From The Seattle Times: Big cash infusion eludes Bill the Butcher

From our online news partner The Seattle Times comes this story Sunday about Bill the Butcher’s latest regulatory filing, in which it had to undo a major financing transaction and take back 6 million shares it had issued last month.

That unusual move is a serious setback for the unprofitable six-store operation, which ended its third quarter May 31 with only $40,000 in cash, the Times said. Co-founder and CEO J’Amy Owens has said that “Bill the Butcher will be to meat what Starbucks is to coffee.” But according to Sunday’s Seattle Times story, its precarious finances resemble Tully’s instead.

The private placement would have yielded Bill the Butcher $4.5 million at 80 cents per share, says Owens, calling its collapse “a very disappointing outcome.”

She says the investment firm on the other side of the transaction fired its fund manager July 15 before the funding was concluded. “I don’t think we’re going to see it in the short term, because they need to regroup.”

Two months ago, My Edmonds News reported – and not for the first time – about the expected opening of Bill the Butcher on Main Street. “We will have the doors open before school gets out!” CEO and co-founder J’Amy Owens had promised during a May interview.

We first mentioned the local butcher chain’s expansion into Edmonds in October of 2010, quoting that fall as the timeline for opening. “We are getting closer,” said Bill the Butcher Marketing Director Alan Brown in February 2011. Now that it’s been almost a year since the butcher paper went up on the window, folks are wondering if they will ever see a butcher shop on the corner of 4th and Main. Owens and Marketing Director Alan Brown did not return recent email inquiries from My Edmonds News regarding the delay.

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