to continue because they’ve got the investors, they’ve got a concentration of experienced entrepreneurs that allow them to create high-income entrepreneurship even in the difficult economic conditions,” he says. That’s not the case for other regions that have focused economic development more on attracting new branches of existing companies, he says.

a Trader Joe's in New York City

Over the weekend, some friends and I were kicking around ideas about what should fill the space at Providence Place mall currently occupied by Borders, which is going to close by the end of September.

The most popular suggestion was a Trader Joe’s, the funky food store that has just one location in the region, on Route 2 in Warwick. The grocery chain has also received a lot of support in a discussion Jef Nickerson kicked off over at the Greater City: Providence blog.

Unfortunately for its fans, there are no plans to open another Trader Joe’s at Providence Place or anywhere else in Rhode Island this year or in 2012, company spokeswoman Alison Mochizuki told me this afternoon. “But things can always change,” she said.

Mochizuki said the company does not disclose how it decides where to add new locations, but suggestions can be submitted at its website.

Other prospective tenants floated at Greater City include Barnes & Noble, H&M, Target Express, Ocean State Job Lot, Dicks Sporting Goods, REI and a “Thriving Center.”

(photo: David Shankbone/Wikipedia)

There are few brands more iconic and ubiquitous in this part of the country than Dunkin Donuts. Its parent company, Dunkin Brands, is set to sell stock to the public on Tuesday, and the shares could be valued even more than those of Starbucks, Bloomberg reports.

And hard as it is to believe driving around Rhode Island or Massachusetts, apparently there is plenty of room for more Dunkins across the country:

After emerging from a 2006 leveraged buyout, Dunkin’ plans to more than double its U.S. locations in the next 20 years and may open more than Starbucks, the world’s largest coffee-shop chain. … Dunkin’ has less than 2 percent of its stores in the western U.S., giving it “a ton more opportunity to grow” than the burger chain, according to Jack Russo, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co. …

In the U.S., where it has about 6,800 points of distribution, mostly in New England and New York, Dunkin’ plans to open as many as 250 new locations per year in 2011 and 2012, with a goal of 15,000. The chain has about 9,800 global locations, almost all franchised, and may add 500 stores a year overseas this year and in 2012. Starbucks, with 16,800 stores, plans about 500 net new locations worldwide in fiscal 2011.