天津市武清区龙济医院泌尿外科官(天津武清区龙济泌尿医院在那) (今日更新中)

With a lot of states forcing businesses to close their doors over the past couple months, small businesses felt the pain of little to no foot traffic.Now, building customer relationships is more important than ever, and many businesses turned to the internet to help fill the gap in sales.“Everything happened, as we all know, in a matter of three days the world changed dramatically,” said Dawn Johnson, owner of Mainstream Boutique Aurora and Mainstream Boutique Castle Pines in Colorado. She’s been in business for seven years.“The passion of a small business owner goes so much deeper than people know. It’s like a child,” she said.Back in March, she was forced to close her doors. Her only solution was to move online.“I would come in on the weekend. My husband would hold the camera, my daughter who is 16 she would model the clothes,” Johnson explained. “We tried things we never tried before.” This included a virtual fashion show and a virtual selling event with one of their vendors.With limited resources, Jonson and her staff managed to post their items for sale on platforms like Instagram and Facebook in a matter of days.“Anything helps. Every time we get one sale on that I do a happy dance,” she said. And the reach of the internet brought in a following from all over.“One of the things we noticed is we had a captive audience for the first time ever,” she said.“We are social beings and I think our limitations on our social interactions have 100 percent changed the way we do so many things,” said Melissa Akaka, an Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Denver. She does consumer insight research.“Small businesses have especially had to become innovative about how they can maintain a relationship with their customers when they need to follow all of the social distancing protocols that are in place,” she explained.Akaka said the pandemic has changed the way we buy things – and customer relationships, especially through social media, are more important than ever.“Those who have really strong brands and really strong community ties with their customers or their followers, I think have a better chance of being able to succeed on this type of platform because they already have their customers built in,” she explained.However, even companies with those strong ties are having a hard time.“We have a following, but we’re still a small family business,” said Steve Weil, President of Rockmount Ranch Wear. The company has been around 75 years, serving customers and other businesses with their clothing and other apparel. Rockmount went online back in 2001.“That has been our lifeblood quite frankly, because it enabled us to reach the world in a…disrupted retail landscape,” Weil explained. “Since COVID, it was part of our business that continued to operate whereas retail did not.”Long standing businesses like this, have seen hard times before.“Everything from tornadoes wiping our factories, to the Great Recession, and now this,” he said. “The secret of survival is never forgetting that disasters happen, and we’ve been through them every 10 years for 75 years.”Even with the help of the internet and social media, both Johnson and Weil saw a drop in sales in recent months.“It was less, it wasn't the same. But what it was able to do is keep us going because we literally would have had no income at all,” Johnson said.“Our sales plummeted to less than half of normal,” Weil said.Big social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are trying to make a difference by offering a platform for small businesses to market and sell. Facebook recently announced Facebook Shops, which will allow businesses to sell their items directly on their platform, without taking them to another site. Johnson said she plans on taking advantage of that as well.“The Facebook and the Instagrams of the world, it means a lot for companies to recognize how hard it is for small businesses. We’ll try anything to see if it works,” Johnson said.Akaka said when it comes to small businesses, there’s a lot of room for innovation, as customer relationships and online presence becomes more important.“Those who can figure out how to adapt and really think through solutions to not just their business problems but to their customers' problems,” she explained. “Those who can step up and be solutions for that are going to weather the storm much better.”  4395

We all know that leaving our dogs in the car on a hot sunny day for a long period of time is a bad idea. Temperatures can rise faster than we realize, putting our pets’ health and lives at risk.William Loopesko says he’s created a tool to help with just that.“I live in Colorado with my dog, Clovis. And Clovis and I enjoy hiking in the mountains, camping, etc, but that requires taking him in the car,” Loopesko says.Long car rides mean the occasional—and required—pit stop.“So, I wanted to have a way to be able to check on him and know that he’s always OK when I can’t be there with him,” he says.Loopesko created “PuppTech,” a device for your car that measures temperature and humidity levels.“It tells you the heat index, transmits all that data over a cellular connection, so I can at any time pull up how Clovis is doing on my phone.”Clovis is a 7-year-old male Labrador retriever, and Loopesko says his “comfortable” temperature range is anywhere between 41 and 72 degrees. The temperature ranges vary depending on the breed, sex, and age of the dog.“If it was above the 84 degrees for Clovis, I would be getting a text message every 5 minutes saying, ‘Hey it’s too hot. Hey it’s too hot. Hey it’s too hot.’”Decals on car windows let others know that a dog’s health is being monitored while an owner is away.But experts say an app should never replace common sense.“I worry that it could be a little bit of a false sense of security for some people,” says veterinarian Dr. Leslie Longo with Denver’s VCA Firehouse animal hospital.“I think you still have to be mindful if you’re leaving your dog in the car that it could still get hot, something could go wrong.”Loopesko says he wouldn’t disagree, but he says the app gives people one more tool for those times when owners just don’t have a choice.“If dogs were allowed to go everywhere, then our product wouldn’t need to exist,” Loopesko says.Loopesko says PuppTech is already being shipped out to its crowdfunders, and he expects it’ll be available to the general public before the end of the year. 2069

WASHINGTON — Congress is shutting the Capitol and all House and Senate office buildings to the public until April in reaction to the spread of the coronavirus. The House and Senate sergeants at arms said in a statement that the closure will begin at 5 p.m. EDT Thursday. Lawmakers, aides, journalists and official visitors will be allowed into the buildings. The statement says officials were acting “out of concern for the health and safety of congressional employees as well as the public.” The officials say they're acting on the advice of District of Columbia health officials and of Congress' own doctors. 622

When Jill Lorentz was in her 20s, she said her mother started showing signs of forgetfulness. “As we got a little bit older, she started having mild memory loss and we didn’t think anything of it really," she recalled. "We just thought it comes with age.” However, she later learned her mother had Alzheimer’s Disease, a form of dementia.“She would ask you the same question that you had just answered,” Lorentz explained.Dementia causes a decline in memory, language, and problem solving.“The disease takes them in a place in the progression where they start losing the ability to go A to Z on any action,” Lorentz said. Lorentz saw this happen to her mom over the years, and eventually, to other members of her family, too. “We have had eight people in our family with some type of dementia,” she said.Every 65 seconds, someone in the U.S. develops Alzheimer’s Disease. Nearly six million people in the U.S. over the age of 65 are living with it, according to 2020 stats from the Alzheimer’s Association. “A lot of the focus is on today, what do we do now that we don’t have a cure and every little in the way of a treatment,” Amelia Schafer, the executive director of Alzheimer’s Association Colorado Chapter, said. “We now have more people living with Alzheimer’s and dementia than ever in our country and when we look at the trajectory we know it’s not slowing down.”One of the biggest risk factors is age.“Age is the number one risk factor so as we are aging as a population here in the U.S. it’s possible we’re more at risk,” said JJ Jordan, the Community Chair for Dementia Friendly Denver, a nonprofit that educates communities about dementia.As more people enter the later years of their life, with more awareness and more knowledge of the warning signs, different types of dementia are able to be diagnosed easier today than before.“I get about 90, 95 percent of my diagnosis from talking to them, getting to know them,” Dr. Samantha Holden, a behavioral neurologist with University of Colorado Health, said. “Even though we can’t cure these things, we can definitely manage them and make sure we’re improving people’s quality of life.”That’s where caregivers like Lorentz play an important role in the life of someone who has been diagnosed. After learning lessons taking car of her mom, she is now a caregiver to her sister, Judy, who also has dementia and lives in another state.“The one thing that I’ve done with my sister is having really open and honest conversations with her and having a safe place for her to come,” Lorentz said. 2561

WASHINGTON — Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), Kelly Loeffler (R-Georgia) and Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) have been informed that the Justice Department has closed investigations into their stock trades, according to people familiar with the notifications. The senators came under scrutiny for transactions made in the weeks before the coronavirus sent markets downhill. The developments signaled that federal law enforcement might be narrowing its focus in the stock investigation to North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr. Agents showed up at his Washington-area home two weeks ago with a warrant to search his cellphone. Hours later, 644

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