PhillyDeals: Joel Naroff is named the nation's top economic forecaster

Economist Joel Naroff has again taken honors as the nation's top economic forecaster, as judged by his peers in the National Association of Business Economics.

Naroff, of Holland, Bucks County, reads entrails and issues prognostications for David Kotok's Cumberland Advisors; Metro and Susquehanna Banks; eMoney Advisors; and Ahold USA (it owns the Carlisle-based Giant supermarket chain), among other clients.

Naroff last copped NABE's top Outlook Award in 2007 for calling the housing collapse.

So what's ahead? Naroff has lately been warning clients about "disturbing" increases in rent, food, clothing, and tuition.

"There is little reason to think food costs will ease," as foreign demand keeps growing, Naroff wrote. "Core prices are on the rise."

That's especially a problem, he says, because Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve (over dissent from Charles I. Plosser, president of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank, and other inflation hawks), has been betting on two years of steady prices to help support its low-interest-rate policy.

As prices rise, Naroff wonders if the Fed's one remaining weapon, cheap money, will be enough to persuade employers to hire and restart the economy, without further government action.

Dough Nuts for Doughnuts, the Philadelphia-area franchisee for Krispy Kreme, opened its first South Jersey store on Haddon Avenue at the Collingswood-Westmont border this week.

Krispy is moving back into the Northeast, after an abortive expansion in the 2000s, even as archrival Dunkin' Donuts, fresh from an initial public stock offering, adds stores in the South, Krispy's gooey heartland.

Dough Nuts' owners, cousins Keith Morgan, an heir to the Aamco Transmission family fortune, and Brian Zaslow, a former Aramark executive, opened their first store last year at a former Popeyes Fried Chicken site in Philadelphia's Fox Chase section, and then another in Center City.

Instead of the glazed-doughnut, assembly-line-oriented emporia Krispy tried last time, the cousins are implementing Krispy's new "hub-and-spoke" arrangement, with a central bakery in Fox Chase and smaller neighborhood stores with mini-production lines to finish a longer list of baked goods. Their stores offer a longer menu, with bagels and muffins and cookies, and drinks, especially coffees, which had been one of Dunkin's advantages.

"It's new for Krispy Kreme," Morgan said. "We have the broadest offerings of any of Krispy Kreme's 600 stores. At first [the chain] was a little skeptical," but "we sold 100,000 doughnuts the first week" at the Center City store, and the initial Collingswood lines stretched down the block.

"We expect our stores to average at least $1 million a year," Morgan said, boosting profit margins toward 20 percent, which he says would rival competing franchise chains such as Panera Bread and Einstein Bros. Bagels.

Zaslow is experimenting with Twitter and installing free wireless (it's cheaper than hooking up Comcast or satellite TV, he says) Internet service. Zaslow has hired his old Haverford School friend Jimmy Rudofker (whose family founded After Six, the old menswear line) as general manager.

"We're working seven days," Zaslow said. "There's still hundreds of thousands of people in the Philadelphia area who have never eaten a Krispy Kreme doughnut. But this is the future."

The landmark General Lafayette Inn on Germantown Pike in Lafayette Hill is among properties listed for Montgomery County sheriff's sale next Wednesday unless its owners, Barren Hill Holdings and Christopher W. Leonard, or its would-be buyers, the nonprofit Bridge Foundation and Nancy Marcus Newman, can raise the $1.1 million owed to Sovereign Bank, plus costs, or some other acceptable price.

The inn prospered as a dining venue as recently as the early 2000s under then-owner Michael McGlynn. Marcus Newman, a former corporate lawyer, has sketched ambitious plans for education, organic farming, and food service at the site but has been unable to raise funding. She says she's asking the bank to consider another extension. Sovereign has already given one month's grace.