By Randy Tucker
The Cincinnati Enquirer

EB Acqusition Ltd. - based in Ohio and led by real estate investor and developer Daniel Summers - has offered more than $60 million in cash for Dayton-based Elder-Beerman Stores Corp. But the department-store chain can't consider the bid until it has completed takeover talks with an unnamed suitor that it has agreed to negotiate with exclusively for a limited period.

Elder-Beerman said May 16 that it was in exclusive negotiations with the unidentified bidder. Names such as Cincinnati-based Federated Department Stores and Charlotte, N.C.- based Belk Inc. have been mentioned by industry watchers as possible suitors.

But after the exclusive negotiations are completed and an offer is made public, Elder-Beerman's "board will certainly be required to consider any superior bid," said Gloria Siegler, a company spokeswoman.

EB Acquisition said Wednesday that it would pay at least $5.50 a share for Elder-Beerman and urged the company to consider its offer.

Federated starts annual food drive

Federated Department Store employees brown-bagged it at lunch time Thursday, kicking off the company's annual "Bag Hunger" food drive for the local FreeStore/FoodBank, an affiliate of America's Second Harvest - the largest domestic hunger-relief charity in the nation. They donated the money they would have spent on lunch to the Bag Hunger program.

Employees participated at Federated's Lazarus stores, downtown Cincinnati corporate headquarters and the FACS Group, based in Mason.

Last year, Federated employees nationwide collected food and donations equal to 1.5 million pounds of food.

Spacenet to provide network for Kroger

Kroger Co. has tapped Virginia-based Spacenet - a leading supplier of telecommunications and satellite network technology - to provide an advanced satellite network to support nationwide video, voice and data applications.

The network will initially link multiple video studios with Fred Meyer grocery store locations through a broadband connection allowing high-speed video and telecommunications transmissions.

The network is also being designed to support a wide range of additional future applications, including software and content delivery, frame relay backup, and other interactive data applications, Spacenet said.

Consumer report finds Ohioans optimistic

Consumer confidence has bounced back from a decline that began at the start of the year, and Ohioans are more confident about the local economy and their own finances than consumers nationally, according to a new quarterly consumer confidence index for Ohio.

Called the Ipsos CASH (Consumer Attitudes and Spending by Household) index, the report is part of a national CASH consumer confidence index that Washington-based Ipsos established in January 2002.

The national quarterly index, based on 6,000 interviews with consumers between March 2002 and May 2003, stands at 78.4 on a scale of 0 to 100.

In Ohio, the index is 86.5 - 8.1 points higher than the national index and 25 percent higher than Ohio's score at the start of the year.

E-mail rtucker@enquirer.com