Run For Office

By Debra Phillips

*Honk if you love Mark Twain! Audio bookstore chain Earful of Books is experimenting with a drive-thru at its new store in Houston. No word on whether bookstore clerks are required to ask patrons if they want fries with their orders.

• Bubbling over . . . or under? No celebration of New Year's Eve 1999 would be complete without some expensive champagne, or so believe the enterprising folks who are snapping up bottles of costly bubbly in anticipation of a shortage come pre-millennium partying. Restaurateurs might want to take stock of their Dom Perignon and the like.

• Real men eat burgers: With young males reportedly accounting for some two-thirds of fast-food dollars nationwide, it doesn't take a McGenius to figure out whom the industry flips over the most. That flipping should continue--and then some--in the wake of reports indicating men are eating even more fast food than they were earlier this decade.

This article was originally published in the July 1998 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Run For Office.