Carol Vinzant
- http://www.animaltourism.com

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

The simplicity of a brand name or symbol confers status on a company. Decades ago, the symbol might literally have been a stock symbol: the oldest companies got one letter ticker symbols from the New York Stock Exchange. United Parcel Service (NYSE: UPS) now gets that status by taking an entire color: brown. (Granted, it's not a primary color like IBM's Big Blue, but it still shows the company's clout.)

The company first started using its trademark brown trucks in the 1920s when it delivered appliances and other goods for department stores, says Mike Brewster, author of Driving Change: The UPS Approach to Business. Pullman brown was a good choice because "their department store clients wanted the company to be more under-stated, because the stores didn't want the fact that they no longer had their own trucks highlighted." That, and the dark trucks were easier to keep looking clean.

Brown is much more than a truck color now. It's the uniform. It's the logo. It's what the company calls itself in commercials. UPS employees bragging about their loyalty will say they "bleed brown." This year the company sponsored a horse named Big Brown, which won two-thirds of the Triple Crown.

But, hard as it is to believe now, UPS almost gave up its trademark color. "The company almost changed the color in the '90s during one of several re-brandings, but decided to stick with brown, much to the disappointment of many in the company," says Brewster. "But the 'What can Brown do for You?' campaign has given the color new life at the company."

This post is one in a series on prominent company nicknames. See all 25, and share your thoughts and memories about the $100 store below in the comments.

You know you do it. You walked into Costco (NASDAQ: COST) to save some money on one thing -- just one little thing. In our minds, we do all sorts of calculations. We see ourselves saving money instead of what we're actually doing, spending money. An hour later we walk out loaded down with bulk bargains -- and $100 lighter. That's where Costco gets its increasingly popular nickname: The $100 Store.

Bloggers and consumers have been using the unflattering "$100 store" nickname for a while. And, it turns out they are right. A recent Christian Science Monitor story cites a statistic from the Food Institute: the average visit to a warehouse club costs $93.

The $100 spending phenomena may be a universal phenomena in any of the big-box discounters. But one Harvard professor thinks the membership fees at Costco (and other warehouse clubs) make us think we're getting a better deal than we are. Michael I. Norton, an assistant professor in the Marketing unit at Harvard Business School, says that the presence of fees make people think they're getting a special discount and then they spend more.

"The presence of fees can drive choice of retail outlets, such that stores with membership fees are more popular even when they offer the same goods at the same prices as stores without fees," Norton writes in his working paper. Maybe that idea of paying to shop somewhere was crazy after all.

Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) announced today that it lost $821 million this quarter and cut its quarterly dividend from 25 cents a share to five cents a share, pending board approval. And it's paying the full dividend on preferred stock.

My question is why is this company paying ANY dividend? I know that dividends aren't necessarily just from profits like you might think. But this company lost $1.63 a share, so why is it giving shareholders even a nickel?

We all know this company may be nationalized eventually, however remote that possibility is under the current administration. We all know that taxpayers are on the hook for up to $25 billion or more for the bailout of Fannie and Freddie. And we know the Treasury can now buy shares in Fannie and Freddie to prop them up. But now it's appealing to shareholders' sense of value by keeping a dividend?

Imagine this typical American strip mall: a Trader Joe's, a Sunglass Hut, a Caribou Coffee. Maybe there's a restaurant that serves hot dogs with French's mustard, and a choice of Good Humor ice cream or homemade Toll House chocolate chip cookies for dessert. Across the street is a CITGO, Shell and a 7-Eleven.

All this sounds so American. It could -- and does -- exist all across the country. Yet all of these companies and brands are foreign-owned.

Some of these marquee names were always foreign-owned, but overseas firms are increasingly buying up American properties. Most recently, beer drinkers were shocked when Belgian beer juggernaut InBev put the moves on Anheuser-Busch (NYSE: BUD). [Update: On July 14, Anheuser-Busch agreed to be acquired by InBev for $52 billion.] How could InBev attempt to turn Budweiser into just another of its stable of international brands? We were surprised not only that those European beer snobs even liked our watery brew, but by the apparent ease with which foreigners could try to snap up American icons.

It's not just American brands and companies getting sold. Foreign companies were the buyers in four of the top 13 U.S. commercial real estate deals in 2007, according to Real Estate Alert newsletter. Another foreign acquisition of notable Manhattan real estate was the Dubai-based Jumeirah group's 2006 purchase of the Essex House on Central Park South.

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

Eighty Four, Pennsylvania, is such a tiny town -- really unincorporated area in Washington County -- that it barely got a name. Instead, it is charmingly known by a number: 84. (Differing historical theories say it was named after its #84 railway mailbox or the 1884 election of Grover Cleveland.) Joe Hardy III liked the name so much that when he opened a lumber yard here in 1956 with his brothers, he named it after the town, 84 Lumber. (Not that he was that picky with names; his previous venture was Green Hills Lumber in nearby Green Hills.)

Even though Eighty Four is only 20 miles south of Pittsburgh, it is a decidedly rural, mountain town. Just off Route 70, Eighty Four, the town, was chosen so 84, the lumber company, could serve its particular tri-state area: Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. Eighty Four itself is too small for anybody to keep track of, but in Washington County in 2006 the average per capita income was $37,000.

Hardy's hardscrabble, blunt management style fit in well with the area and the lumber trade. The stores were notorious for lacking heat (which some now have). The Wall Street Journal described how Hardy fired his son, the would-be heir, when he slowed down with multiple sclerosis. He went with his daughter, Maggie Hardy-Magerko, instead. Battling big-box retailers, she pushed the company successfully toward specializing in pros instead of do-it-yourselfers.

Hertz (NYSE:HTZ) has decided to give up on the cash cow of wildly overcharging customers for filling up the tank. Instead of charging $7 a gallon for gas, they'll charge the market price. Oh, don't get me wrong, they'll still charge an outrageous fee for putting gas in the tank when the deal kicks in on July 1. They'll just charge a flat fee of $7 to fill up, plus the market price of gas. What does that translate to in terms of pay, about $100 an hour to pump gas?

I'm pleased that Hertz is getting out of the gas gouging business. Maybe that field has just gotten too competitive lately. It's getting harder to shock Americans with preposterous gas prices. Rental car companies have been charging insane gas rates -- almost what you'd pay in Europe at the pump -- for years. Consumers think of it as their evil little profit center, like phone charges at hotels.

In a story at USAToday, the industry claims that it's only overcharging to scare people into bringing the car back full, so they don't have to hassle with storing the fuel and filling up cars. So why don't they charge that rate for prepaid gas? USAToday did a survey and found that rental car companies sold pre-paid gas at about $4 a gallon, but charged about $8 when someone returned the car less than full.