Dairy Queen (DQ)

A TJ Maxx-anchored center in Brookfield, Wis., was acquired by Newport Capital Partners. Sale price of the 137,816-sq.-ft. property was not disclosed.

People in rural counties like yoga and gourmet burgers, too, but towns like Quincy, Illinois, don’t show up on the population density charts of many hot new franchising companies.

The Neighborhoods at Butler

Location: Gainesville, Fla.

Size: 2.1 million sq. ft. (1.75 million sq. ft. with an additional 350,000 sq. ft. under development)

Developer/Owner: Butler Enterprises

Grocery anchor: Publix (West), Publix (Central), Trader Joe’s, Aldi, plus sizeable food components in Walmart, Sam’s Club and Target. Adding Whole Foods to anchor Butler Town Center (under construction with a planned opening winter 2018).

Minneapolis – American Dairy Queen Corp. (ADQ) is doing its best to freeze out hackers and other security risks with a managed firewall solution from Netsurion. The remotely hosted platform helps ADQ provide security across a network of corporate and franchised stores.

In today’s news cycle, it’s become somewhat standard fare to read reports of a significant breach in the retail world. From Target to Neiman Marcus, UPS to eBay and even restaurants like P.F. Chang's and Dairy Queen, 2014 resulted in major retail breaches totaling 100 million credit cards and 313 million personal records. But it’s not just the big names that have targets on their backs; as Verizon’s 2015 Data Breach Investigations Report details: “the attack methods are becoming more varied, even against small businesses.”

Waban, Mass. – Grocery retailer H-E-B produces a positive emotional reaction with consumers. Based on a study of 10,000 U.S consumers, H-E-B, Publix, Chick-fil-A, and Trader Joe's took the top four spots in the 2015 Temkin Emotion Ratings, which rates how customers feel about their interactions with 293 companies across 20 industries.

A study of 10,000 U.S. consumers revealed H-E-B, Publix and Trader Joe's are tops when it comes to making customers feel delighted.

While the monetary value of Bitcoin has had its ups and downs (and will likely continue to in the near future), the technological value and the transactional advantages of using the digital currency remain reliable and increasingly promising.