Today in Globe Business

Breakfast meetings the toast of the town

Forget about the power lunch — breakfast is back as the business meeting meal of choice.

Many executives, facing smaller expense budgets and slimmer staffs, are turning to daybreak dining as a less expensive and quicker way to do business compared with more traditional lunch and dinner gatherings. And restaurants are expanding menus and operating hours to accommodate the surge in interest.

Suits are showing up early at Stanhope Grille at the Back Bay Hotel, where the breakfast business is up 20 percent over the past year, while lunch and dinner sales are down more than 5 percent.
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Crackdown apt to cut US aid to many for-profit schools

More than 1,000 for-profit colleges across the country, including dozens in New England, could run afoul of new federal regulations because they have student loan repayment rates below new federal standards, a Globe analysis of new federal education data shows.

The Department of Education plans to limit federal aid to some for-profit career schools with low repayment rates because of concerns that too many institutions are saddling students with thousands of dollars in debt, without giving them the training they need to land jobs to repay the loans.

The crackdown comes at a time when the for-profit sector has been exploding, fueled in part by federal student aid. Nationwide, there are now nearly 3,000 for-profit colleges, ranging from culinary academies to technical schools.
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Tech remains vital to Bay State economy

The state’s technology sector shrank over the past decade, but remains vital to the Massachusetts economy, providing one in 10 jobs, generating high wages, and encompassing industries that are projected to grow quickly in coming years, according to a study being published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The study, which examines employment in 11 technology-based industries, provides a comprehensive picture of a sector that has soared, collapsed, rebounded, and reinvented itself since the dot-com bubble peaked in the early part of the last decade.

Even though the sector employs nearly 50,000, or 15 percent, fewer workers than in 2001, Massachusetts still has a high concentration of technology-based industries expected to rank among the nation’s fastest growing over the next several years, said Denis McSweeney, regional commissioner of the bureau.
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Sidetracked, Wonderland puts its bets on future

REVERE — About the only working vestige of Wonderland Greyhound Park’s racing past is the blinking green sign that invites drivers speeding past on Route 1A to “Join us seven days a week for simulcast racing from noon to one a.m.’’

The owners of the now-shuttered park are looking for new ways to lure business to the sprawling site. But with the economy still hostile to large-scale real estate development — and Wonderland’s location limiting its potential — it does not appear the racing sign will soon be replaced.

Wonderland closed just over two weeks ago, after the campaign on Beacon Hill to pass a bill to legalize casino gambling collapsed. Proponents had hoped for new legislation that would throw a lifeline to the track. Its main business, dog racing, was banned by Massachusetts voters in 2008, but the dog track figured in the plans of the owners of nearby Suffolk Downs, who had envisioned a huge casino resort at their horse track.
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