Business memo

Chamber prepares for appreciation week

Industry Appreciation Week will kick off on Thursday, Sept. 26, with a customer service seminar titled "A Passion for Service." The seminar will be conducted by Bill Drury. Drury has delivered more than 1,000 seminars, instructing 20,000 people a year.

The Industry Appreciation Golf Tournament will take place Monday, Sept. 30, at Bent Creek Golf Course. Morning and afternoon sessions are available and there is an entry fee of $70 per person for the four-person scramble. A $10,000 cash prize will be offered to the first golfer to get a hole in one on Hole No. 13.

The Industry Appreciation Dinner will be at 6 p.m. Friday, Oct. 4, at the Show Me Center, with a reception and dinner to follow at 7 p.m. Cost is $30 per person. Missouri Task Force 1, the group mobilized and sent to ground zero after the Sept. 11 attacks, will conduct a tribute to police and firefighters.

For more information, call the Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce at 335-3312.

Back-to-school sales off to sluggish start

Parents, nervous about job security and stock market volatility, didn't splurge on the latest fashions for their children in August, failing to give the nation's largest merchants a much needed lift for the back-to-school season.

As retailers reported August sales Thursday, it was clear department stores and some mall-based apparel retailers were the hardest hit. But even Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and Kohl's Corp., which have been the industry's star performers, posted results below Wall Street expectations.

College students overusing credit cards

More college students are overusing credit cards, academics and policy makers said Thursday as they urged Congress to do something about the problem.

Eighty-three percent of undergraduates had at least one credit card last year, up from 67 percent in 1998, according to a study by Nellie Mae, a leading provider of student loans. The proportion of students with four or more credit cards jumped from 27 to 47 percent in that period, the study found.

The Education Department recently found that more than 44 percent of college students carried a balance on a credit card during the 1999-2000 school year. Among those students, the average credit card debt was $3,066. It was the first year such data was collected.

Germany's jobless rate dips slightly in August

BERLIN -- Germany's jobless rate dipped to 9.6 percent in August from 9.7 percent the previous month, but the number of jobless stayed above the 4 million mark, official figures showed Thursday.

A total of 4.018 million people were out of work in Germany at the end of August, nearly 29,000 less than a month earlier but 229,000 more than in August 2001, the Federal Labor Office said in its last monthly report on the labor market before the elections later this month.

The total was the highest for the month since 1998, the year Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was elected on a pledge to slash unemployment that is now gnawing at his chances of winning a second term.

-- From staff, wire reports