masons_dad1

The tobacco itself isn't the problem as they do tend to use the finest pure tobacco and not the crap that cigarette companies claim as "real" tobacco. There are studies that show there are health risks involved with the tobacco but, moreso, that the charcoal used in hookahs is a serious health risk. From Hookah - Wikipedia: The least they could do is make sure the hookah lounge a 21 and over club just like bars that allow smoking are. Yes that would destroy their business since they cater to the "hip" university students.

Fad or not it I don't like the idea of a "hookah lounge" especially being targeted at universities where students are much more susceptible to "fads" or peer pressure to be "cool" and I am a smoker. Countries in the Middle East and Far East may require people to smoke in order to fit in or even do business in those countries but this is the US that has the most expensive healthcare system in the world.

Actually the hookah, or narghile as it was originally called, has been around for around 400 years and "hookah lounges" have been around for nearly that long. The "hookah lounge" or "hookah bar" has only recently arrived in the US and is fashionable near university campuses. Here's a quotation from William Hickey, an 18th century English lawyer and author of a famous set of memoirs, who wrote about the hookah in his Memoirs shortly after his arrival in Calcutta in 1775: So I'd say the "hookah lounge" is anything but a fad, although it's just as unhealthy as smoking in a public place and maybe even much more so than smoking cigarettes.

Newsworthy crimes in Northwest Arkansas July 19: 8: 19 a. m. A man at 15951 Beechnut Lane, Fayetteville, reported his trash can and trash stolen. I thought the garbage truck was supposed to do that? The trash can probably slipped! 8: 52 a. m. A woman at 621 N. Leverett Ave. reported her neighbors stealing her phone service. Now how does someone steal someone's phone service? July 20: 11: 46 a. m. A woman on West Bel Air Drive reported a female neighbor

A 3 year old boy was crushed by a falling mirror at a Wal-Mart in Indianapolis. This was a horrible accident that I wouldn't wish on any parent. No amount of money can replace a child, but I hope that Wal-Mart is not only sued for an insane amount of money, but there should be a public apology made by the company on worldwide television. As if I wasn't paranoid enough about letting my son get more than a few inches away from me, especially at Wal-Mart! Read one of these 62 newslinks here... Boy, 3, killed by falling mirror at Wal-Mart - Google News Vice President Cheney will be in Northwest Arkansas today in response to Asa Hutchinson's bid for governor. Cheney Visits the Natural State - The Associated Press

Here's a few more. The Nabisco Biscuit Company - Beau Terre, Bentonville Rayovac Corporation - Beau Terre, Bentonville Service Advantage, Inc. - Beau Terre, Bentonville Hershey Chocolate - Beau Terre, Bentonville The Clorox Company - Beau Terre, Bentonville Hamilton Beach/Proctor-Silex - Beau Terre, Bentonville Bayer Consumer Care - Beau Terre, Bentonville Colgate-Palmolive Company - Rogers Unilever Home and Personal Care - Rogers Hormel Food Corporation - Pinnacle Hills, Rogers Ocean Spray - Rogers Frito-Lay - Lowell Smuckers - Rogers Dial Corporation - Rogers Johnson & Johnson - Pinnacle Hills, Rogers The Hoover Company - Pinnacle Hills, Rogers Eastman Kodak Company - Pinnacle Hills, Rogers OK at this point I would say if you want to know what vendors are located in NWA I suggest going to a nearby Wal-Mart and look at the manufacturer name of every product in the store... there ya go!

Anybody heard of The White Rabbit Hookah Lounge in Wedington Plaza? It's a new club in Fayetteville. I know what a hookah is, but I haven't figured out just what goes on in a "hookah lounge", although my imagination gets the best of me. Won't it be banned when the statewide smoking ban goes into effect?

It would be nice to know what vendors are here and maybe how many people they employee, what type of office they're in and what services they perform for their Wal-Mart accounts. I'll start by listing all the IT vendors I know of in Northwest Arkansas that service Wal-Mart. There are probably others, but these are the largest IT vendors that service Wal-Mart. Symbol Technologies, Inc. - Lease Space in Bentonville Wachter Network Services, Inc. - Own Office in Lowell IBM Corporation - Own Office in Bentonville NCR Corporation - Own Office in Bentonville Compucom Systems - Lease Space in Bentonville If you want to get an idea of what type of service each of these vendors provides to Wal-Mart click on the links provided. I can't go into any detail because I work for one of these vendors.

True. So that means NWA is getting several hundred jobs per month with noone to fill those jobs? It seems kind of messed up that NWA is building so many new jobs only to have underemployed people leave older jobs unfilled. It's a problem that will hurt quite a few Vendors that will be forced to hire underqualified people when all the qualified employees move up to better jobs. The problem is happening in Tampa, FL where tens of thousands of low paying ($10/hr) jobs are being filled by people that were used to making $50-100K per year.

So, for a while there during the past couple of years 1,000 people were moving to fill 600 new jobs per month. I wonder what effect that will have on the unemployment rate or should I say underemployment rate where people are taking a job they're overqualified for until those better jobs are created in NWA.

Well it is just a prediction and NWA is really so unpredictable and so is Wal-Mart for that matter. Eventually, and depending on how much pressure Wal-Mart puts on them, some Vendors will find that moving their operations to NWA will actually be the only way they could cut costs of doing business with Wal-mart. If they have 100 people in NWA working on the Wal-Mart account, and according to current trends with Wal-Mart, it may some day be more cost effective to just move the entire operation here. It's all about the bottom line and not about which city they're in. Anyway, even having a lot of regional offices will be nice. If these Vendors' satellite offices are usually 2 stories we can at least expect a lot more taller buildings from those Vendors and possibly multiple Vendors filling up highrise office towers.

Thought this might help.

You must mean the 2nd Vendor Phase where hundreds of Vendors will start converting their satellite offices in NWA into regional offices like Proctor & Gamble is doing in Fayetteville. It's old news that many Vendors will eventually move their operations to NWA due to the fact that having seperate headquarters would be too costly. I don't know where you got 800,000 in ten years, but 8,000 per year for ten years sounds more likely. There just isn't enough infrastructure yet for Vendors to move their operations here and regional offices take years to build. I'd agree if you said that in ten years there will be at least two or three new corporate headquarters in NWA. My prediction is that Proctor & Gamble and Glad Products Company will call Northwest Arkansas their headquarters within ten years, with a couple more companies every two years following. By 2050 Northwest Arkansas will be home to the headquarters of at least ten Fortune 500 companies and about a hundred companies' home offices.

We're a long way off from getting a discount airline. I believe total enplanements/deplanements would have to be about a million each.

That would be awesome! That sounds like First Fridays in St. Petersburg, FL where the city closes a section of downtown to traffic and everybody pretty much just walks around getting drunk and listening to live music. I don't remember that in the Fayetteville Downtown Master Plan, but it's a pretty big plan and I didn't have the time to read it all. Heck it's like 3 or 4 times bigger than Bentonville's Downtown Master Plan and that's pretty big!

Sidewalk dining on Dickson Street wouldn't work. Dickson Street is just too narrow for it. I'd like to see more patio dining above some of the restaurants and cafes. There's a couple, but more of them would give Dickson Street a nice streetside ambience with people dining outdoors and above the street level.

Welcome to the NWA Forum! Please feel free to post at will.

Those are some awesome scenes. The one above really represents both the best and the worst of an urban city. I really like the brick-inlayed street, the buses and the building density, but the overhead power lines, the exposed dumpster and the messy signs are bad. Overall, it's still more urban than anything in NWA, but could be managed a little better.

It does have striking similarities to Downtown Fayetteville. Although, I do find the pics of Downtown Springfield a bit more urban. Just little things like those tall lampposts and how more densely packed the buildings seem to be. Growing up in Manhattan, NY I saw many of those same lampposts.

See that tree over there? That's really a Digital Tracking Device. Oh and see that Black Bear over there posing for your camera. That's a Park Ranger in disguise.

They'l' probably just look at the quality of the pictures people take, so be prepared to start paying Mith!

There was talk of just tolling trucks using the Bella Vista Bypass. I don't like the idea of everyone being tolled just to commute to work or to go shopping. There are plenty of people driving into NWA that don't live or work here that should be tolled. I thought the whole idea of tolling people to use a road was so that locals didn't end up paying for the wear and tear that those "visitors" create.

At least it's a step in the right direction for XNA to someday include international cargo flights, which is what Wal-Mart and Tyson have been vying for from the conception of XNA.

Did you visit the National Parks that you wanted to? I know that itineraries can get messed up pretty easy especially when they're simple enough.

I don't know where this subject should go and I didn't want to create another one-shot news thread as we have way too many already. Does anyone think that the possible development of the Fayetteville Shale could have a huge economic impact of Fayetteville? I realize that Fayetteville Shale isn't exactly in Fayetteville, but a news article I read says that $5.5 Billion could benefit local economies by 2008. Here's the article link: Chesapeake warns of "high costs" in Fayetteville Shale - Arkansas News Bureau