Judge orders Exxon to pay gas stations

A judge is ordering Exxon Mobil Corp. to start paying as many as 10,000 gas station owners awarded $500 million four years ago because the company overcharged them for gasoline for a dozen years. With interest, the award has grown to $1.3 billion.

U.S. District Judge Alan S. Gold also entered a final judgment Wednesday against Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company.

The jury decided in 2001 that the company owed about half a billion dollars to the station owners. With interest building since 1983 – when the overcharging started – the value of that judgment ballooned to $1.3 billion.

The average for each owner in 34 states and the District of Columbia is estimated at $130,000.

Exxon and Mobil merged in 1999.

In March 2004, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta refused to reconsider its earlier ruling supporting the verdict in the class-action lawsuit.

Since then Exxon has paid only the nine dealers specifically named in the lawsuit, said Eugene Stearns, an attorney representing the dealers.

In his decision, Gold said Exxon has attempted to make a “judicial train wreck” of the claims payment process and wants to prolong the lawsuit, filed 13 years ago.

Gold said Exxon makes $238 million a year from interest on the $1.3 billion as long as it keeps the money.

Best Buy boosts mature game enforcement

Minneapolis Best Buy Co. has a new policy intended to keep children from buying mature video games at the company’s stores, including “mystery shoppers” who will make sure clerks are checking IDs.

The Best Buy policy comes seven months after several religious groups filed a shareholder resolution asking the company to disclose its policy.

On Thursday the coalition, led by Christian Brothers Investment Services, withdrew the resolution and praised Best Buy.

The policy is for violent and sexually explicit games that draw a mature or “M” rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board.

Best Buy salespeople will be trained in how and when to check IDs, and they could face dismissal if found to be selling violent games to children under age 17.

Julie Tanner, Christian Brothers’ corporate advocacy coordinator, said many retailers have adopted policies that prohibit sales of mature games to minors, but Best Buy is among the first to use mystery shoppers and set up discipline for employees that violate the policy.

Shares of Best Buy rose 17 cents to close at $54.36 in Friday trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Internet retail business keeps climbing

Chicago First-quarter retail Internet sales rose 23.8 percent to $19.8 billion in the United States from $16 billion a year ago, according to preliminary numbers released Friday by the Department of Commerce.

E-commerce sales during the first quarter rose 6.4 percent from the fourth quarter, when they were $18.6 billion.

Sales for all periods are on an adjusted basis, meaning the Commerce Department adjusts them for seasonal variations and holiday and trading-day differences but not for price changes.

“Consumers are clearly moving more toward online purchasing as their level of comfort working with the Internet grows,” Caris & Co. analyst David Garrity said.

E-commerce accounted for 2.2 percent of total retail sales in the first quarter, when those sales were an estimated $916.9 billion, the Commerce Department said.

Legg Mason Wood Walker analyst Scott Devitt said Internet sales have grown around 20 percent to 25 percent each quarter the latest year, and that stability is a good sign for long-term growth, Devitt said.

The jewelry category has had fairly rapid growth lately on the Internet, Devitt said. Consumers have taken longer to get comfortable purchasing jewelry using the Internet because it has higher average selling prices than many other items, he said.