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Borders Group Inc., the second-largest U.S. bookstore chain, said Thursday it would close more of its small-format Waldenbooks stores in January as it focuses on its more profitable superstores. The company is shutting 200 Waldenbooks stores and cutting 1,500 jobs in January to make the chain smaller and more profitable. About 130 mall-based stores will remain open, the Ann Arbor, Mich., company said. According to the Borders website, no Waldenbooks stores remain in Minnesota, but a Borders Express store in Crossroads Mall in St. Cloud will close. Borders said the closings will not affect any Borders superstores, including seven in the Twin Cities area, or any of its mall kiosks, including 500 Day by Day Calendar Co. spots.

Shares of Hyatt Hotels Corp. rose sharply Thursday in the iconic hotel chain's first day on the New York Stock Exchange, with investors appearing to dismiss concerns about infighting among its founder's heirs and tepid hotel reservations around the world. Hyatt's stock gained $3, or 12 percent, to $28 in afternoon trading. The company, based in Chicago, raised $950 million in its initial public offering. It priced late Wednesday at $25, near the top end of the $23 to $26 range. The stock's upbeat trading is a welcome sight for the market, which has watched many IPOs fall short of expectations.

Google has unveiled its Google Dashboard service, a page where users can get a sense of the data the company stores about them in any of 23 different Google-run services. As questions about how the company uses consumer data continue to mount, Google has tried to answer those concerns by allowing users a clearer view into how their data is stored and used by programs such as Gmail, YouTube and Google Docs. The Dashboard is essentially a page listing each service that stores data, along with which types of data it stores. Rather than allowing users to control and edit their data directly from the page, however, Dashboard refers users to pre-existing settings pages. In that sense, the Dashboard is a consolidation of existing functions, not a new set of tools.

Three major retailers have agreed to pay nearly half a million dollars to settle a lawsuit stemming from the companies' sale of toys containing excessive amounts of lead, the California attorney general's office said. Under the agreement, Target Corp., Toys 'R' Us Inc. and Kmart will pay a total of $454,000 in civil penalties and other fines. The retailers, along with several manufacturers, including Mattel Inc., were sued by the California attorney general's office and the Los Angeles city attorney's office in November 2007 after the companies were found to have sold or made toys with unsafe levels of lead paint.

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