According to a story posted last week on RestaurantNews.com, CiCi’s Pizza is America’s favorite pizza chain, with Papa John’s No. 2 and Papa Murphy’s No. 3.

The rankings are based on a national study of more than 7,600 consumers conducted by Market Force, which describes itself as a “worldwide leader in customer intelligence solutions.” RestaurantNews.com said the study, conducted in August, “first calculated the favorites based on the total number of votes, and then factored in the number of locations for each chain for a more level view of the results.” Only a dozen national and regional chains were studied. Sbarro, Pizza Hut, Godfather’s, Domino’s and Little Caesars also made it onto the list of favorites.

With all of the locally and regionally based chains and independent pizza-shop operators slicing up the Dayton-area market with the big national chains, I suspect a local survey would yield wildly different results, don’t you?

Abbot Labs ‘on track’ in Tipp

My colleague Thomas Gnau reports that Wall Street was not kind last week to Abbott Laboratories, at least as of Thursday. But that bad news hasn’t extended to the company’s plans for the Dayton area.

The company reported net earnings of $1.9 billion for the third quarter of 2012 on Wednesday, well ahead of the $303 million the company reported in the same quarter last year. That performance was ahead of Wall Street expectations, but still the company’s stock was hammered. Early Thursday, it was trading at $65.86, down $3.18 or 4.6 percent.

The nutritional drinks and health care products company also said on Wednesday that it was laying off 550 workers across several business units. The Chicago Tribune quoted a company spokesman as saying the cuts were necessary to “align … resources to better meet evolving business needs.”

Abbott, of course, is building a $270 million nutritional drinks production plant in Tipp City. Company spokesman Pete Paradossi told the Dayton Daily News Thursday that the company’s cuts in no way affect its project here.

“Absolutely no plans have changed,” Paradossi said. “Everything (in Tipp City) is on track.” The local plant is expected to employ about 240 people when it opens late next year.

Economy ‘severely underperforming’

My colleague Chelsey Levingston reports that Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics, told attendees of KeyBank’s annual economic forecast in Dayton last week that the economy is severely underperforming.

“We have seen 9 of 10 quarters come in below 3 percent growth,” Mayland said, about Gross Domestic Product, which measures all goods and services produced in the economy. “Three percent is actually our long term average rate of growth. We’re not achieving average economic growth.”

The biggest piece of the economy is consumer spending, but incomes aren’t growing because the economy isn’t producing enough jobs, he said. The economy needs 300,000 to 400,000 jobs added in a given month to gain steam, but the U.S. economy has been producing just over 100,000, he said. With annual wage growth below 2 percent, and inflation right about 2 percent, “wage growth isn’t even covering inflation,” he said.