Things To Do In SW Florida

Fresh off the opening of two new stores on Florida’s Space Coast, buzzy boutique grocer Trader Joe’s is now setting its sights on Kissimmee and Maitland for continued expansion.

North American Development Group, the Toronto-based company that owns the Loop West shopping center in Kissimmee, has filed site plans with the city and South Florida Water Management District for a new 12,500-square-foot grocery store on the retail pad north of JCPenney, according to a report in GrowthSpotter.

NADG also owns Tomoka Town Center in Daytona Beach, where it opened a new Trader Joe’s on Nov. 14. The proposed grocery store’s building size and layout match typical Trader Joe’s prototypes, which are less than 15,000 square feet.

Meanwhile, Harbour Retail Partners, which bought Trelago Market in 2020, received preliminary approval this week from the Maitland City Council for a new 12,500-square-foot specialty grocery store with 5,300 square feet of attached, inline retail on Lot 3 of the shopping center. Renderings shown during the meeting used the same signage style and font as Trader Joe’s but with the name “Farmer Jon’s.” read more

The Department of Business and Professional Regulation shut down eight Central Florida restaurants for health code violations during the week from Nov. 30 to Dec. 6.

Orange

Loading Zone at 24 E. Washington St. in Orlando shut down on Dec. 2. Inspectors found 15 violations, four of which were high priorities for rodent activity, roach activity, a stop-sale on food not being in wholesome condition and food held at the wrong temperatures. A second inspection occurred on Dec. 3. There were five violations, but none was a high priority. The restaurant remained closed. A third and final inspection occurred the same day. There were four violations. None was a high priority. The restaurant requires a follow-up inspection, but it is not an immediate threat to the public.

Planet Pizza at 14 W. Washington St. in Orlando shut down on Dec. 3. There were four violations. Two were a high priority for rodent activity and food held at the wrong temperatures. A second inspection occurred the next day. There were zero violations and the restaurant met inspection standards. read more

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — OpenAI said Tuesday it has picked Slack CEO Denise Dresser as its first chief of revenue, a message to wary investors that the ChatGPT maker is serious about making a profit from its artificial intelligence technology.

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OpenAI said Dresser will oversee global revenue strategy and “help more businesses put AI to work in their day-to-day operations.”

Dresser had already spent more than a decade at Salesforce when the software pioneer announced in 2020 it was buying work-chatting service Slack for $27.7 billion. She helped integrate Slack into the software company before Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff picked her as CEO in 2023. read more

By DEE-ANN DURBIN

Cracker Barrel posted lower-than-expected sales in its fiscal first quarter and trimmed its revenue forecast for the year as it continued to feel the fallout from a botched plan to revamp its logo and restaurants.

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The Lebanon, Tennessee-based restaurant chain said Tuesday its revenue fell 5.7% to $797.2 million in the three months ending Oct. 31. That was lower than the $800 million Wall Street anticipated, according to analysts polled by FactSet.

Cracker Barrel said its same-store restaurant sales dropped 4.7% while sales in its retail shops dropped 8.5%. Those declines were also slightly higher than analysts forecast. read more

NASA astronaut Jonny Kim flew home from the International Space Station packed tight with two Roscosmos cosmonauts, their Soyuz spacecraft landing Tuesday in the frozen steppes of Kazakhstan to complete an eight-month stay in space.

Kim launched to to the station back on April 8 with cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky aboard the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft and spent nearly 245 days in space, as part of Expeditions 72 and 73 on board the station.

It was Kim’s first spaceflight, and he was the penultimate member of his 11-member NASA astronaut class, known as The Turtles, to make it to space. The final member, Zena Cardman, remains on board the station having flown up as a member of Crew-11, which isn’t slated to return until early 2026.

Kim and his Soyuz crewmates landed at 12:03 a.m. EST (10:03 a.m. local time) in near Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan having departed the station a little more than three hours earlier.

Their tiny capsule, with a snug fit for the three humans, came in for a parachute-assisted touchdown but tipped to one side before recovery crews were able to converge on the spacecraft and help the three space travelers out. read more