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Sarah Gilbert
Portland, Oregon - http://www.cafemama.com

Sarah Gilbert is a blogger by trade and a finance geek at heart. She cut her teeth on her first Excel spreadsheet full of financials at the tender age of 21, when she began her investment banking career in First Union's Loan Syndications group. She went on to get her MBA from Wharton, work at Merrill Lynch and fall in love with analyzing company strategy and endless rows of numbers. So she tried her hand at *setting* strategy, working for a number of exciting and under-discovered startups in various product management roles, all of which seemed to center around writing business plans and, yes, making spreadsheets. She got into blogging as a marketing strategy and loved it so, it took. She now works for AOL and blogs all day (and some of the night) long, with her little boys yanking at her elbow, in her beloved 1912 Portland home.

Sarah Gilbert
Portland, Oregon - http://www.cafemama.com

Sarah Gilbert is a blogger by trade and a finance geek at heart. She cut her teeth on her first Excel spreadsheet full of financials at the tender age of 21, when she began her investment banking career in First Union's Loan Syndications group. She went on to get her MBA from Wharton, work at Merrill Lynch and fall in love with analyzing company strategy and endless rows of numbers. So she tried her hand at *setting* strategy, working for a number of exciting and under-discovered startups in various product management roles, all of which seemed to center around writing business plans and, yes, making spreadsheets. She got into blogging as a marketing strategy and loved it so, it took. She now works for AOL and blogs all day (and some of the night) long, with her little boys yanking at her elbow, in her beloved 1912 Portland home.

This post is one in a series on prominent company nicknames. See all 25, and share your thoughts and memories about Four Bucks below in the comments.

As big multinational corporations go, Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) had such possibility. Rooted in the heart of the Pacific Northwest, born of grunge rock and a commitment to really good coffee and a distinct sense of place, embracing the centuries-old European coffeehouse tradition with its literary name, Starbucks, Captain Ahab's first mate in Moby Dick. The company's founders were all about the beans, buying them directly from growers in Africa and Central America and roasting the beans themselves.

It was entrepreneurial upstart Howard Schultz who conceived of the strategy of making espressos, coffees, and lattes in the coffee shops and selling them for big profit margins. And in the 1980s, milk was cheap and coffee was cheaper. I like to imagine that, as the company's founders sat around a cafe table in Seattle's Pike Place Market, drinking their mellow brew and listening to Schultz's wild ideas, the others scoffed at the concept of someone paying upwards of three dollars for a latte.

This post is one in a series on prominent company nicknames. See all 25, and share your thoughts and memories about Whole Paycheck below in the comments.

Having long shopped at overpriced gourmet foods markets, I'll admit to having rolled my eyes a bit -- maybe even scoffed -- when I first heard the beloved nickname for Whole Foods (NASDAQ: WFMI), "Whole Paycheck." Of course, this was also when I was single and living on a dot-com boom-style income.

Today, I rarely shop at Whole Foods; there isn't one in my neighborhood, and it's true: it's not difficult to spend upwards of $100 on ingredients for one meal. While there are choices on the lower end of the price spectrum, especially in the company's 365 house brand line and seasonal produce, the grocery chain has long prided itself on providing a wide range of organic and gourmet ingredients; and if its customers demand star fruit from Brazil, stinky cheeses from around the globe, and sushi-quality tuna, by all means, Whole Foods will provide it, and won't bat an eye about charging for its hard work.

This post is part of a series on celebrity spokespeople who ended up doing serious harm to the brands they were hired to promote, or vice versa. See how we rank the 20 top spokesperson fiascos.

Ahh, Madonna. I was a teen in the late 80s and so she had me right where she wanted me: hanging on her every lyric, willing to be titillated, shocked, or otherwise addicted to her poppy music.

She had PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP) right where she wanted it, too, as a spokesperson for the would-be-edgy soda company in 1989. Pepsi and Madonna produced a very long and affecting commercial using her "Like a Prayer" song, in which Madonna watches the eight-year-old version of herself in a video dreaming of being a pop star one day.

The commercial was extremely well-done and well-received (it still gives me goosebumps today, despite those awful late-80s hairdos; that is, until the real video for "Like a Prayer" came out. It took "suggestive" to an entirely new level, what with the obvious flirtation between Madonna and a statue-cum-priest, the stigmata on her hands, and the burning crosses and racial tensions.

Pepsi pulled the ads and canceled all its appearances with the singer immediately, though I wonder if the company couldn't run the ads again now? If you can get past the salacious nature of the rumored affair with A-Rod, Madonna is not nearly so controversial today, and now the commercial seems sweet.

Read the entire series

This post is part of a series on celebrity spokespeople who ended up doing serious harm to the brands they were hired to promote, or vice versa. See how we rank the 20 top spokesperson fiascos.

When Ben Curtis first hit the TV advertisement airwaves, I couldn't decide whether I was enchanted or annoyed. Personal computers were all the rage and Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) was the sweetest apple on the PC tree. When the "Dell Dude" enthusiastically told his little friend, "Dude, you're getting a Dell!" -- weren't we all a little excited?

And, let's be honest, wasn't he -- and Dell -- trading on the unspoken currency of the pot-smoking twang in his voice? It was hilarious, this college kid computer cheerleader. Unfortunately, hilarity equaled truth. In 2003 (right around the time he was phased out by the four cute Dell interns -- which is a whole different story) Curtis was busted for buying a very small amount of pot. "For personal use."

It was hardly the criminal arrest of the century (probably not even of that night in New York), it marked the end of Curtis' career with Dell. It didn't signal the end of his notoriety, however; he was given some coverage late last year for his bartending gig at Tortilla Flats, a popular financial district eatery in New York. The story goes that he makes great tips from fans of his former alter ego, and he's often asked to say his money line. He even dressed up as the Dell Dude for Halloween.

Who wants to bet we'll see him in an indie flick before too long?

Read the entire series

This post is part of a series on celebrity spokespeople who ended up doing serious harm to the brands they were hired to promote, or vice versa. See how we rank the 20 top spokesperson fiascos.

When the Milk Processor Education Campaign hired the Olsen twins for its "Got Milk?" campaign, they though they were buying into the stars' wholesome image. But even from the start, the muttering began. Why was Ashley wearing a t-shirt with an image from the Velvet Underground album famous for celebrating drug use and sadomasochism? Aren't the Olsen Twins' short statures counter to the claims that milk builds strong bones? (The MPEC insisted that teens looked up to the Olsen twins, no matter how short they are.)

And then there was the controversy they really should have seen coming when they dressed up the ultra-mini Mary-Kate for the photo shoot. Two months after the magazine campaign hit the newsstands, Mary-Kate was checked into an eating disorder treatment facility. She not only didn't 'get milk?"; she didn't 'get' any kind of food.

Adding irony to the PR debacle was the statement made by the twins at the time of the campaign launch, that "we want to help make sure our fans are healthy like us." If "healthy" describes Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, and millions of their fans are planning to follow their dietary guidelines, well, the milk industry is in for some trouble.

Read the entire series

This post is part of our Big Company, Small Town series, featuring large companies and the small towns in which they are headquartered.

Johnnie Bryan Hunt, eponymous founder of J.B. Hunt (NASDAQ: JBHT), was, like so many Depression-era children, a jack-of-many-trades. He picked cotton, harvested grain, sold lumber, auctioned livestock, sold lawn sod, and drove a truck. He was a handy soul, inventing a rice hull press and designing a unique poultry truck.

It was the rice hulls that would be the start of J.B. Hunt. J.B. came up with the concept of using rice hulls for chicken bedding. He and a partner used the rice hull business as seed money to buy five trucks and seven trailers and in 1969 started J.B. Hunt Transport. Today the company operates 11,000 trucks and about 47,000 trailers and containers, though its founder died in 2006 -- in time to see his little transport business become the largest publicly-traded trucking company in the world.

It's fitting that J.B. Hunt, which made its start on the profit earned from chicken farmers, should be based in rural Arkansas -- the land of poultry. Lowell, Arkansas is a tiny town, made up of only about 5,000 residents, so J.B. Hunt is a big force. With 16,000 employees, the company could triple the town's size based on its payroll alone.

Be sure to check out more Big Company, Small Town posts.

This post is part of our Big Company, Small Town series, featuring large companies and the small towns in which they are headquartered.

Like most big companies located in small towns, Tyson Foods (NYSE: TSN) has a delightfully quirky origin. John Tyson, owner of a battered truck and 500 chickens, opportunist, and debtor in the Depression-era 1930s struck an idea that probably seemed like folly to his neighbors: he'd deliver chickens to Chicago and Kansas City, where they'd get more money.

I'm sure for every story like Tyson's, there were 100 that didn't turn out so auspiciously. But in this tale, the hero comes back to his little Arkansas hometown with a profit and pays off his debts. He keeps on raising and selling birds in points north, eventually devising a plan to keep more of the profits by "vertically integrating" (I'll bet dollars-to-doughnuts he didn't call it that) and incubating his own chicks instead of buying them from a hatchery, as well as milling his own feed instead of buying it from a feed store.

This wasn't the end of Tyson's forethought. He bought a broiler farm in Springdale, Arkansas (beginning the company's history in that town) and started to cross-breed birds designed for meat production, instead of using heritage (or "pedigree") breeds.

This post is part of a series on some of the most memorable companies that have disappeared.

How is this for a post-op? "The fashions were too forward," said apparel industry analyst Kurt Barnard. Merry-Go-Round was a huge clothing chain targeted at teens and young adults, one in which (I couldn't make this up folks) my best friend in high school worked, gaining her great respect amongst the shopping-obsessed teens we were.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Merry-Go-Round was the darling of Wall Street and the suburbs where Jessica sold $70 rayon shirts for minimum wage plus commission. Its 536 stores comprised Merry-Go-Round, Dejaiz, Cignal, and Chess King, the latter an acquisition made a few years before its demise. One blogger called the apparel "faux upscale" and wrote of the chain's merchandise, "the cheesiest, sleaziest, ugliest and most eye-searing '80s clothes you could possibly find. Velcro closures? Check. Mesh designs? Check. Excessive use of leather? Check. Odd-colored thick v-neck sweater vests? Check."

Sadly, the mid-nineties teen did not want to wear v-neck sweater vests, mesh, or paisley rayon blouses. According to the New York Times, the 1990s teen wanted ripped jeans from Wal-Mart. The company had expanded too fast, too furious, changing merchandising strategies so frequently that its edgy consumers couldn't keep up. The business was so overtly trendy it tipped over the edge. Merry-Go-Round filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1994, but couldn't stay afloat and liquidated all its assets in 1996 when its chief backer, Fidelity Management, pulled its support.

The music stopped for Merry-Go-Round, and all the mesh-covered horsies fell off. None of the children, it seems, cried.

This post is part of a series on some of the most memorable companies that have disappeared.

Paine Webber was never the biggest brokerage on Wall Street; the title of top dog was held throughout the years by its rivals, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, E.F. Hutton, Kidder Peabody, Bear Stearns, Salomon Brothers. But it was part of the solid middle, the proud family firms that began to boom in the early decades of the 20th century, many before the Great Depression, and survived for nearly 100 years.

Paine Webber was founded in 1880 by William Alfred Paine and Wallace G. Webber. The firm expanded slowly in the latter part of the 19th century and by 1930 had expanded to 30 branch offices in 25 cities through the Northeast and Midwest United States. When Paine died in September 1929, his son Stephen had become a partner in the firm, maintaining the family connection. Unfortunately, Stephen got the firm mixed up in a securities fraud case involving Canadian investment trusts in the late 1930s, ending up with his securities license revoked and his firm's proud family name in the dirt.

The firm eventually recovered from the ignomy, and in 1963 moved its headquarter offices to New York City. Throughout the next few decades, it expanded through acquisitions in the Northeast and Southeast U.S. Unfortunately, Paine Webber was a follower of market trends, and in the late 1970s when it became vogue for brokerages and investment banks to combine forces, it bought Blyth Eastman Dillon. The merger turned out to be disastrous, as the company was not prepared for the immediately following bull retail market. Their systems could not support the thousands upon thousands of trades, and the company almost broke under the pressure.